I am often reminded of Nikolai Gogol’s grotesquely witty novel, DEAD SOULS, Chichikov is an interestingly absurd character who effectively comes into a provincial town looking to buy property in the form of names of dead peasants, whom by some administrative oversight were still legitimate entities on formal records.
His enterprise appears, to me at least, to resemble a form of “purchasing souls of those who are dead”, much like what archeologists, fossil collectors, treasure hunters (liberators of lost antiquities) and art collectors do with the creative works of deceased people.
Accumulation of cultural artefacts and proprietization of artworks has long been a niche for select cabals within colonial families and they continue to have a stranglehold on the contemporary art landscape, even discarding bodies, persons denuded of agency, depicted in various artworks ranging from photographs to portraiture.
There are vast collections acquired through scrupulous means, during wars as pillaged booty stolen by soldiers in unsanctioned wars ravaging the world’s heritage sites.
There are wanton destruction campaigns of monumental historical ruins disguised as acts of religious valour and conviction, masking illicit trades in antiquities which will forever plague a humanity that commodifies even memory.
Therefore, there is no absolution to white cultural privilege that black poor artists can offer, and there is no obligation for such atonement for white people’s sudden spurs of conscience when it comes to restitution of stolen artworks and erased archives, as well as hidden cultural items.
There will remain a validated and entrenched mistrust when it comes to black communities opening their vaults of memory to any academic and curious collector intent on creating archives for future generations, based on past experiences.
For most families, parting with images of their forebears, as well as those often associated with religions rituals, marriages; and those contested portraits of black lives is akin to dislodging oneself from their spiritual source.
And their conflicted sentiments towards donating these revered artefacts for preservationist projects has never benefitted their current historical standing.
And while attempts are being made by varied institutions, not only to repatriate but to redress ideological misnomers employed to discredit these valued items, western preservation institutions require vast non-exploitative resources from those communities to which the items belong.
These institutions will require black counter-critical analysis of contemporary artistic output, to provide a relational understanding grounded not in the illusion of objectivity but practices of questioning and authenticating memory and its sources.
Patronising Black Artists To Oblivion?
When artistic glory calcifies into obligation to market-success demands; the incompatibility between genuine art and kitsch expressionistic work is blurred; and the creation of artistic works is transformed into regurgitative production of stylised replicas.
The hollowness and fragility of reputation enjoyed by a few in the art world tempts artists of colour towards unacknowledged corruptibility, a form of decay that affects even the most benevolent of makers and collectors of black art.
Replicating their originality for commerciality, sanitising their rebellious art to conform to the chaotically profitable provenance, these artists often exhaust themselves before their pinnacle, when the inevitable disappointment inches on their transitory fruits of fame.
As though patrons are vying to subdue all black artists into a permanence of banality, the subtle tyranny of critics disguised as learned opinions often leaves our artists overwhelmed by the entire sham of reputations that are established and venerated.
No major museum or gallery in South Africa, with their bureaucracies of value, have gone beyond commodification of artistic output by artists and people of colour; and this also impacts on the dynamics of reciprocity between institutions and communities.
Most of these art institutions’ hierarchies of cultural inertia can’t even humanise the inhumane ornamentation of people of colour (Ncome Museum as an example), and the objectification that still continues to be exploited by internationalist collectors who continue to desecrate art that is endowed a social function.
Exhibitions have become orgies of gossip and congratulatory spaces for inflated egos, where artists make pragmatic decisions at distinct phases of their lives, which in turn affect their future career prospects.
From the curatorial compromises that intrude throughout their developing oeuvre, to the curiorization many succumb to for sales, undoubtedly these transactions taint the innocence that carries the spirit of their artistic endeavour.
These artists become complicit in a system that demeans their craft, shifting alliances and resentments, blurring the line between appropriation and plagiarism; while building a legacy that will represent a collective black experience from their own personal anguish.
Retired corporate moguls establish galleries for wives and trusts that spend millions on acquisitions, mansion walls covered with predominantly white artists and their orbiting acquaintances; forging a system where works decanted in hatcheries of white privilege are capital business.
And having received different responses to their work, many black artists have begun to reject comfort and expectations, freeing themselves to create beyond the silenced rage of consumer-driven exploitation and expectations.
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In this digital age when social media algorithms have spurred a surge in the proliferation of artistic content that verges on artificiality, the question is even more pertinent.
The compulsion for exposure and audiences have nudged artists towards a stream of styles condensed into pictorial wonders that flood timelines like gallery isles, yet many of these artistic masterful works are regurgitated replicas of what the art world has been engineered to appreciate.
Then one wonders if the art is being produced for art’s sake or motives driven by monetisation prospects patronised by technocratic agents; or is today’s art being produced by artificial agents through prompts that scale human sensibilities down to predictable aesthetics.
When creativity has been tainted by greed it has to re-orient and test its elasticity against social institutions, but this process is in itself a transformative and degenerative to a degree, as quality is often forsaken for quantity.
But can black artists afford to overlook these persistent urges to produce for an audience disguised as bits and digital avatars on computer screens?
Like weavers of time eroding We ride storms into an unknown each day Ever longing to give for Those that wrestled with demons and lost
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Whatever inherited memories are haunting our generation, they are “a contested space” where in stark contrast to the architecture of dreams, are created structures determining what we recall and how we recall it.
The political and cultural - as unstable agents of memory; are constantly reassembled and disassembled to orient oneself to the tattered reproductions of revered moments and occurrences.
But memory is both a fool and miser, a jester who conjures objects within a vacuum of meaning.
And travelling like gossip, memory metabolises into an organic entity that is sensed and tasted, seen and heard in hallucinatory chambers of our minds.
Objects we carry from one place to another, possessed with our souls and charged with our collective emotions and memories; like fragments of what is left behind, they anchor our lives’ memories and their disorienting transformations sparked by dislocations from familiar environments.
And as mobility continues to shape our living conditions and environments, it also affects our relationships with objects we embed with worth determined by experiences and attachments.
These objets can bear traces of decay, their eroded beauty generating a newer shifting resonance with memories fading; but still these objects are themselves weavers of times and we forever interact with it through memories continually born.
In these objects and their surfaces, textures and hues, we find documented days and years of memories of those innumerable hands that grasped and used them.
