An opening of restricted and restrictive hardcopy formats and archives
Challenging and expanding traditional/colonial conceptions of academic validation
African, diasporic and south led knowledge production through Creative Research
Decolonising creative research
Online and interactive journal for creative research from the Global South
Ellipses is an experiment in form, supporting multi and cross-disciplinary work
About
About us
ISSN: 2788-841X Publisher: Wits School of the Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, 1 Jan Smuts Avenue, Braamfontein, Johannesburg, South Africa Senior Editor: Dr. Zen Marie
Framing Statement & Objectives of […]
[…] denotes a grammatical troubling, an opening or caesura in the linear flow of a sentence, marking intentional omission, absent content. Alternatively, the application of ellipses as aposiopesis signals a certain trailing off, a sentence ending or not ending in the suspension of unresolved thought… It resists pronunciation or being easily saved as a file or turned into a URL. For these deviant, troubling and open-ended features, […] – applied without prefix or suffix – works as a conceptual space or marker hospitable to the contingent, collaborative and multi/cross-disciplinary work of creative research in the global south supported by this digital and online journal.
What discourses, paradigms, tropes or structures shape or censor different kinds of knowledge production, and how can alternative modes of meaning-making imagine and make possible a more just and liveable world? […] asks these questions from an explicitly Global South perspective – rooted in the local, open to the diasporic and informed by a range of practices, processes and tactics that deviate from conventional, analytical and colonial modes of knowledge production. […] is a collaborative platform, drawing editors and contributors into creative dialogue with digital arts practitioners, and encouraging interactive and digitally published scholarship that extends beyond the rarefied space of the academy. It is an experiment with form, prioritising sonic, visual, oral, performative, visceral, embodied, spatial and temporal modalities of practice, invested in questions of why, how and for whom knowledge is produced, and by what criteria deemed ‘valid’. […] supports a growing community of scholars, artists, curators, creative practitioners and collectives, thinking and working in and from the Global South. In each issue […] is imagined as another opportunity to rethink the ways in which creative research and the ‘aesthetic’ is bound to the machinations of dominant knowledge economies, and to creatively explore more enabling, and culturally responsive modes of meaning-making.
[…] was collectively founded in 2015 at the Wits School of Arts as a multi/cross-disciplinary, digital, online and interactive journal for creative research, by collective responsive to the urgent political demand for the decolonisation of knowledge and the university mobilised by #rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall. The journal is supported by the Wits School of Art, steered by a local, regional and international appointed Editorial Board. […] has published three issues to date, and one special edition. […] publishes biennially, with issue IV scheduled release in 2023.
The first issue of […] is marked by a process both pragmatic and speculative and is product of grant money from WITS University’s SPARC fund, and as such was designed to function as an accredited journal located within the WITS School of Arts (WSOA). The second issue of […] and four that follow were supported by Art Research Africa, developing Creative and Artistic Research within the Wits School of Arts and supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. […] is currently funded by the WITS School of Arts Research Committee.
Aims of […]
[…] is a platform for Creative Research from the Global South, with an emphasis on African and diasporic practices of knowledge production.
For […] Creative Research encompasses artistic research, practice-led research and research as creative practice, all of which are acknowledged as submissible forms of research and valid methodologies of knowledge formation.
[…] aims to reflect Global South approaches to critical artistic research as support for decolonial practices. Inviting disenfranchised and new methodologies of knowledge production to both challenge and expand traditional/colonial conceptions of academic research and validity in academic research.
[…] seeks to trouble the established knowledge economy of the university and academia, and the ways in which ’research’ is produced, governed and circulated (or withheld), by presenting (and re-centering) decolonial creative research as open-access content on an interactive online platform.
[…] is an experiment in form, supporting multi and cross-disciplinary work in which conventional written research practices are productively intertwined with new media, audio, visual and interactive forms of production and publication in the digital.
[…] embraces Creative Research work across a broad range of disciplines, pushing the digital humanities into productive dialogue with the visual and performing arts, music, sociology, anthropology, African Literature, architecture and other fields of cultural and creative study.
[…] aims to make transparent the processes and critical developments involved in its approach to, and support of, creative research work, reflecting the journal’s stated commitment to decolonising knowledge and research methodologies.
[…] holds digital production and dissemination within the context of global souths, as an opening of restricted and restrictive hardcopy formats and archives, and an opening of methods and channels in its aim to decolonise creative research and knowledge production.
Submissions
Submissions to […]
All submissions must meet the following criteria in meeting the aims of […]
Criteria for Submissions
Reflect a critical and substantial response to the thematic or critical knowledge concern of the Issue to which the submission is being made.
Fit the journal’s aims towards the publication of creative research (see Journal’s aims).
Reflect a critical and substantial response to the subjects and/or actions of the Global South.
Present in or translate through multimedia and /or the online digital format of the Journal.
The contribution should not be previously published online or in a mutli-media / interactive form. If previously published (this includes exhibited or performed) in a different form, reference to prior publication, formats and justifications for revisited publication must be supplied with the initial submission.
