[…] Special Issue: Johannesburg Lasts
Issue Editorial
Editorial: Last, Lasting, Lost
The specter stands for that which never simply is and thus escapes the totalizing logic of conventional cognitive and hermeneutic operations. It cannot be reduced to a straightforward genesis, chronology or finitude and insists on blurring multiple borders, between visibility and invisibility, past and present, materiality and immateriality, science and pseudo-science, religion and superstition, life and death, presence and absence, reality and imagination
(Esther Peeren, 10).
What are Johannesburg’s spectres and whom do they haunt? What spectres of late capitalism inhabit a city hastily erected on top of the rich seam of gold that lay beneath? How do legacies from Johannesburg’s past mingle with its future
Johannesburg Lasts is a research collection that seeks to uncover, unpack and deepen investigations into spectres of Johannesburg, it’s toxic legacies, its facades and the residues of its disturbed surfaces. Our initial impetus was sparked by the last remnants of an archive: The 1976 book Johannesburg Firsts by librarian Anna Smith. Johannesburg is a city young enough for Smith to keep a biased score of its firsts. She presents a vast amount of information, from the city’s large industrial debuts all the way down to the first chicken hatched in Johannesburg. This story not only loses key details and facts in Smith’s retelling, but is charged with the racist assumptions of that era in apartheid South Africa. It left us wondering about what it would mean to consider Johannesburg in terms of its lasts.
Through the framing of the last and the lost, we ask questions of how to imagine a city in terms of its ends, its spectres – those which are “both revenant, that which returns from the past, and arrivant, that which is to come…” and its continued and future hauntings (Peeren 2014: 14). Here we think of the remnants of apartheid spatial planning, the facades of Johannesburg’s suburbs and enclaves, and the “emergence of diverse urban worlds within the same territory—strange mappings and blank figures, discontinuous fixtures and flows, and odd juxtapositions” (Mbembe 2004: 375).
Johannesburg is an exquisite corpse, collaged from other times and other places, “characterized by an unmediated adjacency” a “hybrid composition” that “betrays an attempt at synthesis” (Comaroff and Ong 2013: 85). It is a city that operates through forms of mimicry and mimesis “evident in the city’s contemporary architectural forms […] in its mania for wealth, for the sensational and the ephemeral, for appearances” (Mbembe 2004: 376).
We ask questions of appearance, surfaces and residues, the visible and invisible, the sonic, tactile, emotional and radioactive. We ask questions of what lives above the surface, what legacies can be resurfaced and revisited, and what logics govern the cities operations – it’s roads, it’s policies, it’s building codes, it’s highways, and the rivers of mine dust floating off the top of dunes scattered around the edges of the city, settling in to the fine tissue of our lungs. What reenactments of dark colonial and patriarchal legacies continue to govern our present interactions with and future imaginings of this city?
In a city weighed down by extreme inequality and infrastructural breakdown (Myambo 2019: 2), during a time of cataclysmic global environmental and health crises, how do we catalogue, capture and research a city’s lasts?
Johannesburg’s construction and collapse occurs simultaneously alongside projects of regeneration and renewal. In many spaces, the remains of old buildings stand beside temporary structures, “this psychic life inseparable from the metropolitan form: its design, its architectural topographies, its public graphics and surfaces” (Mbembe 2004: 375). Johannesburg’s old and new CBDs (developed in the 1930s and 1970s, respectively) attest to a crass modernist urge to expand new ground rather than adjust to the shifting stakes of city space.
Land-locked and without obvious natural resources to draw people to it, Johannesburg has relied on extraction, artifice and novelty. From its very beginnings, “Johannesburg was fashioned as the ultimate city of the nouveau riche capital, luminous and exciting, yet superficial and unforgiving … with no historically consistent aesthetic sensibility or genuine commitment to the cultural heritage of the past (Murray 2011: 9). Johannesburg is now an amalgamation of densely layered and built upon historical space, loosely attached to swathes of urban sprawl. It could even be described as a city that has nostalgia for the future rather than the past (Malcomess and Kreutzfeldt 2013: 18).