Into the abyss of dis-remembrance though memories erode and deteriorate, often these object outlive those who stored and devoted memories into them; and when decay is not resisted beauty looms, when the gravity of memory obeys time’s ravages there rises imperfect yet marvellous reflections that are not flaws by news ways of being.
Memory mutates, and circulates within bodies, a body that is given being by other bodies; it’s always flirting with the sacred suspended between the living the dead. And yet can memory exists without words formulated to conjure their meanings?
In my inexhaustible fascination with how memory takes a vantage point within a complex assortment of recollections, my video art weaves a veritable assembly of ideological commentary that are culturally layered yet rooted in locales of black experiences.
And as places become locations, bodies become information and informants - memory becomes resource for exploitation; and I therefore use video art is the allegorical intervention for filling the prevailing blindspots of our socially collective memory.
And art, like a promise, is the responsibility taken for that which doesn’t exist, and this promise is held to be transformed yet preserved like bonds and traces of commitments to be upheld.
Through art we forge practices of mourning that sharpen our pain also render monuments to events experienced in transience; yet all beings recall and like promises that bind us to the unknown, so does memory.
South Africa is gripped by anti-immigrant sentiments that have resulted in various acts of xenophobic impunity against many foreign nationals in recent months.
Commonly held reasons for these tension are said to stem from disproportionate numbers of foreign owned businesses that are found in townships.
These grievances are further exacerbated by the dire economic conditions faced by many black South Africans who feel betrayed by their government that has seemingly allowed an influx of illegal immigrants to run rampant on local streets as organised criminal cartels or inform workers.
But are all the stories of foreigners being scrupulous business people and criminals escaping justice, validated by facts?
This documentary delves into stories of foreign tuck-shop operators, asking whether their lived experiences translate into the tale of economic exploitation that has been preached by anti-immigrant movements.
And this is the first in an episodic series of conversations with various tuck-shop operators, with the continued effort to document more as time progresses.
Filmed By Paul Zisiwe
Edited By Khahliso Matela
Production Manager Catherine Mthembu
Featuring Ashanti “Abram” Mishumo Simon Mantlathi Nichola Mohoje
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NOTE OF REQUEST
Over the past year, I have produced four documentary films that address the service delivery concerns of my home community of Kokosi, and these films are passion projects created with an old and failing camera with no professional sound or lighting equipment.
I continue to be confronted by activists and community members with a variety of social issues to tackle, and as a documentarian who knows the importance of silenced voices, I selflessly pursue these filming excursions without any financial support, working with the unreliable equipment at hand.
It is in this light that EXT Lab Media requests any equipment donations from entities who are touched by the work done thus far, for the continued crafting of narratives rooted in lived experience of township based communities.
To offer any assistance, please feel free to contact the filmmaker at tjobolo.khahliso@gmail.com
Kind regards,
Paul Khahliso Matela Zisiwe Filmmaker/Writer http://anirrationaldiary.blogspot.com
In our fictitiously observed hierarchy of living beings, animals and plants have been relegated to the bottom rungs of emotional intelligence; this misnomer has characterised Man’s disregard, fear and often disdain of the encroachments of nature as embodied in these living beings.
Biologists have proposed that flora birthed fauna in the aftermath of an evolving natural life; and whether animals birthed man is no longer a disputed question.
But there’s an ever growing chasm between man and the natural worlds, an alienation that is transcendent and destructive to both in terms of longevity on this planet.
Although the word “culture”, taken from the Latin “colore” has much to do with cultivating the soil, perchance it could impugn that the self is cultivated by the soil; this cultivation also applies to humans as products of the earth.
Yet humanity has not become a companion of the earth; inversely humanity has rather become a nemesis to all living beings.
There was another theory that postulated that the plants and animals decided to never speak to humankind at some mythic point in time; to forever keep an unvoiced life wrapped in a resounding silence and mystery.
And considering that humanity is a species that does not fit best, can any moral definitions and ethics proposed by humanity extend beyond humans themselves, and to the whole of reality?
Can mankind discard the seductive dream of humanity being the summit of a metaphorical Mount Insurmountable?
Is it because we cannot relate tot the sensuous and material presence of plants, animals, insects, bacteria and other forms of conscious entities that we find ourselves relegated to being mere observers of this indifferent reality around us?
And what happens when groundbreaking botanical researches challenge notions of human exceptionalism, suggesting that there are trillions if not more of other consciousnesses thriving across the planet, although threatened by humanity’s destructive penchant for territory and resources?
As humanity, our inner harmony is expressed through innocences of petals and branches, in forests of complexity do we find the lessons in the cosmic and etheric, like mirror we reflect each other within the pond of time we share.
And when reason can’t prevail on the murky surfaces of these ethical swamps; only attuned poets would be able to hear the hymns of flowers and streams, carried on winds directed by the earth’s dance around the sun.
These artists would reference metaphors of plants in the act of blooming, or decay; as plants remain true predecessor of animal life on this planet we call home.
This way, these poets who write or paint about blossoms and petals, streams and silent forests, they interest me most, because they cultivate a culture of companionship (within humanity as earth’s creation) with all of reality.
Their often striking depiction of nature, the composed fauna and flora populating this planet seek passage into our sacred recollections of the divine spirit imbued each plant and animal against the mirages of technocratic worldview worshipped by mankind.
Scents of wild flowers in spring carry nostalgic recollections of varied textures and temperaments; yet in these scents mankind has embedded coded hints of joys, sorrows or perhaps blood on petals shed during wars long lost between nations and kin.
Mythic creatures and hybrid animals that populate most literary worlds; these divine bodies unbound by earthly limitations chiseled in man’s yearnings, are alive without any source or fountain of their longevity.
And if mankind copied nature as a strategy for inclusion within the greater scheme of life’s mystery, man might begin to resemble them in sincere innocence and their intricate and evolving harmonic relationship all other beings on the planet.
Mekhukhung, is a Sesotho word coined to describe residential areas constructed with corrugated zinc plates or wooden planks; they are squatter camps where many township residents begin their peri-urban experiences and social upward mobility.
Yet, most squatter camps appear to have an inter-generational history, a story that is carried forward by younger generations grappling with life in a place designed for stagnation and social dissolution.
