[…] 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
About
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
About
Tara Weber
Resistance To Ruin – Lithic Encounters
Spaces of geological and ecological enmeshment
"Have you ever noticed that the wild, or wilderness is always elsewhere?"
Abstract
Have you ever noticed that the wild, or wilderness is always elsewhere? Another place, primordial forest, wild savanna, desert, mountain range unspoiled by the human, thriving elsewhere? Yet even a cursory investigation of dirt and crack reveals a complex biome of insistent thriving below our feet, bringing wilderness into the current urban landscape. This project investigates sites of decay on and around the Witwatersrand Ridge as spaces of geological and ecological enmeshment, where stoney matter presents a lively subversive material agency, intertwining with modern stoney materials, and other nonhuman agents. In this project, the writing and visual essays attempt to give voice to the stoney matter of urban spaces which we have rendered as terra nullius by narrating open urban space as wasteland. Resistance and Ruin attempts to engage the online reader in a multi-sensory experience of walking, being and becoming enmeshed in the weather worlds of stone.
Authors
Brigitta Stone-Johnson
Brigitta Stone-Johnson is an artist and architect. She currently lectures at the Wits School of Architecture and Planning, while completing a Creative Practice PhD in Visual Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. The focus of her work revolves around themes concerning the Anthropocene, posthumanities, and new material theory. Her current work explores the intersectionality between urban landscapes and stoney materials.
Digital Editor
Andrea Hayes
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: Resistance To Ruin - Lithic Encounters (2020)
Reviewer: Anonymous
Which aspects of the submission are of interest / relevance and why?
'Resistance To Ruin' undoes the ways in which we often imagine a city: solid structures, imagined as carriers for human activity, decaying once such activity ceases to exist. Instead, this body of work interrogates the very notion of endings, lasts and lastings in ways that allow us to understand the city as being less obedient to our commands; in thinking through concepts such as ‘primal ooze’, this project understands cities in more of a liquid state than a rigid one. Through befriending rocks that lie across the Witwatersrand ridge, the artists ongoing practice of walking, thinking and making have resulted in a rich exchange between artist and city. The work layers an understanding of what a stone is onto impressions of cityness in convincing ways, placing the lively matter of stones at the center of the image of a central business district that houses ruin next to vital livelihood. Resulting from this connectivity, the work sinks the audience into an amalgamation of aboves and belows in ways that enable a questioning of the binary between disassembly and assembly. Stones are understood as odd kin, which have the potential of drawing us nearer to our more-than-just-human surrounds, and push us toward the potentials of understanding the human as being intrinsically integrated in earthly matter. The work enables one to understand the mutative potentials of the city in ways that disturb anthropocentric and temporal norms; the human is “composted” into the fabric of landscape and weathered into, making us think of ourselves in relation to deep time while simultaneously recognising that we are fragments of a future to come. It is the act of being present, over and over again, with the city and with the rocks along the ridge that enable the substance of this work to emerge -in this regard, the work is a convincing example of the values of practice led arts research.
How are the artistic and research outcomes represented?
This project is presented as a topographical map of the Witwatersrand ridge, the site where walks, thinking and encounters occurred. The viewer at first needs to take in the aesthetic qualities of a map that have multiple aesthetics of topography assembled together, and then begins to navigate and makes sense of it for themselves. Whilst immersed in this act, an image of the artist making sense of the ridge through the act of exploring the ridge came to mind. The map contains locations of importance, a clear route which indicates the ridge, and interactive keys that link with and lead to descriptors containing academic research and artistic work. All of these components are hidden within the map and the viewer can browse for as long as they want while remaining within the same frame of the map of the ridge. Again, the methodology of taking walks and gathering information is played with here in interesting ways.
The entire project is displayed through multiple entry points of engagement. This enables the viewer to choose the ones best suited to them which pushes artistic works up alongside theory and reading; the artworks talk to the theory and the theory to the artworks. Despite the high degree of technological innovation behind the project’s landing page, it still reads as quite analogue. It almost feels as if bringing analogue and digital together is an important aspect for the artist, as is the case with the highly rendered 3D scanned objects juxtaposed against the collage maps of taken photographs. I am now curious to understand the creative choices for the work more.
How well does the design support the submission?
The density of the written academic component that supports this work is lightened by the design of navigation for the viewer. I becomes important that you are never lost in the work -you always remain in the same frame atop the ridge. This results in a sense of grounding while you dip in and out of the information on the site. It is almost as if you too are roaming around the ridge vicariously through the information and affect present in the project. There is a stillness to the work, despite its many points of entry and bits of information. Time, somehow, feels like it has slowed down to a manageable pace where you can poke about and learn at a pace that suites you. This is set in contrast to a city often associated with a high pace and anxiety. Accessing the Johannesburg in this way does indeed highlight the possibilities of alternative temporalities that we all, in one way or another, become composted into.
Are there any ethical or legal concerns?
No.
Conclusions and and pre publication revision:
This project offers a strong rethinking of the city as seen from the perspective of all that it rests on. Once you have seen the city through the mattering of rocks it is hard to un see it. The project thinks through art as much as it does theory, which amounts in a strong argument for the potentials of artistic research into Johannesburg. Further, by considering rocks as odd kin, this project reframing of the city outside of human-centered norms and brings it into the lively conversations about worlding in more-than-human ways (along with oddkin).The work is strong and I recommend it gets accepted without changes.
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 2: Resistance To Ruin - Lithic Encounters (2020)
Reviewer: Anonymous
Which aspects of the submission are of interest / relevance and why?
The global view of the landing page is interesting as it offers a visually interesting image of what looks like a topographic map at first glance. The textual prompts and navigation create a sense of curiosity of what is presented and the form of presentation.
How are the artistic and research outcomes represented?
'Resistance to Ruin- Lithic Encounters' is a good topic, but I am left curious about how the artist's proposed contribution will improve research quality. This needs to be much clearer. They key question for me is, "how does this study /presentation contribute to a more robust artistic research, production and presentation. Although I would like to see a presentation oriented towards a more bold disruption of the presentation of the submission in the research notes collection.
How well does the design support the submission?
This presentation meets a reconceptualised conventional academic research project designed for the screen.
Are there any ethical or legal concerns?
No.
Conclusions and and pre publication revision:
On a technical level the textual prompts for navigation are too small. The artist could consider a different colour scheme, or different font size as one hovers over the prompts, this in turn might enable for a better reading of the textual navigational prompts.
The search button acts as a magnifying glass, but it does not offer any other information when one hovers over hot spots (textual prompts). The menu at the top next to the search icon, could be better rendered to offer a visual clue to what the headings could potentially represent if a user where to click on the prompts. If possible, the artist could consider dimming of the background or reducing the opacity levels when there is a piece of writing on screen so that the writing stands out more clearly from the background artwork and this could result in an easier way to close the text tabs.
Therefore, with some adjustments to text, navigation and more contextual background in some instances that go beyond bullet points.