A central question that haunts this landscape is one of boundaries. What are this city’s physical boundaries and where are its edges? Ever more ingenuous security fences, wires and walls clearly outline who feels they have something that needs protecting and who does not. What of the rewritten CBD, the emergence of satellite financial districts in the north, like Sandton, and the superficial smart enclaves like that of the unrealised Modderfontein fantasy? What of the hollow ground underneath and the dusty atmosphere of constant construction and ruination above? Perhaps the most pertinent question this special edition of Ellipses asks is: In an “elusive” city that refuses definition, what can be pinned down as being specifically of this place, belonging enough to last? (Nuttall and Mbembe 2004).
The specters of Johannesburg are territorial: sticky and stubborn. In this special edition and with contributions that blur the lines of disciplinary practice; realised through code, static and moving images, 3D models, digital maps and interactive interfaces. All made with the intention of being accessed through screens and through them, we hope to engage with the specters that continuously create new bridges between past, present and future.
Territorial edges, dusty surfaces and sticky histories:
This city, like so many others, is threaded with encounters of lasts and losts. It is scattered with attempts to ensure its history remains, spread out across blue plaques and monuments. In the following collection of projects we see the messiness of official and unofficial histories play out. As the different projects take us along streets, under the earth, into forgotten places and future musings, there is a restlessness across them all. An undertone that says perhaps something refuses to be settled. This speaks to the haphazard assemblage of moving parts that make up Johannesburg. The projects here all, in different ways, pay close attention to the movement of people, plants, dust, data and the very visible and invisible workforces that make the city work. Overall, there is a sense of agitation and unease throughout.
Projects like those of Counterspace, Dorothee Kreutzfeldt and Brett Pyper are tied to the legacies of specific sites in the old CBD. We are drawn into potential versions and visions of Kwa Mai Mai market, a burnt and later demolished demolished building, and an historic cultural Jazz landmark. Where Pyper’s former Bantu Men’s Social Club is now an echoing heritage site, Kreutzfeldt reflects on the end days of The Bank of Lisbon through an unsettling video and sound piece. In close proximity to these sites geographically, Counterspace delves into the psychic and radioactive vibrations of a possible future Kwa Mai Mai market, where the toxic legacies of the mining industry mingle with the business savvy of Johannesburg’s vibrant informal market. Each of these projects render the aesthetics of the surface as hypnotic, and reach into the underworld of voices and messages: from the past or the future we don’t fully know.
Nkgopoleng Moloi draws us away from such histories and futures, with multiple (often conflicting) narratives, to pull us into her own vulnerable personal position walking the Braamfontein streets as a black womxn. These social and political architectures are all evocatively conjured with sound and movement.
Throughout this special edition, the senses are important. Nina Barnett and Jeremy Bolen make us aware of our skin and the surfaces of our devices, through a meditation on the ubiquitous dust that is, perhaps, the one intimate element that all inhabitants of Johannesburg must live with. In opening up the world of stones beneath the built and building city, Brigitta Stone-Johnson expands on the make-up of not only dust, but the deep time of continental shifts beneath the Braamfontein Ridge.
Riley Grant and William Shoki take disembodied experience into the realm of Marx and Zoom, questioning the always-on workforces of late capitalism. They pull into focus the labour practices behind the shiny surfaces and projections of Sandton, its digital interfaces and its hypnotising blurring of life and work. Lastly, the interruptions of DigiCleanse’s advertisements highlight the ubiquitousness of capitalism operating through the wellness industry, preying on the citizens of polluted and toxic cities who seek refuge in new age cleansing tools, both for mind and body.
Dusty Futures:
The events of the past year have shifted how we think about traces, effects, marks, and remains. On both a micro and macro scale, from the surface of our lungs and groceries to our travel routes and movements, Johannesburg life has changed. Through the sightings and soundings of aspects of the city presented here we hope to draw attention to the screens which display, frame, code, render and augment our interaction with the idea of the city and its people and their uncovering through this creative research.
Bibliography:
Comaroff, J. and Ong, K-S, 2013. Horror in Architecture. California: Novato
Malcomess, B. and Kreutzveldt, D. 2013. Not No Place: Johannesburg. Fragments of Spaces and Times. Johannesburg: Fanele.