99 is one such place, characterised by child-headed households, young man joining gangs and girls prostituting themselves for a meal or a ride on the gravy train of mine-worker wages or a hit from pimps slowly gaining traction in our townships.
Here, young people still dream in spite of the squalor and the dreaded drug infestation that makes animals of their peers, they resolve to change their worldview for a better life deprived their parents and grandparents.
And faced with the false promise that education under democracy means success,these youths are confronting an uncertain future premised on lack of opportunities in a country still grappling with the legacies of economic inequality and exclusion.
This is their story shackled in cold shacks of 99, spoken with words sober and crafted by talent and long-suffering; this is a story of how in the midst of depravity and decay, small flowers can crack the sewage clogged soil and bloom through concrete slabs.
What dark and morbid thoughts art these, whispered on a moonless winter night of stampedes of departed souls?
What of these slurred echoes of night's rowdy children steaming off loose lips, loud as those barking dogs frowning at lost ghosts?
Or has death's stroll become so candid, that they'd curse in loud voices when the dead are shrouded in their nightly excursions?
Has mourning crusted a rotted mask on only the faces of the bereaved, a mark of un-birth spoiled in mocking feasts of those who forget death?
What sordid nostalgia is this, roused at this hour of woken stories of loss and dragging dreams; when faces fade into torn caverns of our flogged souls like smoke into the void of night?
What chapter is this, from a sinister comedy of botched lives strewn across time's shanty avenues named like tombstones of wizards massacred through hunger?
Is this yet another tale of ended bliss and sorrows to be cupped with tears of reminiscence?
Are all lines written in blood meant to dwindle and smudge into pages of memory, only to perish into mortuaries of occupied hearts and mazy graveyards?
What dark and morbid thoughts art these, whispered on a moonless winter night, when forgiving oneself art is a sole gift for the departed?
Video art presents a critical reassessment of the screen; a simple display surface that has evolved into an active and generative membrane through which speculative realities are constructed.
And as the screen, or projection spaces, are becoming mediums of interfacing with with synthetic and virtual environmental conditions; artists are producing new conditions of experiencing these realities.
It has evolved into an art form that requires specific perceptive regime in which seeing is mediated via the screen; where introspective projections of marginal stories at risk of disappearance, reappear in new forms, carrying new meanings.
But is there a deliberate repression of video art history within continental cultural remembrance and pedagogical discourse?
Are there video artists with distinct material compositions and visual grammar grounded in perception, intuition, and ideological inquiry into the symbolisms and myths of colonial representation of bother the settler and the oppressed (from whom imagery is extracted for exhibition of conquest)?
Today, publications that open cultural discourse are more important than ever, to address various ways in which heritage and social realities of the past have been preserved to serve certain dominant narratives while overlooking, if not erasing, other subaltern perspectives on the same realities.
And recollections of these erased narratives also entails finding ways of creating a new urges of stories that promote solidarity in these uncertain times, fostering regenerative ways of remembering the past while being members of the present and future.
The article asks how historical violence continues to resonate in post-colonial artistic practices, and explores the potential of inter-generational and transnational dialogue for a pluralist remembrance that offers orientation for the future generations of video artists.
By presenting an encounter between moving image, sound, historic collections, and archives as a site of projecting memory, its preservation, and potential resurrection, the polemic here, challenges stereotypes and deconstructs romanticised myths about people of colour and Video/Film-Art.
This is a personal analysis of where images and narratives converge in a practice driven by a constant pursuit of freedom, transformation, and complexity.
With constantly evolving techniques, the artists mentioned in this piece use “samples” motifs from art and cultural histories, linking them to current issues, tracing both the visible and invisible forces that shape civic life, particularly for the lives of African people.
Bringing contemporary cinematic art into a poetic and sensorial dialogue with the architecture of disparate memories, their personal inquisitive natures propose an unorthodox gesture of memory while presenting a methodological counterpoint to traditional historiography through film/video art.
This article examines works of a number of prominent southern African video/film artists trafficking in cross-cultural interdisciplinary practices, as they expose the grit and perversions that have created the myth of western personal freedom and its depravity of constant dehumanisation.
And considering the tensions between transience of the mediums of film and video art, and the impermanence of its subject matter; collating the remaining traces, presenting them as archives, are methods of contending with their disappearance and erasure from the annals of contemporary African artistic expression.
Nandipha Mntambo
A drifter through a vacant bull ring, a female matador in complete regalia composed yet on edge, sword in hand aimed at the unknown awaiting.
These were some images that clung to my mind when watching Ukungenisa, presented at Big Fish School Of Digital Filmmaking, by renowned film producer, David Max Brown.
Ukungenisa (2009) is the kind of work, a performed trance that impels one to consider ideas of transplantation of identity through animalism and multi-cultural exposure that occurs abstractly and through physical proximity to animals at moments of their death.
As she meanders through a vacant coliseum as in an echo of a dream; femininity in a masculine territory, a metaphor and an invasion of seclusionist traditions - this performance video art is about womanhood, following a rhythmic trance to escape and defiantly slaying mythic beasts of patriarchal privilege.
Blurring dichotomies between the animal and the human, protecting and harming; the scenario starting with the ritual of preparation; the film-art presents an interrogation of western mythology in African contexts, where even entire bloodlines are descendant from the animus.
Placing herself in the midst of the politics of erased beings and those to be erased (bakwaNkomo), to make visible their invisibility as a fighter who heals while brutalising, Nandipha captivates with her robust energy, and a mysticism that is both foreign and dear, akin the slaughtering of a sacred cow for an ancestral libation.
She often spoke of her work being entwined with myths and archetypes from ancient cultures, this trait gives her approach to skinning and using cow hides in human form, a timeless and macabre texture for reflecting on concepts of lactation/birth in relation to death/loss of identity as symbolised in the duel.
Cattle in the myth of the matador are nourishing entities turned violent and enraged, who in turn are massacred in worship and sacrifice. so, is this ceremonial performance responding to vast histories of the Moorish traditions as they eventually evolved into the Spanish cosmology?
Often taking on the hides of cattle to enclose her human form, Nandipha undergoes a metamorphosis; a transformation into a Minotaur (a human with a bull’s head) provides a anthropomorphic hue, a ferocity that symbolises femininity in violent confrontation with “the Gods” and a fated existence of domestication.
