Ematyotyombeni - Squatters Of The Wetlands

 

Ematyotyombeni - Squatters Of The In Wetland

LOGLINE

99 is a number symbolic of “truth” in township street lingo, and while many people in Kokosi know of EXT 99, they have no idea of the shocking truth of living with sewage and daily gunfire and violent rapes of young girls trapped in poverty’s remorseless grip.

Synopsis

In most townships, there always emerges an anomalous neighbourhood comprised of squatters and migrant workers (illegal or otherwise) seeking residence.

These places often carry names such as Baipei (Those Who Located Themselves), and EXT 99 is one such place composed of corrugated steel shacks and makeshift abodes desperately crafted by the homeless suing ramshackle tools and discarded materials.

Built from the desperation of a growing population of unemployed youths and backyard dwellers crowding inhospitable spaces around places of prospective employment and entrepreneurial efforts; 99 is an epitome of social injustice pitting people against a swampy existence in a place designated as a wetland.

But places like 99 tend to evolve into hellish neighborhoods, characterized by brutality and crime, coupled with unchecked poverty exacerbated by lack of service delivery by municipal authorities, who dread these neighborhoods.

Established n 1999, the number became synonymous with a sense of self-determination for which many black people were yearning.

Sadly, to date, the place that was also symbolic of the spirit of freedom embodied by dreams beyond the Y2K scare, remains still under-developed and further reduced to a haven for criminality and social decay.

This documentary is an exploration of Kokosi’s most infamous informal settlement.

It delves into the lives of those who cannot leave this sordid place for greener pastures; telling their stories of resilience in the face of squalor, and their continued neglect by powers that be, when faced with extremely degrading living conditions.

This film asks why are these people confined in this horrendous squatter camp, while being continually used as symbols of poverty in propagandist electioneering campaigns?

No Apolitical Art - A Short Manifesto

It is often said that history lingers and waits, to over time unfold through residues never arrives all at once; history occurs at moments when in the present, memory converges with the inner gaze of nostalgia and the chorus of trauma.

Art as never a mere footnote of history actively moulds it; therefore art remains not a supplementary cultural anecdote but a protagonist of evolving life.

Art transforms history and memory into not only an inheritance but a lived experience perpetually reimagining and redrafting itself into collective memories of people in realtime.

And as political entities longing for intimacy within a world that mould us, artists continue to craft impulses that convey the soul’s desire and burning urge for visibility.

Entranced by the violence of visibility, we, dissident artists are all drawn towards the light like moths in their masochistic performance and fatal attraction; yet the erratic and inevitable impulse urges us on to understand that history is ever occurring.

And as our contemporary times are troubled by remnants of unloved pasts, our art provides constellations of interpretations and meanings bringing to light other travellers in the shadows of history.

Those travellers, our ancestors and their imperilled memories are an undefeated and undying force to be recorded, not dormant nor passive; and through our art they are resurfacing and enduring not as recurrences but morphing residues grounded on the common theme of life.

Smudging canvases and projection surfaces with compositions that challenge the stability of the visual plane, the dissident artist emphasises the disruptive gestures of our collaged existences.

Here, art reorients us ,to moments buried within the hierarchical tombs of the mind, to lie forgotten and repressed until erupting in the present; providing a haunting pictorial universe of disturbing forces that continue to reshape the present psyche.

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And as currencies of political violence resonate through generations, transforming physical and cultural landscapes, how can art look away without inventing visions of the future already crippled by past and present brutalities?

What about those who live having survived perils and traumas that test morality and sanity; those who endure the vile residues of political spectacles?

As the fragility of survival woven into the catastrophes of our times escapes the logic of control; and it is up to us to challenge our sense of shared angst, allowing our past wounds to let light into our waning souls.

And in our absurd dialogue with memory and time, in an active game of shifting gazes, we will turn our sadness to humour and criticality of history’s intentions.

We will reshape the subtle optics of “recalling” and “listening” through nuanced shifts from clear-cut realities; marvelling at the beauty of anarchy and dissent against patronised cultural conventions.

With our invented and unbroken continuity of meanings, in a world saturated with images and the clamour of arbitrary noise; our art will require specific subordinating forces to rein in these tensions between what is incubated in the wombs of time.

Beyond propagandist fragments of the present; our art will exile our souls to dysfunctional spaces and imagined dystopia; evoking altered forms, ghosts moving across locations, listening to tunes haunting their chests.

Like vessels that bring humanity to proximity to its made terrors, our narratives must announce an inauguration of a larger mess of reality-definitions, those that includes the digital and spiritual.

We will move beyond the narrow margins of insulated ideals, we will grapple beyond the comfort of certainty and become detached from incoherence of systems, be but indebted to ourselves, and not participate in our erosion by reshaping ourselves around invisible expectations.

We will recognise that new connections are forged once entrenched prejudices are precluded from our imaginings of a new hour; and once we discover these discreet meanings evading our cluttered sights, our art will speak to the past with tongues that have tasted the future’s cold blood.

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A Questionable Time

Time, is it an object to be known or a way of being?

Is time ever in the making, happening as it retains within itself the frozen past?

Does “timing” forge man as an actor appreciating inseparability of time and life experienced?

Is Time but a ritual and ceremonial experience draped in the mysteries of both the visible and invisible?

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Is time a cauldron of marvels and terrors?

A well of terrors experienced before tongues could word unfettered emotions?

Is time but an uncertain territory that exists between memory, dreams, and the unconscious?

Isn’t memory but an evocative constellation emerging from residues of time’s past emotionally charged in the present?

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Isn’t time but a winter’s fleeting breath howling through raging bones;

A mouse snuck in foliage of forgotten testaments?

Can time redeem lost wills and tombs with forsaken songs borne as yokes,

But lighter than feathers of obsession?

Isn’t time but one’s mirror ablaze with secret ogres and rancid swamps,

Bloated with drowned dreams and fallen monuments?

And wouldn’t it be time for clocks to grind to a halt,

At this questionable time mesmerised by the final rays of setting stars?

By: Khahliso Matela

Why Is The Water Wet?

 

Why Is The Water Wet?

A Video Poem that observes water as a mesmeric entity, especially when contained.

A marvelling at the hypnotically edgy minuscule drops that drip into floods undulating, echoing a life fallen from celestial planes, for all that thrives upon the earth.

And as many reach unto the sky having crawled the dust and mud saturated in the blissful tears of clouds, Branches Like Wires Into The Sky emerges and imagines the darkness of midday, reconfiguring an austere perception of a bone dry tree; a symbol of decay within the dynamic yet familiar reach for light.

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