Should not have any ethical or legal concerns.
Contributes to balanced representation.
Guidelines for Submission
Submissions are received only through the submission portal (see issue calls) and against a deadline following a call for submissions to specific issues.
Submissions should follow the criteria for submissions (above) and meet these guidelines:
Provide an indication on whether the creative research submission can be presented in one of the following online and interactive formats; detailing which format is may be best suited to the research in question, and why (use the form to indicate):
Media enhanced by text; such interactive essays or digital conversation / interviews (should include media formats such as audio, visual or other media contributions).
Multi-hyperlinked media and /or hyperlinked text; linking to own or external media and sites and may include multiple media formats.
Interactive Map (spatial), with media and/ or text linked to a spatially mapped location or sites.
If you are a digital artist or collaborating with a digital artist and are proposing a digital submission to be developed by yourself or a collaborator without assistance (apart from hosting) from the Ellipses editorial team.
A written statement or abstract of 500 words (max) of the proposed creative research submission; indicating aims, critical research position and response to the thematic concern of the issue submitted to.
A written description of 500 words (max) of the media and / or digital contribution of the proposed creative research submission. Media contributions may vary and should include media formats suited to the research in question. The description may include references to attached samples or links (use the form to attach and add links).
A biography and publication history of the author and any collaborating authors.
Issue editors may add further guidelines related to specific issues.
Accepted submissions will be subject to a publication agreement, which includes allowances for open access publication, use and distribution rights and criteria by the journal and form based restrictions to the republication of the work.
Peer Review
Peer Review & Critical Knowledge Engagement in […]
Ellipses Peer Review and Knowlege Engagement Process
Peer Review Process
Submission, shortlisting and peer reviews are conducted online in a protected and archived submission system. Selection and review follow this process:
Editorial Selection and Review: an initial shortlisting of submissions is conducted by the Issue Editor/s. This shortlisting is aimed at identifying:
Submissions that respond to the open call and align with the thematic or critical knowledge concern the issue in question.
Assuring balanced representation in the submissions being put forward for peer review.
Editorial Board & Double Blind Peer Review is conducted against shortlisted submissions, this is done by both a panel of elected peer reviewers and selected members of the Editorial Board. Reviewers assess the following:
Submissions meet the submission criteria of the issue and Journal and align with the aims of the Journal (see above), which will include:
The extent to which the submission engages critically and creatively with questions of knowledge production.
The extent to which the submission acts as a meaningful contribution to knowledge making on/in creative decolonial research related to the Global South.
Has no legal or ethical concerns.
Review outcomes will be sent directly to authors by the Editor in Chief and Issue Editors as one of the following outcomes and with instructions for next steps:
Accepted for publication as proposed in the submission.
Request a revision on aspects of the submission before acceptance.
Rejected for publication (to be accompanied with reasons for the rejection).
Critical Engagement & Knowledge Transparency
[…] Ellipses Journal for Creative Research is committed to opening up and making transparent the processes of criticality and knowledge development for Creative Research in the Global South. In an act towards radicalising the methods of generation, review, development and publication, our issues are subject to any of the following:
Open to Editorial Teams for Issues: we understand that knowledge and critical engagement in the Global South more often than not takes place within communities of practice rather than with individuals. We therefore encourage the election of editors and editorial teams from collectives, partnerships and knowledge collectives.
Post Review Publication: in following the historical trajectory of Ellipses and its founding in the collective production of its first issue aimed at knowledge production transparency – we ask for post and some pre-publication reviews to be published alongside published research submissions.
Community Knowledge Engagements: following publication Ellipses aims to bring the published research into an engagement with a community of practice in Creative Research, in the global south and its diaspora. This is done by working with editors and editorial teams to develop knowledge events or actions that aim to expand visibility and further engagement with the themes and methodologies of the issue and research in question.
[…] Reviewers
Amie Soudien
Annie Paul
Athena Mazarakis
Athi Mongezeleli Joja
Bettina Malcomess
Carine Zaayman
Cathérine Hug
Christo Doherty
Clare Loveday
Danai Mupotsa
Diana Ibanez Lopez
Edda Sickinger
Ernst van der Wal
Etienne Viviers
Fabian Saptouw
Francis Burger
George E. Lewis
George Mahashe
Gwen Miller
James Macdonald
Janine Allen-Spies
Joanna Grabski
Joshua Reno
Juanita Praeg
Kurt Campbell
Lionel Manga
Louise Hall
Maria Ines Rodriguez
Michelle Stewart
Mika Conradie
Mokale Koapeng
Naadira Patel
Natalia Esling
Nathanie Luneburg
Nishlyn Ramanna
Raél Jero Salley
Sarah de Villiers
Thandi Loewenson
Theo Herbst
Ulrich Süsse
Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye
Vulindlela Nyoni
Zoé Samudzi
Editorial Board
Editorial Board
[…] Ellipses Journal of Creative Research is managed by an Editor in Chief Zen Marie.
The Editor in Chief is supported by an Editorial Board made up of Wits School of Arts, non Wits affiliated Regional members and non Wits affiliated International members. Each issue is edited by an Issue Editor elected by the Editorial Board.