And recalling the myth of ancient Minoans of a white bull given by the sea, a beast of such beauty that a king (Minos) refused to slaughter - how it became an anathema and the queen’s fiery love that yielded an ungodly birth; UKUNGENISA seems to hint at a confrontation with the bestial urges that breeds monstrosities in humanity.
The film examines, in a choreographic exploration, how the mythic entities that lurks in diverse global cultures is constantly rehearsed in various social auditoria and enacted with intent on bodies of women deemed as animalistic by nature of their nurture.
Does this creature become a hybrid form that emerges through power and violence?
But does hunting this bull of heaven (or the sea) to offer its heart to the gods or ancestors suffice as an ideal for sanctification of the mortal sins committed before the divine?
Though UKUNGENISA, as an attempt to grasp the mysteries of the matador, Nandipha provides a generated vision where the beast is purportedly slain in an act similar to that of being milked.
A state of fragility that is both vulnerable yet threatening; and transcends.
Her performance driven film/video art proposes a new way of perceiving relationships between animality and spirituality; seeing the transcendent in the visible, beyond the complex self-perception imposed by external narratives.
Communication as transmitted through gestures, the primal urgency interacting with the unknown frequency known for its violence; the bull that never materialises in a world left desolate with remnants of echoes of bleeding and conquest.
The environment, a cathedral of executions flanked by a rostrum as the edge of instinct; a biological defence crumbling in the face of the unknown.
Gradually moving the space, venturing into an world unobserved and its blood soaked soil bringing the inevitable to pass in an enigmatic rhythm that dances at peril; Nandipha transforms the Eurocentric mythology on its horns to blow the sordid dust of colonial coliseums into dances of the undefeated.
Jyoti Mistry
Can our vigilant ancestry intervene in the technocratic present of machine religions and new age spirituality that purports to heal traumas of legitimate origin?
How does the person become affected by ancestral pain and its transmission throughout generations? What are the inherent poetics of memory that are suckled from our grandmothers; populated by grandfatherly trees and tales old as roots?
These are some questions that mould the mystery of Mistry’s films and the enigma they possess.
As a lecturer in Film at various international institutions, her research oriented practice is a complex excavation of both personal and collective memory in light of political developments in post-independence Africa.
Her presentations and installations, as well as experimental documentary work, reinvigorates ideas of hybrid identities and diasporic fragments found in music and arts of disparate communities divorced from their African origins.
The “witch” as a key figure in ancient literary imagination, has endured numerous afterlives in much of contemporary literature and artistic representations. Yet, this figure, infused with interpretative paradoxes, has been indelibly obscured in contemporary memory.
In CAUSE OF DEATH, womanhood, patriarchal dread and ever repeated accusations of witchery are metaphors of the perpetual subjugation of the feminine mystic.
Traumatic memories of gendered suspicion and oppression are exorcised, and redressed through visuals infused with Napo Masheane’s poetry, where engaging with issues of spectacles of representations of women’s death, Jyoti linkshistorical imagery of historical persecutions to contemporary forms of resistance as expressed in Napo’s poetic spell of words that translates and resuscitate spirits of women drowned ”by the land” and crucified for the land.
The stake bearing a resemblance of an unorthodox crucifix, a figure strapped by the wrists and flames devouring their wailing posture; an x-rayed analysis of the innermost essence of the tortured body and the torture itself, addresses both the overt and subtle violence effected on the feminine body.
And as the film-art compels the “remembrance of this spectacle”, the burning female body remains a vehicle for projecting the most scathing of memories of bodies subjected to condemnation; femicide and its unbearable psychological violence, denounced as an atrocity without reproducing a spectacle of the canalisation of the feminine.
The grandmother’s warm bed has been a space of intimacy and listening, augmented by scents and odours that linger in memories that are often rekindled as emotional registers, could possibly have retained her soul at those hours of her return to vulnerability in death.
Yet, each bed knows its occupants eternal thoughts and essence, their energy entwined with fabrics and sheets that had bound generations of descendants, with a wholesome nurture of love.
LOVING IN BETWEEN proposes such inter-generational intimacy, where aged memories commingle with meditative observations of the decay of “ the memory of the elders”, a form of sacrifice of treasures embedded in genes, memories raging through the living and young.
The bed as a devotional locus for vulnerability and maternal relationships between bodies divorced by age, a surrender that is lost; a device for listening and memory created through participatory companionship.
Asserting a compelling engagement with the present, Jyoti’s works rewrite personal histories, in which autobiographical experiences intertwine with memory, breaking with the linearity of time while assigning new meaning to wounds of forced absences and dislocations from loved ones.
Her film art echos of lost futures and past dreams used to predict a present that could bear a just and responsible humanity respectful of heritage, history and the idea of origins.
Nathaniel Stern
In a post-truth era of deep fakes and artificially intelligent and augmented virtual realities populated by avatars, how is art perfecting the subtle disappearance of reality, where deception and illusion are the sole means of interfacing with the world around?
Balancing the express seriousness of a scientists concerned about networked and virtual worlds, and exploring cinematic dimensions of the internet as a tool for merging reality and the virtual, Nathaniel Stern collaborates with computer experts, programmers, to repurpose existing residues of discarded gadgets, as a response to human interactions with “their reality”.
We watch animations displayed on etched screens, superimposed to lend a three dimensionality to an interactive reality emerging from his manipulated constellations of imaginary; the frames being light emitting portals so to speaks, opening onto psychic archives of man dreaming he was a machine.
His networked ecosystem and their polished characters (players) caught in loops of performances of virtual selves, immerses one in a fluctuating world of colour, juxtaposed with intimations about how humanity yearns to automate itself into interactive and modular scenarios.
These new dimensions, the inhuman gestures and atmospheres oscillating between mathematical order and optical disruption, become tactile, programmed projections of utopian reveries; revealing a performative potential that can entrance the human mind away from the burdens of reality.
Nathaniel’s work as a philosophical inquiry, seeks to uncover how reality can be distinguishable from the virtual and the possible, when the mere act of creating these realities is an extractive force that transforms the planet for the worst.
