Ruins

Ruins

The image of an abandoned and cracked building yielding to weeds seems to offer lessons about the inevitable fall of overblown civilizations and the ultimate power of nature. We are hardwired to avoid decay, an evolutionary response to the threat of polluted materials and rotting food. It accompanies a category of abject things which exist on the borders of the living and the dead. Yet, at the same time, we seem to be attracted by abjection, fascinated by the way in which dying things can change their appearance before our eyes. Ruins, it seems, speak as much of the future as of the classical or more recent past.

We only have to look around us to understand decay as a natural and inevitable process. It plays a key role in the cycle of life. Cells which are not renewed, degenerate, and, once dead, life forms decompose into simpler forms, supporting micro-organisms and bacteria. The fertile soil from which we are sustained is, of course, the organic product of these cycles of growth and decay.

Decay is a natural process but we live in an age when it is no longer clear what is ‘natural’, at least in traditional terms. The processes of decay are not, for the artist, something to be eschewed but to be harnessed. It is this strange beauty of decay that engrosses him more, and this is evident when looking at the photographic images produced by artists Khahliso Matela in the town of Kokosi in the North West Province of South Africa. Through these strange geometric landscapes captured in his RUINS Series, the artist posits a question about the differences between decay as a look and as a process.

As if on the cusp of decay, the structures depicted in these photographs represent an undeniably beautiful yet enigmatic impermanence. Abandoned interiors – the original purpose of which seems no longer clear – have succumbed to nature. Decay and ruination provide value in the contemporary imagination because they can remind us of the age of things. In this view of the past, a cracked and broken monument is more resonant than a pristine one.

A South African Story: Untitled

Patchwork democracy bailed out sycophants;

Cushion economies for bigots nestle among bony dreams of children.

Militarised suburbia and car-ports spot for failure of common sense ghetto-style,

Posterity measures canonize slave-labour factories as monuments revolution-bred.

Mines and other abattoirs convulse gagged by pallid wails of frothing men,

Rhapsodies of rage maraud their settlements.

Hammers and spears poking stony bellies of fortified presidential coffers,

Offer only masquerades resolved by the learned on behalf of those clawing the soil.

Such times chronicle hunger as a sport game irreligious,

An eternal fast or toxic diet handed down conveyor belts of social grants.

What anthems are these resembling an executioner’s hymns?

What honest hunt by the rich when the poor are branded bestial?

Hospitality chambers brim with match-stick legged beggars,

Ransacking fake and abandoned thrones that mocked ours.

River-banks scrapped for toys by bored infants,

Carry carrion massacred for bait and black gold.

And here we roam an unliberated pyramid,

Random sunrises and sunsets coaxing prayers from our chapped throats.

Bestowed our laments are jaded piety of complacency, and

The euphoria of suffrage second-guessing our commandments.

Let freedom be a murdered voice displayed on placards;

Let the freed mark a territory on this ballot cemetery.

While the dead watch, let their glass tears turn to puss,

Dispatch parties to dissuade the wrath inked on sterile palms.

Your new-borns will not be birthed in song,

Their death-throws will be consecrated in legislative junk-yards.

Let freedom be that muted promise on the airwaves,

A bias gilded and flaunted for temporary honours by cowards.

Defiled combatants stink of smoke and ash,

Amending soliloquies and faded slogans for profiteering brigades.

Mammoth chapels for flagellation host petulant lusts,

Avowedly disparaging ornamental creeds of struggle.