WITS School of the Arts Board
Prof. Rene Smith Head of the Wits School of the Arts, replacing Prof. Brett Pyper as outgoing Head of the School.
Prof. Christo Doherty is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the Wits School of Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is also director of the Arts Research Africa project in the School and chair of the School’s Research Committee.
Dr. Bettina Malcomess is a writer, academic and artist. Her work exists in a diverse set of media and forms, ranging from long duration performance, to the staging of shorter interventions, and installation projects to the book as site of practice. She produces performances under the name Anne Historical. Malcomess’ writing traverses art, film, history, urbanism, as well as fiction. She co-authored the book Not No Place. Johannesburg, Fragments of Spaces and Times (Jacana, 2013). She was the visual editor of the book Routes and Rites to the City: Mobility, Diversity and Religious Space in Johannesburg (Palgrave, 2017). She has recently formed an interdisciplinary project called the joining room, a non|space for intermedial intimacies. Historical/Malcomess’ work has shown at various national and international exhibitions and spaces. She is a lecturer in Visual Arts at Wits School of Arts and is currently doing a PhD in Film Studies at Kings College, London.
Dr. Zen Marie is the founder and Senior Editor of the […] Ellipses Journal (2015) – Marie is an artist who works in a variety of media. Core to his practice is a concern with how meaning is formed through different media, spaces and processes. While working from a position that begins with photography and film making he also works in performance, sculpture, graphic processes and writing. His areas of focus have included international sport, identity, nationalism, and public infrastructure. The binding link between these diverse areas has always been the relationship between desire, power, agency and their subversion. Marie currently lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he is a Lecturer in Fine Art art at the WITS School of Art. He is also a PhD candidate at WITS, with a focus on areas of art and theory in relation to what he calls situated aesthetic practice.
Regional Board Members
Molemo Moiloa lives and works in Johannesburg, and has worked in various capacities at the intersection of creative practice and community organizing. She currently works on notions of ungovernability, social infrastructures of cultural organizing, and relationships to nature. She is one half of the artist collaborative MADEYOULOOK, who explore everyday popular imaginaries and their modalities for knowledge production. She currently leads research at Andani.Africa, with a focus on open restitution debates and is one of the inaugural AfricaNoFilter Fellows 2020/2021 for this subject. MADEYOULOOK was nominated for the Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics 2016/17 at the New School, New York. Molemo was also a Chevening Clore Fellow 2016/17, and winner of a Vita Basadi Award for 2017.
Prof. Vulindlela Nyoni is Head of the Head of Department (Visual Arts), Nelson Mandela University. Nyoni was born in Chilimanzi, Zimbabwe in 1976 and attained a Bachelor of Arts in the Fine Arts from the then University of Natal in 1998 and a Masters in fine Arts from the now University of KwaZulu-Natal in 2006. His Masters thesis was entitled “Representations of ‘other’ in selected South African artworks: Re-membering the black male body”. Prior to moving to Port Elizabeth, Nyoni was the Academic Coordinator of the Centre for Visual Art, University of KwaZulu-Natal (Pietermaritzburg), and Senior Lecturer in printmaking at Stellenbosch University. Apart from being a practicing artist, Nyoni also lectures in Printmaking at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. His main interests lie in Diaspora studies, Gender and Sexuality; and the politics of representation and self-representation through print media. He continues to make his own work at any opportunity he has.
Dr. Zoé Samudzi is a writer whose work has appeared in The New Inquiry, Verso, The New Republic, Daily Beast, Art in America, Hyperallergic, ROAR Magazine, Teen Vogue, Arts.Black, and other outlets. She is a contributing writer at Jewish Currents. She is also a photographer and was an archivist with MATATU Nomadic Cinema. Along with William C. Anderson, she is the co-author of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Our Liberation (AK Press). She is currently a fellow with Political Research Associates. She is represented by Alison Lewis at the Zoë Pagnamenta Agency.
International Board Members
Prof Raél Jero Salley is an artist, professor, speaker & writer. Salley is the Founding Director of The Space for Creative Black Imagination, the Chair of the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Visiting Faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and former faculty at the University of Cape Town in South Africa (UCT). Raél (rah-El) is also a martial arts instructor, a yoga instructor, a plant lover, and Mazie’s grandson. Find more at www.raelsalley.studio.
Reece Auguste is Assistant Professor, University of Boulder in Colorado (USA). He is a documentary filmmaker and scholar whose research focuses on national cinemas, transnational screen cultures and documentary media practices. He was a co-founder of the seminal Black Audio Film Collective, which was at the forefront of radical filmmaking in ‘80s and ‘90s Britain. With BAFC, Auguste wrote and directed the award winning Twilight City and Mysteries of July. His essays on screen aesthetics and documentary practices have appeared in Framework, Cineaction, Undercut, Journal of Media Practice, The British Avant-Garde Film 1926-1995, Questions of Third Cinema, Dark Eros, The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Media and The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective. He is the recipient of the Grand Prize at Melbourne International Film Festival; Josef Von Sternberg Award, for most original film of the Mannheim International Film Festival, Golden Hugo Award for best Documentary at the Chicago International Film Festival, and the International Documentary Association.