Here, the convergence of technology and art as a scientific experiment shed light on their entangled relations, critiquing how technological advancements disregard the environmental degradation that follows.
Perhaps that is why Nathaniel tends to utilise varied materials to augment his dynamic practice; reworked drawings on projection surfaces, or silk screened images that create a multi-dimensionality - all disparate methods are employed to questions the origins of technology’s superiority over life, and extractive lifespan that adds to waste culture.
His films view computing as weaving a complex future, processing an inseparable digital layer to the illusion of superiority of humanity over nature; thus generating a space for a counter-narrative to the dominant ideology of world domination through trans-human efforts.
Berni Searle
Berni’s work disrupts habitual notions that old architectures is solely symbolic of decay; implying that buildings, landscapes are as entities imbued with spirits, life and tales.
In SUBTERFUGE, architecture is storyteller, its silence and absence of human occupation implicit of its inherently and independently born spirit; where spaces are constantly breathing souls and memories.
Tracking shots and drone footage provide a spirit’s view over dystopian architecture of The Castle, a significant monolith of colonial oppression; and this fluid re-entry into the past, induces a contemplation of that which was, yet remains.
And within the emptiness that is a mere camouflage of a violent turmoil at a spiritual level, herein are enclosed within these serenely built reinforcements, lamenting hordes of slain slaves and failed by a forgetting past and amnesiac present.
The employ of the artist’s denuded body as witnessed in her seminal performances is a symbol and thematic inference to selflessness, induced by human confinement; a solitude suffered within surreal settings and its imageries bred from traumatised psychologies like echoes activated from the present.
In MOONLIGHT, themes of informal labour and the furnaces of dislocation, and the profound changes brought about by post-apartheid South Africa, reveal the transforming nature of socio-economic structures but also the lasting marks of landscapes and ways of life, the failures of the promise of progress and self-realisation.
At the junk yard the circulation of bodies and resources, and extraction of resources by bodies that are also resource commodities; play a metaphoric trick on the spectacle of recycling what is discarded.
The persons obscured by neglect and social disdain, relegated to the margins of the unseen; these garbage collectors aren’t mere performers in guises of poverty but entities shaped by everyday action of many Berni’s contemplative piece, filmed from an extreme low-angle address notions of inferiority of the bodies, when seeking the value in obsolescence that drives and sustain consumer culture.
This act of capturing an event reflecting on the post-apartheid promises of that continue to structure the current social absurdities and inequities; MOONLIGHT, and its time lapsed conception of temporality proves the that their tale will outlast he extractive logic of the empire within which they existed.
Her continued confrontation with the status quo when lucidly crafting art about and against colonial privilege, has been exemplary among those artists who have concerned themselves with addressing the lack of equilibrium in human life,between the personal and the public.
Retracing past histories as a way to disturb established narratives that largely ignores the brutality that seeped into the walls with blood and tears, and wails; restoring dignities of souls animating the unfinished colonial violence witnessed at THE CASTLE as site of contemporary tourist leisure.
Simon Gush
As most African post-independence epochs are marked by the profound sociopolitical tensions that preceded liberation for many African communities, and artists like Simon Gush, as active intellectuals within distraught societies, manifestly reflect and ponder the complex and maintained ties with colonial trauma.
Winner of the Ernest Cole Award 2022, Gush continues a hybrid, research-driven practice that spans photography, video and installation, interrogating socio-political crises of the twentieth century against the backdrop of exploited persons and communities, bringing history into vivid dialogue with film/video art.
In THE COMPANY OF, a study on the joys and anguish of alienation in lives of immigrants is depicted through a football match on railway tracks (a force of migration and displacement), where immigrants (as extracted bodies) are heard jovially speaking varied languages in a purported serenity of a “new life in exile”.
Executed meticulously in response to contemporary political crises facing foreigner in European metropoles, Gush explores nostalgic expressions in space marked by constant departures and arrivals; where desperate eventualities challenge human empathy and morality.
Themes of cultural assimilation and exile are tackled playfully through a game that often unites while pitting men against one another; a ball as the centre of a universe, players becoming fictional entity divorced from others by their mere displacement and foreignness.
His film/video art tends to employ documentary attention tailored to reflect on multiple meanings of happenings, welcome of otherwise; confronting trauma caused by uprooted memories never to be reclaimed, and the rapid fragmentation of identities in the face of global forces such as war, famine and the overall displacement environments of origins.
Simon Gush is one such contemporary visual artist working across media to unravel ideas and trauma; whose research work informs projects, from conceptual installations based on archives to documentary observations, all developed through interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge.
Artists like Simon Gush, as active intellectuals within distraught societies, manifestly reflect and ponder the complex notions of inherited heritage and the poetics of memory; unraveling the maintained ties with colonial trauma within post independence contexts, using contemporary themes and aesthetic interpretations of the darker magic of a circus of a present wearing thin.
Bogosi Sekhukhuni
Interactive, virtual landscapes, characterised by surreal imagery, and constructed scenography of costumed figures; Bogosi’s works question one’s relationship with subconsciousness, and possibly the unconscious occurrences that occupy spaces between zeros and ones.
From digital debris and other coded discarded nodes of algorithms, bands out a chorus of strange but intriguing figures and multicoloured forms on forays through two dimensional planes.
In the case of virtuality in his art, one might wonder who holds the camera, or rather,who paints with codes and algorithms? And for who; and what remains visible and invisible within the frames beyond the vessels of machine memory?
Oscillating between mathematical order and optical disruptions and obsessions, Bogosi’s art employs triggered vocalisations, gestures and pseudo-facial expressions rousing and posing, to expose stereotypes embedded and coded in emotions and reactions of viewers.
All these digital environments populated with computer-generated images in immersive worlds, algorithmic image generation, are all forms of re-configuring forms of subjectivity and how we perceive them across time, restating thought onto the varied stages of inventive virtual life’s narratives.
And as he turns virtual absences of sound into poetic gestures, geometric abstractions into patterns forming in an unexpected continuum; jolted performances into moments of outraged visibility, creating binary ghosts that yearn to be seen, Bogoshi Sekhukhuni’s art jostles with themes identity in a world where hybridity is the normative form of assembling the self.