Mbembe, A. 2004. “Aesthetics of Superfluity” in Public Culture 16(3). Duke University Press, pp 373–405
Murray, M. 2011. City of Extremes: The Spatial Politics of Johannesburg, Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Myambo, M. 2019. “Introduction: Jo’burg’s spatial dilemmas resonate globally” in Myambo, M. (ed), Reversing Urban Inequality in Johannesburg, London and New York: Routledge, pp 1-9.
Nuttall, S. and Mbembe. A. 2004. ‘Introduction: Afropolis’ in Nuttall, S. and Mbembe, A. (eds). Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis. Durham and London: Duke University Press. pp 1-36.
Peeren, E. 2014. The Spectral Metaphor : Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Smith, A. 1976. Johannesburg Firsts / Johannesburgse Eerstes, Johannesburg: Africana Museum.
Articles by
Brett Pyper
Articles by
Brigitta Stone-Johnson
Articles by
Dorothee Kreutzfeldt
Articles by
Jeremy Bolen
Articles by
Karin Tan
Articles by
Nina Barnett
Articles by
Nkgopoleng Moloi
Articles by
Riley Grant
Articles by
Sarah de Villiers
Articles by
Skye Quadling
Articles by
Sumayya Vally
Articles by
William Shoki
About
Andrea Hayes
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Brigitta Stone-Johnson
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Glen Mudau
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Laura Seal
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Paul Sika
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Andrei van Wyk
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Jarrett Erasmus
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Karin Tan
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Naadira Patel
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Ruth Sacks
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Skye Quadling
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Tara Weber
You Have A New Message
What of Johannesburg’s many deaths – and what if these could speak?
"Operating at a multitude of spatial layers, this project seeks to reveal unseen currents, seepages, damage and ecological alterations, emergent through Johannesburg’s mining landscapes."
Abstract
What of Johannesburg’s many deaths – and what if these could speak? What ghosts would rise, what would they say about Johannesburg’s continuities – its political, economic, and ecological dormancies and relapses? Operating at a multitude of spatial layers, this project seeks to reveal unseen currents, seepages, damage and ecological alterations, emergent through Johannesburg’s mining landscapes. The project conjures a speculative imaginary, which attempts to simultaneously narrate both past and future, where lasting consequences of mining activities in Johannesburg become intertwined in the supernatural and economic.
As similarly observed in mining remnants found to the west of the city, the imaginary begins with land-scale registers of ground-radioactivity in the Village Main mine area. Transfusing northward through groundwater, it reaches the roots of a nearby impepho plantation. Burning of the crop some weeks later produces a lasting augmented potency. The impepho’s effects exponentially flourish. A spiritual network metastasises – a frequency of millions of voices, messages, and invocations exponentially growing – accessible through a small portal in Jeppestown, Johannesburg. The project traces the speculative by-product economy of this spatial and temporal anomaly through Kholwa’s enterprise: a micro-radio station owner on the fringes of Kwa Mai Mai market. She has acquired the ability to tap into this supernatural communication network using a massive transistor radio that she has set up on the roof of her shop. Kholwa regularly holds programming of various selected contributions by people ‘on the other side’ of Johannesburg. There are several other network-channels like her in the area. Adverts of their offerings are pasted to every visible concrete bin, bollard or electrical distribution box in Johannesburg. The presence of Johannesburg and its connected deceased remains perpetual, continuous, lasting – a chaotic yet profound archive of trauma adjacent to everyday Jo’burg life.
Authors
Sarah de Villiers
This contribution to Johannesburg Lasts is led by Counterspace with Sarah de Villiers and Sumayya Vally.
Sarah de Villiers is an architect and designer based in Johannesburg. Her interests lie in spatio-economic practices, as well as elements which involve ‘otherness’ – particularly practices which embed themselves as unexpected systems of transaction, defying logics of surrounding scale, time, accessibilities, identity or broader policy environments. She had formerly contributed for six years at Counterspace as a co-director and architect, and holds a Masters in Architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand. She co-leads Unit 18 Hyperreal Prototypes, a postgraduate architecture course at the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, and preceding this has also taught in GSA Unit 14’s Rogue Economies for three years.