George Shire is a London based, Zimbabwean cultural theorist, self styled Bandungist and historian of ideas who has been engaged with questions of knowledge from the global south, with visual culture and decolonisation, and with tracking histories of art education in Southern Africa. His intellectual interests are moored inside the cultural studies tradition set out by Stuart Hall. His research interests are primarily in the intersections of artistic and political practice; working at the intersection of black studies, the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, and the material and technical politics of the Indian ocean. He is a member of the international editorial boards of the British New Left Journal “Soundings” and the peer reviewed journal DarkMatter. He previously taught at the Richmond Upon Thames College, London; the Open University; Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design, University of the Arts London; and Birkbeck College, University of London. He is a DJ, Jazz Saxophone player and I-Phone Photographer.
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Published by The Wits School of the Arts University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
Editorial Written by Issue Iv Editors: Huda tayob and catalina Mejía moreno
Architectures of the South questions what is at stake for architecture and spatial practice to contend with the south as an embodied site of knowledge and power [1]. To critically and ethically engage with the south as temporal, geographic and epistemic terrain requires questioning practices, methodologies, forms of engagement and means of representations. It also necessitates a constant awareness of the relational and ‘radical instability of the meaning, location and history’ [2] of the south as a term and location. Framed by the long-standing histories and practices of violence witnessed by the southern geographies of our home countries - Colombia and South Africa - we invited contributors to respond to colonial and neo-colonial violences alongside practices of care and repair. In this issue, we ask how a return to thinking with bruising, wounding, remembering, returning and repairing, might enable a drawing out of relational, deep and long histories of displacement, racialised dispossession and extractive violences; while at the same time foregrounding the necessity of work that centres reparative practices as a move to imagining liveable lives.
Inviting contributions on Architectures to a journal of creative research is a provocation to move beyond our own disciplinary structures, and to maintain an insistence on the value of creative practices despite enduring violence. In many ways, this builds on concerns raised in earlier Ellipses [...] journal issues around embodied, southern and situated creative research. We understand architecture, here, as deeply embedded within forms of coloniality and racial capitalism, in a context where indigenous and colonised populations are rendered as ‘outside history’ [3]. As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui reminds us in the context of the Americas, while modernity is associated with extractive violence, it is also an arena of resistance, conflict and the development of new projects for other ways of living [4]. In this issue, architecture is material and metaphor, sited and speculative, tangible and intangible, entangled with coloniality while containing the seeds for imagining alternative worlds.
The collection of nine creative projects made in response to the open call draw in a wide range of geographies, methods and practices around key concerns. Kitchen Stories by Refiloe Lepere and Nkululeko Selulu is an audio-visual offering which draws out “sigh, sound, song and silence” as an attention to the gestural sounds of Black female labour and hidden trauma and anxieties in Johannesburg across a series of kitchen sites. Disremembered Ruptures/ Rupturas Desmembradas by Margarida Waco, is similarly attuned to silenced histories, people and places, and adopts creative writing as a means to contend with the “spatial toolboxes of violence and trauma” and build an “errant archive” of guerilla women’s experiences in the Angolan civil war. Fleshworks: ‘Consent not to be a single being’ by Camilla Rondot and Antonio di Campli, takes us to Borgo Mezzanone in southern Italy, a site of opacity inhabited by African migrant labourers. In these works, film and narrative are the means to surface the spatial significance of overlooked sites and territories.
Narrative and erased stories about racialised tidal pools in the Cape Peninsula resurface in Tidal Pools as Containers of Care by Aaniyah Martin, who shares collectively woven hydro-rugs from plastic waste gathered during ocean clean-ups as a method and practice of actively cleaning and caring for human and more than human life. With Restaging Temporalities: Monsoon Stories from the Kampung, River and Tower by dll. Collective, Jessica Hindradjaja and Hamzah Al Asadulloh, we are plunged into the temporalities of everyday lives and recurrent violence of flooding where story-telling is a means to explore the spatial power dynamics which shape tangible realities across Jakarta. Staying with watery methods, in Ruins of the South Atlantic: Espírito Santo, Brazil by Gabriela Leandro Pereira, Mariana Leandro Pereira we journey through four temporal and spatial acts, overlaid family histories, urban contestations, sustained joy and unimaginable oceanic lives. They remind us that the violence which inaugurates the afro-atlantic diaspora, is always met with gestures of rebuilding life as “de-capture, disobedience and refusal.” In these works, water is a witness and medium, of overlapping violence, joy and care.