His artificially generated art serves as a tool for producing imaginary environments, generating forms of illusions, and perfecting mechanism that sustain desires shaping humanity’s understanding of reality.
Lerato Shadi
The feminine gaze has become an essential vantage point from which many artists plunge into contested waters of female representation in art; an art that prioritises and presents womanhood in its full and unadulterated sensibilities and nuances, without patriarchal infamy.
Consequentially, Interpreting historical audio-visual recordings from the country’s past become Lerato Shadi’s starting point, as she transform these into living archives.
Lerato has over the years become such a voice that continues to garner popularity among the young and burgeoning feminist school of thought emerging on the fringes of a society rent by masculine violence, claiming visibility in a world invisibility of women as essential.
An in these inadmissible time characterised by the unfathomable violence against women and gender neutral persons, her voice grapple with an uncertain future for black women in South Africa and across the world.
Through her multifaceted practice that includes painting, sculpture, video art and photography, Shadi’s work unfurls the myriad tapestries of a contested space where the erasure of womanhood still persist in forms of artificialization, commodification and domestication.
The monotony in the video installation titled Selukgilwe, for example, presents knitting (ashore associated with female labour) as a method of weaving time and its mundanity in the rituals of everyday life.
She is immersed in an intense ritual guided by intuition and traditional skill which precede the idea at hand. Driven by a physical commitment to in pursuit of what she sees as the mundanity of monotony, a powerful critique emerges against socialised acceptance of women as charter slaves.
With a raw emotional intensity that exudes vulnerability, with resistance on its surface, Shadi’s works asks if the impoverishment of manners evident in western etiquette makes African womanhood uncultured and uncouth for appreciation and admiration?
Delving into her ancestors’ histories through the lens, Lerato’s work tracks lineages that resonate with peacemakers and diviners; in which autobiographical experiences merge with a broader reflection on socio-historical memory.
Sib Lamer Shongwe
Sibs Lamer Shongwe has worked hard to increase the visibility and acceptance of experimental films within the South African art scene with his Whitman Gallery, and audiences have welcomed his curatorial and film/video work with an ever deepening inquisitiveness, as he always challenges the norms and conventions of traditional cinema.
From the despondence of an affluence generation fed up with reclusive tendencies fueled by binges of narcotics and sedatives, Sib makes narrative observations of an insider; capturing the rotted smack vomited on designer couches of suburban disillusionment.
NECKTIE YOUTH is a testament of youth gone off the rails and frenzied dreams turning into nightmares, and highway traffic drones synthesised into soundtracks of hedonistic self-destruction.
Sib’s pictorial depictions of urbanity lends itself to Harmonie Korine’s haunting imagery of the everyday city and suburban docile life, translated into intimate moments rooted in the fundamental conditions of earthly experiences - life and death, love and loss; suburban luxury turned into stagnation and confinement.
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?
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.
***
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.
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.
The word “history” came into being, because our events were told and written down thereafter. Now history is being recorded in images or video. Therefore from now on there is no more “History”, but only “Imagery” or “Videory”.
⁃ Nam June Paik, Binghamton Letter(1972)
“We live in an age where truth is constructed from images, not from facts.”
⁃ Simon Fujiwara
As we live in a post-narrative condition, not the end of storytelling but its overflow into new forms. Stories appear between what we choose and what chooses us, across screens and devices, beneath conscious thought.
Through video art, I undertake journeys into the limits of our perception and imagination, triggering images and ideas that, in turn, point towards new realities and the self-involved thoughts transformed into surreal playgrounds.
It is often said that a document is a record of fact-based information, traditionally in the form of words but more recently also as images such as photographs and moving images. The word “documentary,” meanwhile, has come to be used not only as an adjective meaning “factual” or “consisting of documents,” but also as a noun referring to a film expressing facts.
But my video poems are NOT fact based as much as they deal with the hyper- realities of the mind conjuring their self-destruction and re-assimilation in the real and natural realm. These video poems is are interplay between deliberation and intuition in art practice.
I begin first by dissecting and reassessing the unofficial history of imagery as found in sculptures, mosaics and buildings; unfolding those lesser-told layers of its vibrant evolutions until contemporary manifestations. Memories and their counter-memories are fragments upon which I construct visual interpretations not bound by traditional definitions or criteria for artistic representation, but used as a lens that looks at both personal and collective memories.
My video art therefore is a porous network of cultural dialogue and engagements, and it stems from an insane and very profound distrust of imagery, which in turn roused the need for orality and at times textualization of narratives in most of my projects. Through the use of “hijacked” images from popular culture, mainstream movies and publicity materials, the forensic-poetic work is affirmed by inner questions raging from faces of nameless objects and individuals reduced to symbols.
The underlying critical question is what the art can imply for life through suspension of genre-specific boundaries and redefining a new synthesis of the disciplines that explore the collective, the ephemeral, the occasional and yet psychotic engagement with a traumatising world. These video artworks are hence articulated as material testimonies to trauma, using cinema as the language of conflict , to expunge history from corruption.
Video art has always been to express different forms of resistance to dehumanization and interrogate the social fascination with memory erasure and contemplate the conditions of collective amnesia, where the marginalized and nameless, embrace their fluid identities through multiple possibilities of narratives.
This gelatine based pathway into dreams, recognizes the human in the abysmal, the timeless in the archival and the true in the alienated observations of light shed on obscurities. And “Human" here, is etymologically related to the word "humus," which is soil.
This cinematic art is far from representational or unambiguous. There are always ‘tipping points’, ambiguities and multiple meanings, less concerned with a concrete reproduction of reality than with “interpreting existence”, sometimes utilizing technical glitches as tools, and rewriting visual narrative paths in atypical ways.
Rather than follow predetermined paths, video art moves across shifting contours, layered fictions and shifting realities, lead us down unanticipated paths.
These appropriated manipulated images subjected to a series of physical alterations and even macabre that they portray, they have been penetrating deeper into the unconscious of technological society
Blending storytelling with critical and dissenting narratives, video art subverts the polarising structures shaping our understanding of the world, and, explores the anxieties provoked by the uncertainties and social injustices of our time.