Counterspace is a Johannesburg-based collaborative architectural studio led by Sumayya Vally. Counterspace is inspired by its location – Johannesburg – and is committed to developing design expression particularly for the continent – through design research, publishing, pedagogy, built things, buildings and other forms of architecture. The studio is an exploration into evolving methods of collaborative practice and research, and it operates adjacent to the academy, with Sumayya leading Unit 12 at the Graduate School of Architecture, Johannesburg and collaborations on several research projects with the school and the City.
Counterspace also runs Counterparts with Sarah de Villiers, an interdisciplinary space, residency, dialogue and publishing platform, with an interest in tracing, seeding and carving collaborative ways of working.
Founded: in 2015 in Johannesburg, South Africa. www.counterspace-studio.com
Sumayya Vally
This contribution to Johannesburg Lasts is led by Counterspace with Sarah de Villiers and Sumayya Vally.
Sumayya Vally is the Principal of Counterspace. Sumayya’s design, research and pedagogical practice is committed to finding expression for hybrid identities and contested territories. She is in love with Johannesburg. It serves as her laboratory for finding speculative histories, futures, archaeologies, and design languages; with the intent to reveal the invisible. Her work is often forensic, and draws on performance, the supernatural, the wayward and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. Sumayya also leads Unit 12 at the Graduate School of Architecture where she has taught since 2015. She is presently based between Johannesburg and London as the lead designer for the Serpentine Pavilion 2020/20 Plus 1.
Counterspace is a Johannesburg-based collaborative architectural studio led by Sumayya Vally. Counterspace is inspired by its location – Johannesburg – and is committed to developing design expression particularly for the continent – through design research, publishing, pedagogy, built things, buildings and other forms of architecture. The studio is an exploration into evolving methods of collaborative practice and research, and it operates adjacent to the academy, with Sumayya leading Unit 12 at the Graduate School of Architecture, Johannesburg and collaborations on several research projects with the school and the City.
Counterspace also runs Counterparts with Sarah de Villiers, an interdisciplinary space, residency, dialogue and publishing platform, with an interest in tracing, seeding and carving collaborative ways of working.
Founded: in 2015 in Johannesburg, South Africa. [www.counterspace-studio.com](http://www.counterspace-studio.com)
Digital Editor
Glen Mudau
Peer Reviews
Peer Review
General Note:
[…] Ellipses Journal for Creative Research endeavours to make bare the process of research and development in creative and artistic research. This is for readers / viewers an opportunity and mechanism to see the types of academic critique engaged with creative research and to make visible the responses and development. The following peer review was produced blind and in process, the artist / author has subsequently been given the opportunity to respond and develop both the theoretical and interactive parts of the article before publication. What you see published has been edited post this review.
Peer Review 1: You Have a New Message (2020)
Reviewer: Anonymous
Which aspects of the submission are of interest / relevance and why?
This work operates at intersections: between spiritual and environmental, fiction and reality, faith and skepticism. The Mai-MaiMarket is the location of the intersections of the city of Johannesburg’s historical origins in gold mining, the consequent migrant labour system created by colonial and apartheid administrations to build this industry using cheap labour; and a current economic practice built around surviving the toxic and damaged environment of the city. Spiritual belief, and the practice of reaching out to the past, to people who have lived and died perhaps under difficult circumstances or before their time is something deeply entrenched in the city’s fabric. It is something that not many people here would deny, despite perhaps not ‘believing’ in it themselves. This work touches on aspects of spiritual belief that are beyond social, political or aesthetic theory and beyond the purview of academic research. It crafts a scenario, where the consequences of the past merge in the creation of a powerful new portal –not possible anywhere else precisely because of this convergence. It touches on continuing damage under present day capitalism: the continued destruction of the environment, and continued social injustices inflicted in the name of profit and the preservation of the market economy. But, it is through this convergence that something emancipatory emerges.
The work does not make clear from which point it began. But rather appears as a cacophony, putting forward a proposition that balances between fiction and reality. It provides snippets of text, and apparent quotations but does not name its sources. Its avoidance of a clear frame within which to interpret it, seems to me to be a way of acknowledging that the practices to which it refers are not fictional; they cannot be discounted nor can they be proven. The works appears to be deliberately vague, and I am left grasping for a conclusion that will never emerge. I am required to both ask answer my own questions that come from my experience with the work, not knowing if my interpretations are in line with its intention.