In further practices of returning to colonial and state archives, Arabsat-1A by Jumanah Abbas, speaks to the celestial body of the satellite as site of “hope and desire for collective unity” and of the “deterritorialisation of earth boundaries”, and yet as entangled with histories of colonialism, racial violence, and uncertain precarity. Revisiting The Mabarebare Archive As Web Platform by George Tebogo Mahashe is a reflection on the possibilities of building a digital archive around the quest for the mythical Modjadji, famed as the Rain Queen of Balobedu. Mineral Maladies: Anatomical Pathologies of the Black Lithosphere by Kaelo Molefe excavates Johannesburg’s mining history, and the pathologies that entangle biological bodies of racialised labourers and environmental and geological degradation. These works offer insights into excavations and alternative engagements with inherited repositories of knowledge that actively point to the possibilities of archival futures.
This issue of Ellipses [...] is part of a series of projects from the past three years, which span from private and public conversations, conference panels, an online residency with Tropical Papers, and a Quiet Conversation series [5]. We have included four excerpts of Quiet Conversations to this Issue of Ellipses [...] to further the questioning of Architecture of the South that can be read through this Issue. These conversations supplement and extend questions asked within this issue, and speak to additional ways of sharing and building collective methodologies for creative research. The four excerpts of ‘quiet conversations’ present intimate conversation in which invited artists, architects, researchers and thinkers, Jumoke Sanwo, Felipe Arturo, Marcelo Ferraz, and Zara Julius share their work as a means to think through relational histories and practices.
Collectively, in this issue, the violence of bruising and wounding of people, homes, land, oceans, rivers, skies and stories is countered by deliberate and caring acts of returning and remembering. In different ways, the authors offer insights from their particular southern locations, actively surfacing overlooked stories, histories, sites and geographies [6]. Doing so, as Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us in her fictional short story ‘Sur’, opens a myriad of site-specific ways of engaging and responding collectively to the multiple worlds we inhabit [7]. If representations of the south have historically centred violence, creative methods are adopted here as a means to work against a repetition of this violence, to centre repair, and to think and work beyond the loss and absence of worlds. As Françoise Vergès reminds us, ‘we need to dare to dream of a peaceful life. Peaceful, here, does not mean pacification or appeasing, but a politics and a practice of solidarity, love and self-defense.’ [8] The works gathered and shared in this issue speak to material, visual, sonic and textual practices across southern territories. They draw together entangled relationships of bodies, the built environment and wider ecologies, alongside sites, spaces and acts of solidarity and care. They question how we might collectively share and build methodologies as part of a larger ethical mandate for opening up other ways of knowing and doing [9]. This is a gathering of voices which points towards coordinates, positions and approaches to hold and work through entangled, difficult, but also affective worlds full of possibility.
Footnotes: 1. Ananya Roy, 2014. ‘Worlding the South: Toward a post-colonial Urban Theory’ in The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South (ed. Susan Parnell and Sophie Oldfield) London: Routledge. 2. Ibid, p.16 3. Brennar Bhandar, 2018. Colonial Lives of Property. Durham: Duke University Press. 4. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, 2020. Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: on decolonising practices and discourses. Cambridge: Polity Press. 5. This conversation series is supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and The Space for Creative Black Imagination. It was developed in conversation with Raél Jero Salley at The Space for Creative Black Imagination, based at MICA in Baltimore, and James MacDonald. 6. Desiree Lewis and Gabeba Baderoon (eds.) 2021. Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. 7. Ursula K. Le Guin (1982) ‘Sur.’ The New Yorker, pp.38-39. 8. Françoise Vergès, 2022. A Feminist Theory of Violence, London: Pluto Press, p. 102. 9. Denise Ferreira da Silva, 2014. ‘Toward a Black Feminist Poethics’ States of Black Studies, 44 (2): 81 - 97. *The June 2022 author’s writing workshop was organised with support from the University of Manchester, SEED Research Recovery Fund.
Tamara is a writer, academic and digital artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her special interests involve interactive media and experimental storytelling platforms. She holds a BA in Digital Arts from the Wits Digital Arts Department, where she is currently completing a master’s degree that investigates interactive narrative design in the nonfictional space. She also hopes to visit Antarctica someday.
Catalina Mejía Moreno is Senior Lecturer in Climate Studies at the Spatial Practices Programme in Central Saint Martins, UAL in London where she curates an interdisciplinary research and exchange platform that rethinks spatial practices and pedagogies through the lens of the biodiversity and climate crisis. She holds a BA in Architecture from Universidad de los Andes, Colombia; an MA in Architectural History from the Bartlett School of Architecture, and a PhD in Architectural Theory and Criticism from Newcastle University. She has been Andrew W. Mellon research Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Grant recipient from the Getty Research Institute and the DAAD.
Huda Tayob
About Huda Tayob
Huda Tayob is a South African architect and architectural historian. She is a lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester, and has previously taught at the University of Cape Town, University of Johannesburg and the Bartlett School of Architecture. She is a Mellon Fellow on the Canadian Centre for Architecture project, Centring Africa (2019 - 2022). Her research focuses on minor, migrant and subaltern architectures, centred on the African continent. She is co-curator of the open access curriculum Racespacearchitecture.org, and lead co-curator of the digital exhibition, Archive of Forgetfulness.
This research forms part of a broader project to understand and co-create a pedagogy of care for our marine environment through sharing stories about brown and black experiences of the ocean and forms of care.