Video art therefore embraces incompletion as a generative method for pushing inherited fragments and unresolved ideas into motion, juggling a paradoxical dynamic of gazing while being gazed at, offering sensorial testimony to the historical traumas, and the fragile and illusory nature of social systems we live in.
Video art thrives on glitches and errors that are treated not as failures but as methods. They create cracks where new meanings slip through, moments where the story branches unexpectedly into fault lines point to the politics of narrative: who gets to tell the story, who is written in, and what is left unsaid.
Within a contemporary visual climate in which images appear to precede reality, an era where reality is thought to be the outcome of images rather than images being an outcome of reality, how do archival images lay claim to representing truth?
Interweaving the personal and the collective, in other words, a holistic unfolding of memories and socio-cultural associations, video art is a contingent process of creating meaning of identity and collective biography.
My video art practice includes appropriating museum collection audio-visually and representing them in a new formulaic symbolism, allows for an ethical approach to retracing the traces of various voices and images that have been constructed and erased throughout history, bringing the repressed and overlooked to the forefront, inscribing them into the local context, thus opening a dialogue between time, place and history.
The archival artefacts alluded to include sound-based and silent works, yet within which sound is always present—sometimes heard, sometimes only imagined - yet retaining and relating to the partially obscured histories of human reality.
The resultant visual experiments recreate visual narratives that draw on stories that resonate with the current resurgence of discourse about archival truisms and heritage preservation. Furthermore they employ montage to juxtapose appropriated images, generating new meanings, offering a careful reflection on appropriation and collaboration, foregrounding the artist’s role as art historian, documentarist, and archivist.
This archives-based video art practice therefore operates at the intersection of cinema and historical research of heritage of absurd histories and rituals as varied as cinema screenings, psychoanalytic sessions, and experimental theatrical performances are model for exhibitions: they are mediated experiences by which to access worlds beyond the everyday and connects these emancipatory practices to anti-colonial and anti-capitalist movements in the present.
Video art becomes the ever more refined messenger for a modern world that might be seen beyond appearances, it announces new orders of vision, it gives the future something more than an image, embracing the idea that everything we think we know is, to some degree, a constructed narrative.
First Published On: https://www.numenofstory.com/video-art-and-the-decline-of-high-story
In the four works (shown in this article) by renowned artist Ephraim Mojalefa Ngatane, born in Maseru and maturing in metropolis of Johannesburg, I observe an intricate connection and inter-generational dialogue between his works and the art of Taung born, Lesego Moncho.
The famine and maternal are the energies that radiate from each work by these South Africa’s unsung artists, whose art gestures vulnerability and resilient beauty often cluttered among the debris of broken identities and social memory.
Through an evolving visual language shaped by abstraction, intuition and interplay of materials, Ngatane’s critical strokes of expression embrace a subversion of the spectacle of poverty towards a record of resilient travail against politically prescribed fate.
***
Lesego on the other hand, as a contemporary galleries and artist, continues to evolve his style, as his works feature have grown to feature urban and non-urban identities weaved through curvatures and geometric compositions mingling strokes of acrylics and oils.
His work possesses a darkly playfulness of colour and lines, rectangular and squared forms that mimic daily expression against the backdrop of the clutter of township life.
The township skylines, the cramped compactness of squatter camps insinuated as canvases within the canvas where beings struggle with life’s joys and perils.
Obscured and unsettling faces always seem in awe of their environment, merged with bursting colours of township squaller, carrying instinctive meanings of perhaps how these unknown and unidentified black bodies survive unknowability and obscurity.
This obscuration of their faces, these potently elemental figures frozen in time, becomes a method of questioning ones recognition of what is familiar, yet rousing nostalgia carried like fragments of a people’s memory along a journey towards dreams.
***
With Ngatane’s probing studies of an “end of civilisation”, in his work, bodies also exist in a state of continued search for identity in world that constantly ascribes categories to all forms of being.
Wrapped in a sense of multiplicity, these figures are captured often in groupings that symbolise non-alone(ness), a phenomenon prevalent in black community life.
And this communality in strife and celebration, fixed in alchemical colour palates, Ngatane’s paintings, reminds us that light and colour are siblings vibrating in harmony to surges of consciousness.
Each painting observed seems to lodge something into minds of the beholders, causing a pause, and interval of contemplation.
Not a fleeting glance, but a gaze that leans into unspoken gestures and small declarations.
***
These selected pieces together question whether there are some entanglements with the politics of dispossession as experienced by people of colour, that still haunts our distraught national conscience?
I answer in the affirmative, having interviewed Lesego about his inspirations and allegiance to documentary style abstraction, where the forms are cleaved form actual persons or found photographs and images discovered through research.
These artworks works invite viewers to probe the invisible within the recognisable, the reasons that emerge independently are in eternal conversation with the viewer’s own past experiences of the poverty of township life.
As the country grapples with gender-based violence and its states of conflict and violence on the female body, these works mark a departure from struggles for bodily agency and self-determination to a collective awareness of “not being alone is our sorrows”.
Through these works, Ngatane barters with lived and imagined experiences between his present and possible yet manifest future.
Lesego confirms that no much has changed in regards to the dispossession and incarcerational designs of black communal experiences.
And while both their art positions gender as an embodied field of erasure, unseen yet revealed as recurring historical crises, there is a celebration of resilience attributed to the maternal guardians of an impoverished people.
What happens when a body does not recall that drowning leads to death?
Can a body expire itself through the abrupt cessation of processes of breathing?
Aryan Kaganof’s Ulrike Meinhof Goes To Heaven, in response to these questions, treats water as a fluid cinematic projection space - that translucently blue shifting fluid, holding a figure in euphoric twists that could imply death by drowning.
The slowed undulations of fluids in “womb”, endow the figure a sudden and evolving non-being, an agility that seems lost yet restored as it is lost and restored, again and again in varied harmonies.
It is as though the artist inspects a body of water, and the immersed body itself as a site of agency; where the water is a consciousness in which the figure swims.
And we ask, which body is neutral in the exposure of another?
Could water return us towards perception of the imperceptible, a time before being where language was insufficient to contain the complexity of the experience?
The body here, is in a constant state of becoming, and when everything perishes or the body’s form vanishes, submersion undulates, symbolising the figure’s inseparability from the whole body of water.