How are the artistic and research outcomes represented?
The work does not aim to take the form of a traditional narrative and therefore does not need a beginning, middle and end. It instead embraces the environment of the market –where a multitude of things are taking place simultaneously. The work is however also not clear in its message, and it is up to the viewer, through picking apart the experiences prepared for them, to search through the market for the root of the argument or message.
Though technically executed extremely well, it is not clear what the methodology or approach is. There are snippets of a narrative that emerge –perhaps in the same way that the messages from ‘the other side’ transmit through Kholwa’s radio. Snippets of the historical context behind Mai-Mai, as well as the reference to radioactive material from a nearby mine seeping into a crop of imphepho; both speak to the social and environmental damages caused by mining as a capitalist enterprise. Thework suggesting that this radioactive seepage had in fact opened a new, more powerful gateway to communicate with the afterlife would appear as staking a new claim to the distressing reality of the environmental and social damage brought about through mining as a colonial and apartheid era enterprise. The consequent migrant labour system which resulted in the separation of many families from their loved ones, is alluded to in the text snippets where someone ‘reaches out’ to a loved one left behind. But again, it is up to the viewer to feel their way through the material, never quite able to get a full grasp on the experience.
found the use of ‘the other side’ to refer to supernatural realms triggered an understanding that I as the viewer am also seeing the work from the other side of a computer screen. Seeing the market from the top, as though witnessing a digital computer game as gave me sense of being in another realm from the actual place, which I am quite literally. It is within this context that terms such as ‘you have a new message’ as well as the pop-up advertisements for Digi Cleanse Ferrous Based Super Stones serve asa reminder of my position, and location. All of my attempts to reach further into the work are made through pathways that allude to something more but in fact are not open. I found that it was a missed opportunity to include a phone number in the work. I called it out of curiosity and found simply a generic voicemail on the other side. I found it interesting to use the aesthetic of an advertising pop-up for Digi-Cleanse But again, digicleanse.co.za is ‘not found’ and give a similar feeling to calling the number and simply finding a voicemail. All of these are then exposed simply as aesthetic gestures that do not go much deeper than their face value.
How well does the design support the submission?
The illustration of the Mai-Mai market, and positioning of the viewer as looking down on the space is a really successful way of opening the space of the market to a limited screen size. The movement of the cursor takes on some semblance of how a person might move through a market, making various stops along the way knowing that leaving that particular spot will not mean that what happens there will stop without their presence.
The work does appear to be very data heavy,and did not initially work on the browser I was using. I had to change the browser and even thenfound that certain elements would pop up at the wrong moment –blocking other content from being engaged with. This added to my sense of vagueness about what I was meant to be seeing, feeling and interpreting of the work.
Are there any ethical or legal concerns?
No.
Conclusions and and pre publication revision:
I really appreciate the level of thought and care that has gone into this work, but my feeling is that it attempts to do too much without giving enough opportunity for the audience to immerse themselves in the proposition that is being made. While there is nothing wrong with multiple ideas and propositions emerging from a single work, I have found that perhaps in this instance it has meant that the level of engagement from myself as a viewer has ended up being more surface, as opposed to more thoughtful. I have found it to be frustrating that while the work expects that I must ‘explore’ the space of the market and find for myself the things that have been left for me to discover, that when I make attempts to look further –such as calling Kholwa’s phone number or going to digicleanse.co.za –that I am left with bare infrastructure, feeling as if I am seeing the loose ends that still need to be tied up. I would say that these unfinished elements present a huge opportunity to garner belief in the work, to allow the viewer to feel a sense of immersion and to clarify what has become a vague interpretation of a convergence of ideas.
I also think that perhaps a disclaimer about the type of browser required to view the work, and the type of internet connection required would avoid experiences such as mine –where I was left at first interpreting the malfunction of the work as the work itself. This disclaimer would however require that the work make the admission that it is only available to those with the requisite internet connection and browser.
Peer Review
Second reviewer declined to publish their review.