Abstract
This article explores tidal pools as safe spaces for humans, and it specifically focuses on the experiences of brown and black humans who were excluded from certain areas due to the South African Apartheid legacy and the Group Areas Act (GAA) of 1962. Most brown and black people have an unusual relationship with water and the ocean because of our South African history and the Group Areas Act that prevented access to certain places. This unusual relationship continues to filter into our lives today, despite democracy and the new South Africa. For humans that feel insecure about their swimming ability, tidal pools are a safe haven, additionally, they act as a nurturing ground for juvenile plants and animals. Tidal pools are therefore safe spaces for humans and more-than-humans.
In South Africa, privilege and structural economic benefit were determined largely by pigmentation (Bam and Muthien 2021). In other words, privilege was the ability of white people to have the capital and access to experience places and spaces in ways that brown and black people could not. They have had access to the most pristine and safest beaches and the capital to purchase coastal property and equipment to enjoy the ocean in different ways. There is a lag effect and a sense of entitlement that comes with privilege, even though Apartheid laws no longer exist. This privilege is what makes caring political.
I inquire through place-based conversations with four individuals at four tidal pools - what other care practices exist that have been overlooked because of our South African Apartheid legacy which continues to live on today? Duncan Johnson is intra-viewed at Dalebrook pool, Joanne Peers at St James and Traci Kwaai at Kalk bay pool. Sarah Martin was intra-viewed in relation to her experience with Harmony Park tidal pool (due to heavy rain this was the only intra-view that didn’t take place at the tidal pool). The term intra-view as opposed to interview encompasses a generative exchange rather than extraction of information through an open-ended conversation and is linked to Karen Barad’s intra-action. Furthermore, facilitating the intra-view at the tidal pools or close to the ocean affects the way in which the conversation unfolds, and that certain kinds of materiality do not merely refer to passive entities but must be understood as matter that matters (Petersen 2014).
Authors
Aaniyah Martin
Aaniyah Martin
Aaniyah focuses on work that connects people and nature. She has 15 years of experience in the conservation sector with a strong emphasis on finding the balance between what is good for the Earth and good for the people. Aaniyah is the founder and director of The Beach Co-op a non-profit organisation, registered in 2017, that aims to build communities that care for our marine environment. She has joined the Homeward Bound team to co-facilitate the science stream that brings together STEMM women from around the world for a yearlong online course focusing on the sustainability of our planet. Aaniyah is a founding fellow for the Women for the Environment in Africa leadership programme in which she participated in 2021. She now forms part of the delivery team focusing on Understanding and Adapting the program to ensure that it remains relevant to the participants. She is a registered PhD student at the Environmental Learning Research Centre, Rhodes University and her research focuses on co-creating a pedagogy of care for the marine environment.
Digital Editor
Tamara Tesoriero
Tamara Tesoriero
Tamara is a writer, academic and digital artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her special interests involve interactive media and experimental storytelling platforms. She holds a BA in Digital Arts from the Wits Digital Arts Department, where she is currently completing a master’s degree that investigates interactive narrative design in the nonfictional space. She also hopes to visit Antarctica someday.
Tidal Pools as Containers of Care, False Bay South Africa
Aaniyah drifting in Dalebrook tidal pool (credit: Leonie Joubert 2022).
This research forms part of a broader project to understand and co-create a pedagogy of care for our marine environment through sharing stories about brown and black experiences of the ocean and forms of care. These four pools are amongst nine that have been built along the False Bay coastline, and I will be walking and swimming along the coastline and passing all of them as part of my research journey.
The co-creation of the hydro-rug plays a crucial role in unlocking and revealing stories about our relationship with the ocean. As we mend and share our stories they are woven into the hydro-rug, which becomes the physical object of our stories. Whilst in conversation we were stitching, mending and sewing a hydro-rug which is made from plastic litter that we collected from our South African beaches, thule and off-cut/waste material and thread. The hydro-rug becomes the embodied, material aesthetic of the stories that are shared and that formulate our understanding of caring for our marine environment. These methods of listening, sharing stories, stitching and mending foreground the need to know and do differently and otherwise (Tachine & Nicolazzo 2022), when we produce and understand relevant knowledge about the colonial past and its ongoing presence (Bam and Muthien 2021).
The process of mending the hydro rug whilst sharing stories about the oceans and about feelings of belonging to places that were previously demarcated for white people only provides a sense of healing. We were positioned next to the pool or with a view of the ocean. I would lay out a cloth demarcating a space for us to meet, with a flask of tea and all the materials we needed to create the hydro-rug: the sewing box, waste material and litter. They would choose which waste material, litter, and thread they wanted to use and we would be in conversation throughout the making process.
Sarah explained how the process was like going down memory lane. The tulle material colours she had chosen reminded her of the ocean and the stitching had a balming effect on her, much like the waves do. It reminded her of walking along the ocean and singing her hymns and prayers. Traci, Joanne and Duncan expressed how creating something of beauty from castaway bits felt like a healing process for themselves as well as the ocean.
