Editorial

Issue […]

Special Issue: Johannesburg Lasts

Editorial: Last, Lasting, Lost 

Are We There Yet? 

In early 2019 the Johannesburg Lasts collective started mapping out a project that sought to think about and through things that have been lost, what lasts and what is lasting in the city where we all live and work. 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. In a city weighed down by extreme inequality and infrastructural breakdown, during a time of cataclysmic global environmental and health crises, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to think in terms of how this city ends?     

As our research and conversations developed, so did the directions of our questions. What are Johannesburg’s spectres and whom do they haunt? What spectres of late capitalism inhabit a former boomtown hastily erected on top of the rich seam of gold that lay beneath it? How do legacies from Johannesburg’s past mingle with its future and how do they not? The city is in a constant state of construction and collapse. In many spaces, the remains of old buildings stand beside temporary structures. 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. Ever more ingenuous security fences, wires and walls clearly outline who feels they have something that needs protecting and who does not. 

The 20th century saw the world’s largest artificial forest planted over Highveld grasslands. As a land-locked city with no obvious natural resources to draw people to it, it has relied on extraction, artifice and novelty. 

Johannesburg is now an amalgamation of densely layered historical space loosely attached to swathes of urban sprawl. A central question that keeps coming up is that of boundaries. What are this city’s physical boundaries and where are its edges? While the symbolic value of the old CBD is a constant, what about Ekurhuleni, Randburg and satellite towns like Springs? 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 amorphous city that refuses definition, what can be pinned down as being specifically of this place, belonging enough to last. 

Territorial edges, dusty surfaces and sticky histories:

Creative practice and research are threaded through with encounters of lasts and of losts. 

This city, like so many others, shares many of these same qualities, and is scattered with attempts to ensure its history remains, spread out across blue plaques, and on street corners. In the following collection of projects we see this messiness play out. As the different projects take us along streets, under the earth, into forgotten places and future scenarios, there is a restlessness across them all. 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 and data through this cityscape. Overall, there is a sense of agitation and nervous energy 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 of Kwa Mai Mai market, a burnt exploded building in the old CBD and a historic cultural 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. In close proximity to these sites geographically, yet far apart on all other aspects, Counterspace delves into the psychic space 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. 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 Johannesburgers 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. They make us consider the labour practices behind the shiny surfaces and projections of Sandton and its digital interfaces. Lastly, the interruptions of Digi-Cleanses ads highlights 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 this special issue we also reflect on the ways in which we don’t touch and interact with material and sensory Johannesburg the way we used to. We don’t party the way we used to, we don’t rub up against each other at art openings and after parties, at conferences and lectures, book launches and dinners. The sightings and soundings of aspects of the city presented here also hope to draw attention to the screens which display, frame and affect our interaction with the idea of the city and its people.

As we consider what has lasted and will be lost of Johannesburg’s past and future, we can’t help but consider how Johannesburg will reflect this moment of drastic change and upheaval. Routines, livelihoods and entire patterns of movement have been altered forever. 

As the city impatiently demands to move forward, regardless of who and what gets left behind, we realise that we have, in fact, already lived through one of Johannesburg’s lasts.