00:00 Okay, so, so let's hold this conversation, say, within the frame of, of black interiors, which is, is something I'm trying to develop as an inquiry. And at its essence, what I'm trying to establish through this black interior is to ask how black and brown folk make home in South African suburbia.
And I can be specific here, I'm particularly referring to black and brown folk who have taken up certain political and aesthetic sensibilities or positions, in how they want to make home or lead family life, right?
And I'm quite, I'm still early in thinking about this idea. But I can say that this notion or this theme is meant as an expansive frame that say, looks at our relationship to the objects that we bring into our company. It looks at the relationship established between ourselves, and those (domestic and garden workers) who tend to those objects. And our domestic spaces, and still within the frames, also like considering items concealed in our cupboards, in our pantries and refrigerators? … broadly speaking, I'm trying to [00:02] figure out, how, a range of these things, help us make sense, of, of the nuances, that people like you and me, bring to a place like the suburb, you know. Why the suburb?
The burbs are a place that were essentially made to cultivate and house a particular kind of subject. And that subject was not us. But we are here, we occupy the space and more of us are to come, right? And so, I think it's worth paying attention to what happens when, I guess what happens to us and what we do to places that are suburbia.
03:00 And lastly, I wonder what we can draw in the relationship between black interiors and black interiority, the relationship between the object and the subject.
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04:00 But before we speak, about an object I'd like to set up a relationship between blackness and a particular set of design objects. And I want us to keep desire and aspiration somewhere in this matrix. Let's call it reflexive aspiration or critical desire, I'm not sure. But I'd like us to keep desire and aspiration in mind, as we talk about the relationship between blackness and these design objects.
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09:00 The act of making home, in my view, it runs tandem with the act of making community. You're making a home, you're kind of trying to find yourself in that community and belong to it in some way. Yet we've heard so many stories of the various policing tactics that black families go through in suburbs. And if, if one cannot find a sense of place out there, can we use one's yard, like, one's property? one's yard to construct a familiar universe? If one can't, if your home or your house or your being cannot be accommodated in the broader context (of neighbourliness or community), how can you then use the place that you can call yours to build a sense of belonging?
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10:00 And, and I've been thinking about the possibility of doing that through a series of small acts, like, so like these acts can, you can read them as vignettes, or you can call them rituals if you want. Essentially, they are small acts of stamping one's ontology onto space or suburbia, right? The small acts of trying to figure out what do we as black and brown folk bring to suburbia?
So if suburbia is understood to have a set of postures or codes or behaviours, what is it that we bring of ourselves when we refuse to assimilate and we decide to occupy? … I don't think we can take on suburban living as it's given, you know? And I'm also not talking about dramatic or radical acts of occupation. Rather, like, durational, reflexive acts of homing, as a term I took from Nolan Oswald Dennis, an artist.
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00:15 So, a few months after moving into, into my crib, I, I came across the original plans, of the house, dated 1973.
And I kind of sat with these, with these plans, just as I was going through the detail. you know, you have all the details of who made the plans and the clients, et cetera, et cetera, and you had the Durban Corporation stamp of approval. I wondered about the first owners of this house.
And I wondered what did these walls witness? If they could speak, what would they say? who was this architect? What kind of person was he? Most likely a male, at the time, right? What conversations took place in the living room? Say, between 1989 and 1993, which were these tumultuous years during South Africa's transition, what were, what were the nightly conversations over dinner?
And who are the people who live down there, you know, there in, in what is called the ‘servant's quarters’? Partly because I was, I was raised in one, you know, so one can't only think of the main house.
I mean, I'm kind of going off on a tangent here, but to come back to these house plans of 1973, I thought, my, my grandmother would have been 31. 31 years of age in the year that those plans were passed. And I wondered if she might have walked past this house on her way to work, you know, partly because the (her) last place of occupation is not too far from this house.
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00:18 Yeah, you know, one can think of the decades of, of built-up energies that I, walked into when I moved into that house. And how would I confront this?
So this sat with me, this sat with me for a few months. And it wasn't in any serious or heavy way, but it's something that kind of floats in, and comes in and out of my mind. And the question led me to think about how people in rural areas and specifically Msinga, Greytown which is where my, my family's from inhabit space.
I was recounting, how people make place of space. And two particular ways that, that, that I was able to, to, to conjure, to kind of bring up was the use of plant life and animal life, like these material objects that operates in, in say other like subtle, realms. And if we zone in on plant life and its role in the making of a particular kind, a particular kind of Zulu homestead, so like a herbalist, for example, would tell you that, that plants make, or they ground a home, if not complete it, yeah. But here, of course, I'm not talking about the 'Jardin' as conceptualized, say, by the French and botanical societies.
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So I'm not talking, when I, when I talk about, about the, the use of plant life, as a way to complete or ground a home. I'm not talking about the, the jardin or the, the garden as conceptualized and, uh, and theorized by the French or botanical societies.
00:21 Rather, I'm talking about, that which has been designated as indigenous plants. Or indigenous garden. And these plants that, that I'm interested in, that I'm speaking about, they, they serve different functions, you know, so some would speak to spiritual agents. They are able to kind of contend and cleanse and work with energies. Some speak to supernatural forces and natural elements like inclement weather, while some can reduce or diffuse catastrophes that we as humans or materials are susceptible to, you know.
And so in Zulu cosmology, you can't refer to these objects. You can't refer to them as ‘objects’. Right? They are understood as entities in and of themselves. And these plants, like some of them you, you can't point to, or you can't point at using your index finger, because that, you know, that objectifies them, or you cannot approach them in particular states, you know?
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00:27 So, yeah. So I, I'm finally talking about a very, very tangible, object here. And it's a blue chair. Yeah, so there's this blue chair that has been, that has been with us, in our family for at least, at least 32 years. Or for as long as I can hold a memory, this, this chair has, has been around. And so it's this blue plastic seat, backrest, uh, solid, with, uh, these thin black iron legs, uh, so it's like one of those old school, like, super sturdy and strong, um, products, you know?
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