Sarah’s hydro-rug adrift at Harmony Park tidal pool.
Tidal Pools and Humans
Harmony Park Tidal Pool Click to read more.
Dalebrook Tidal Pool Click to read more.
St James Tidal Pool Click to read more.
Kalk Bay Tidal Pool (circa 1992) Click to read more.
Harmony Park Tidal Pool
Sarah’s relationship to Harmony Park tidal pool was troubled because of not having access to all beaches along the Strand peninsula prior to the Group Areas Act, and then subsequently only being allowed at Harmony park before the tidal pool was built. This stretch of Strand coastline is rocky and swimming there before the pool was built was dangerous. For this reason, Sarah’s older brothers discouraged and prevented her from going to Harmony Park. She first visited it 58 years later at the age of 69 with her daughter Aaniyah (author of this article) in September 2019 for a beach cleanup hosted by The Beach Co-op, a non-profit organisation. This experience was traumatic for her because she had not realised how much pain she had buried until arriving at Harmony Park, being physically unable to move her legs to climb out the car and walk onto the beach.
Sarah shared her anger and bitterness for being forcibly removed from her home, which was replaced by a taxi rank. She mourned the loss of the place and all the memories that she has of her childhood with her mother - which have been physically erased. Similarly, Joanne explains her swimming experience at Infanta – a place that only white people could enjoy and how the feelings of not belonging to that community still exist today, even though brown people are allowed there now. She refers to these feelings as the ‘backwash’ of what still remains from a time long ago, a time we need to remember to help us heal.
Despite the trauma experienced, Sarah continues to act responsibly by cleaning up the beach while she walks along the coastline out of reciprocity, and the strong need to give back to our mother ocean for what she provides to us.
Dalebrook Tidal Pool
Duncan uses his music as a language and wants to make it accessible to everyone, not only those who can afford to listen to him perform. His scenery sessions are performances in public spaces for citizens to enjoy and engage in the role that music plays in making us feel good and that we belong.
Duncan performing a scenery session at Dalebrook tidal pool.
All intra-viewees bar Sarah had a positive relationship with the tidal pool as a container of care. Joanne, Traci and Duncan felt safer in the pool not only from a physical perspective but also from an emotional and spiritual perspective. They expressed similar feelings about being held by the walls of the pool from the wilder ocean and simultaneously being held by the sense of community that they have created by visiting their respective pools regularly. Duncan developed this sense of familiarity through his ‘scenery session’ performances by playing his saxophone at the pool. He was initially afraid that people would find his performance loud and obstructive but was surprised and heartened to receive praise and thanks for playing with affirmations of wanting him to play there again. This sense of community is what brings him back to the pool.
St James Tidal Pool
Joanne’s relationship to water is linked to the colour of her skin. Her skin colour determined where she was allowed to swim and she would play in the shallow water, and not necessarily swim because of her exposure and access to water and swimming. The pool walls became a body of care for her, creating a safer space within which she could swim. More than the physical container of a pool, the sense of belonging is also felt through seeing other people that remind her that she belongs because of the colour of their skin and the language that is spoken, which she identifies with and understands.
She mentioned the safe space that was created for us to share stories by laying down a cloth and displaying the hydro-rug materials that we used whilst in conversation. Joanne explains: “Going in and out, tying together knots, threading through a needle eye – feels like it allows the freedom to tell stories. And to know that what I am doing here will become part of or become something different.” (June 2022).
St James tidal pool image taken by Joanne at the intra-view.
Joanne uses an example of her relationship to water and initial fear of it, and how remembering this fear is important when she engages and encourages other users to join her in the water. She asks, “What are the instruments that we need to be part of a care practice?”(June 2022). Some of these instruments are linked to privilege, which is always political. Acknowledging the politics ensures that we do not create a recipe for care, and this in turn helps us realise that it is never a simple task. Privilege enables care through having access and capital to be able to enjoy and become familiar with experiences, for example swimming and snorkeling in cold water with wetsuits, masks, snorkels, weight belts, fins and underwater cameras. In the same way these instruments can constrain care because we forget that not everyone has the means or capital to purchase instruments, which translates into care because of the experiences that obtaining the instruments brings.
Kalk Bay Tidal Pool
Traci lived in Kalk Bay as a child, it is home to her and her ancestors for 200 years. Although she feels at home at the tidal pool, there are also moments of anxiety and feeling unwelcome because of the memories that linger from the Group Areas Act and places being demarcated for white people only. More recently, Traci has been involved with protests against the owner of the Brass Bell restaurant. He has encroached and developed his restaurant business into the public space of the tidal pool, and this has substantially diminished the public space accessible to pool users.
Traci explains how care can be fierce.
Traci explains that community and care work together, and caring is not something you can do alone, it is a collective effort - one that requires community. We need the ocean to survive and therefore it makes sense for us to build and create communities that care. However, Duncan explains that the ocean does not necessarily need us. As humans, we emphasise our needs and place ourselves above everything else. He feels that the ocean has no regard for us and will continue to survive without us.