Phillippa’s muffled voice gesturing towards non-verbal resonance, becomes an acoustic phenomenon in itself; questioning a hopeful resurrection of the “lost” self that could be drowning or swimming towards the void of time.
And this act of “giving breath” no room, exhalation as expulsion of the occupant of the body, is as a method of concealing oneself inwards thus transitioning to the heavenly plane - that which is beneath the waves of time.
The figure at core of the video poem’s enquiry, is treated as free of convention, as that which exist without its occupant soul, a formless constantly morphing entity; water itself as a space of radical vulnerability throughout this transformation and rebirth.
With Phillippa Yaa De Villiers’ rendtion of Kaganof's poem, recited to create as idiosynchratic orchestration of sound as a liberatory force; her digitally manipulated voice responds with a moving language to the visual poem, which, despite its inherent subjectivity, arouses a further mystification of “the self”.
Through that “self”, symbolised by the figure descending into the brink of consciousness; the poetry modulates the stigmatic occurrence of drowning and possible death (an embrace of the void) as entry to the heavenly.
And this haunting collective of image and unsettling sounds, the voice wrapped in mystery, this gurgling fluid entwined with splashes suspended with moments of the figure’s weightlessness; these are the core of euphoria of a purported heavenly entrance to the unknowable.
A recent article titled: Planned to Contain, Forced to Condense: Orlando East and the Making of Urban Black Modernity penned by Molefi Ndlovu, is yet another astute analysis of a phenomenon which still haunts our precarious lives in the enclaves of social experimentation named townships.
These places still feel like concentration camps where capitalists enterprises could extract cheap labour while securely caging populations through proximity/distance morality.
There was time when I attempted to analyse the “shack” as structural interpretation of what I viewed as “corrugated steel boxes of de-privatised and denuded lives of black folks”.
And as these squatter camps emerged around mining areas in the form of “Baipei” self-locating households, the powers that be figured that creating a coloured region just before the white areas was deterrent to black urban influx.
This obviously created the animosity we still seem between most black people and their “coloured” brothers and sisters.
And through your text I now understand the extent to which social segregation was entrenched through town planning, enhancing visibility of those deemed “nearly white” to become buffer zones that can neutralise black revolt.
Reading your article now resuscitates some of my bitter sentiments about the continued impact of spatial segregation rationalised as cultured settlement of natives for the sole benefit and access of whites.
Molefi expose how architecture can carry the souls of a people - and suffice to say, the spirit of each place (township or location) was inevitably going to break through the normative grids and spill to overwhelm the infrastructure of poverty that kept black communities in enclosed spaces.
And as is the case with many of your literary works that read issues, objects, practices from an internationalist vantage point, I am now forced to re-evaluate my own analysis, or perhaps bolden and broaden their scope through my audio-visual practice.
“Baipei”, as an epitaph and monicker for various squatter camps seems a residual retaliation to the pre-arranged degradation to be encountered in townships.
Baipei - Those Who Located Themselves have thus become a new incarnation of illegitimate residences, which are in turn heavily policed and criminalised and labelled as illegal.
The country is truly grappling with politicised geographies of land dispossession, and the rampant dislocation from locations have left a truly transitory generation, who seem rootless as they cannot fix roots within any of the reinventions of “locations” around apartheid spatial designs and demarcations.
The contested issue of “origins” still haunt me, because I still cannot understand why so many places along the Witwatersrand and the N12, going as far as Lichtenberg, communities trace their origins in “locations” once called Makweteng”.
Imagine the planned and organised rationale behind the dislocation of communities onto environmental landscapes known for mud and inhospitable soil for any cultivation; places like wetlands that are always cold in winter and soggy in summer.
Peter Sloterdijk’s Critic Of Cynical Reason comes to mind when further delving into Molefi’s analysis of ghettoised existence, providing a sweeping diagnosis of our current social decay muddled by naive ideologies based on “false consciousness” manufactured by mainstream think-tanks.
The now unmasked illusion that the township is our heritage forces us to rethink the simple deceptions that went to our collective fetishisation of squalor.
And this article poses sustained arguments reflecting on how our purported modernity at various stage of human evolution can mirror disillusionment and the political fragility of systems that constructed them.
The colonial powers saw it fit to do all manner of experiments on black communities, possibly to sedate their perceived disregard for western modernity.
Molefi views geography, architecture and spatial displacement not as political aftermaths, but as constructs meant to anchor and root social dynamics “into land” which later form political ideological lineages of the dispossessed versus the possessors.
His investigation is both intuitive and interrogative of the historiography of spatial
design in relation to South African township grids, how they influence psychological
imaginings and constraints; a dialogue with his partially Sowetan heritage, that unveils those hidden codes of domination etched into topographies.
***
Molefi speaks of a lifelong desire to discover a language that would insist of recognising Orlando as a microcosm of a vast modernist experiment entered around the mining economy.
This unequivocal claim could also resonate with persons from regions such as present day Merafong, or any township along the stretch of the N12, where mining industry capital invested vast resources to exploit black labour.
It was a design that constantly displaced black communities to suit radicalised economic priorities. And living in Khutsong and Kokosi or Wedela, one can observe vividly the similar spatial grid designed to plot the contemporary, yet “contained” Orlando Molefi analyses.
This spatial design applies to many townships clustered around mine-shafts and white affluent towns established for the sole purpose of white monopoly capital.
From the earliest memories told by of elders in Kokosi in a documentary produced some years ago, the present township is testament and a result of forced removals from places once owned by black farming communities endowed with multiracial social layers and economic co-dependence.
Those targeted demolitions are what Molefi calls “designed beginnings” due to ”an absence produced by violence”; municipal violence through demolitions of histories and livelihood, violence of continual relocations to smudgy and often inhabitable landscapes in the periphery of white towns.
This legacy of segregationist spatial planning continues to this day, evident in many new residential developments designed around the same infrastructural seam of surveilled existence; where density is a structural condition blamed on ever growing urban, criminalised populations that require monitoring.
It therefore is commendable that, through an informed observation of past architectural forms from a contemporary vantage point, Molefi could yield such a analytically illuminating portrait of an Orlando East that seems to converge in organised symmetry into an eye slumped unto the earth; a vast township system that regulates and constitutes South African inter-personal interactions.