Both Joanne and Traci identified remembering as an act of care. Joanne reiterates that this is not simply remembering an event or occasion, rather it is an ongoing concept. Traci explains remembering goes against the notion of erasure, it is in fact the opposite of erasure. "We remember because they want us to forget” Traci Kwaai (June 2022).
Drifting Thoughts
I chose to use the word 'containers' for the tidal pools to disrupt the traditional view of a container as confined, restricted and controlled. The tidal pools are structures that allow water to flow over, into and through them. They are continuously changing and adapting to their surrounding conditions – the swell size, direction and period, the phases of the moon and tides, the surrounding geography and sedimentation, and the shape of the pool in relation to the surroundings – these are some of the factors that influence the pools as containers of unboundedness and abundance.
The intra-views with four individuals affirm that the bruising and wounding of bodies (whether human or more-than-human) and land are the visual and physical surfacing of violence and trauma, or manifestations of inflicted harm. While the immediate impact might be highly visible, the longer term effect of trauma is no less significant, even if at times less visible. Vollenhoven (2021) reiterates this through acknowledging the countless South Africans who have taken on the responsibility to re-member; and by so doing addressing the damage done by centuries of colonialism and Apartheid.
Ralf collecting litter whilst doing laps for Traci’s hydro-rug.
Alexis Pauline Gumb asks “What are the scales of intimacy and the actual practices that would teach us how to care for each other beyond obligation or imaginary duties?” (2020:56). Similarly I am asking what other care practices exist that have been overlooked because of our South African Apartheid legacy which continues to live on today. Patricia Hills Collins argues that ‘seeing from below’ can generate a post-colonial understanding of ‘being human’ (1990). In this way, seeing from below, allows brown and black bodies to offer understanding and insight that speak not only about and to – but beyond – their locations (Lewis and Badroon 2021). They argue that despite the assumption that essays and writing from socially marginalised standpoints can generate only knowledge that speaks to the experiences of these groups, on the contrary those positioned at the margins often see the world from a different perspective. Lewis and Baderoon (2021) go on to say that this knowledge not only counters racist and patriarchal world views, it envisions new ways of being human and is therefore relevant to all.
Despite being marginalised and restricted from accessing the ocean, these four brown bodies are healing their wounds and scars by choosing to remember by singing, swimming, performing live music, picking up litter, protesting for access to spaces that were previously demarcated for white people only and building communities. These are some of the acts of care that they are practising and that was shared as we co-created the hydro-rug and shared stories of our connection to the ocean despite the trauma experienced. Each interviewee has a deep connection to the ocean and both Traci and Duncan liken the ocean to a mother figure.
Tidal pools as containers of care (Image by Traci Viljoen 2022).
The approach and methods for this research includes stitching, mending, creating, imagining and storytelling. These methods enable us to comprehend entangled relationships between bodies and the built marine environment of tidal pools. These ‘otherwise’ ways of knowing and being in the world facilitates the co-creation and building of community especially amongst brown and black people who have been segregated through Apartheid’s compartmentalisation of ethnic, religious and mixed-race groups that has had a powerful impact on how groups continue to identfy themselves. “We are now busy journeying from the woundedness of recent centuries to wholeness” (Vollenhoven 2021: 29).
Hydro-rugs adrift at Harmony Park tidal pool.
Sarah’s response on WhatsApp to the video of the hydro-rugs adrift at Harmony Park.
Expanded Gallery
Credits
Intra-views: Sisi Sarah Martin, Joanne Peers, Traci Kwaai and Duncan Johnson Tidal pools: Kalk Bay tidal pool, Dalebrook tidal pool, St James tidal pool (once a fish kraal) and Harmony Park tidal pool for providing the space and place for memories and the connection to the ocean. Aerial photographs: Harmony Park, Dalebrook and St James tidal pools shot by Jay Caboz. Cover image: shot by Leonie Joubert.
Sources
Gumbs, A.P. 2020. Undrowned: Black feminist lessons from marine mammals. Edinburgh:AK Press.
Johnson, D. 2022. Intraview at Dalebrook pool, 24 June. Unpublished recording.
Kwaai, T. 2022. Intraview at Kalk Bay pool, 22 June. Unpublished recording.
Lewis, D. and Baderoon, G.(editors). 2021. Surfacing: On being black and feminist in South Africa. South Africa: Wits University Press.
Muthien, B. and Bam, J. (editors). 2021. Rethinking Africa: Indigenous women re-interpret South Africa’s Pasts. South Africa: Jacana Media.
Petersen, K. S. 2014. Interviews as intraviews: A hand puppet approach to the studying processes of inclusion and exclusion among children in kindergarten. Reconceptualising Educational Research Methodology.
Peers, J. 2022. Intraview at St James Tidal pool, 22 June. Unpublished recording.
Tachine, A. and Nicolazzo, Z. (2022).Weaving an Otherwise: In-Relations Methodological Practice. Stylus publishing.
Vollenhoven S. in Lewis, D. and Baderoon, G.(editors). 2021. Surfacing: On being black and feminist in South Africa. South Africa: Wits University Press.
