PAPER
with commisioned writings by:
TOMKE BRAUN
NOLAN OSWALD DENNIS *
ZARA JULIUS
ZAYAAN KHAN
MAHRET IFEOMA KUPKA
LINDI MNGXITAMA
MAGNUS ELIAS ROSENGARTEN
KATHY-ANN TAN
notes after -land
& -scape
Let us, for the duration of this text, imagine that landscapes are made, not found. Like most things which are made they are also often made-up. They exist at the murky interface between how we see and what we know. What I mean is that landscapes are fundamentally technopolitical objects and methods of objectifying. Processes resist objectification and so the landscape becomes a technical and political substitute for the land (which, for our purposes within and beyond this text, is a set of processes, not an object). The landscape conditions what we see and recognise as land by privileging a representation of the land (an abstraction) over an experience of the land (a relation).
* * *
A lullaby in voice and violin echoes against the hard walls of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG). A Decomposing Lullaby by Mia Thom loops an ethereal soundtrack to two silent works by Natalie Paneng whose blurred boundaries and overlapping parts dissipate and coalesce in sync with some unknown, perhaps unknowable, rhythm. Venus Alchemises Below and Venus Finds Balance, occupy the beginning-end of the exhibition project Soil Conversations. Two monitors rest on a bed of earth and iridescent fabric, this is Venus Alchemising Below. On the monitors a ghostly anti-presence of a figure, glitches across and beneath a field of soil. Light ripples across the video as if, in some way, this soil is also a pool of water. Above this work, a projector beams images over a wall print of a familiar figure standing on the bank of a stream, this is Venus Finds Balance, one foot seemingly in the water, the other on the land. Or more precisely both feet in the muddy interspace between. The projector repeats this image over the wall print, the projector lenses slightly out of focus, echoing the figure in light while subtle movements annotate the print. I read a diagram in the image as “so-> above so-> below”. Two re-cycle diagrams rotate on either side of the print. Spectres abound. They ask: how to look, so to see?
* * *
According to photographer and theorist Santu Mofokeng we recognise the South African landscape through terms inherited from our “Apartheid ancestor” and reiterated through our “art institutions and museums, in monuments and memorials, and in the nomenclature and place names”*. These terms form the structures of sharing that constitute, constrain and enable claims on the South African landscape. Cultural critic and novelist Njabulo Ndebele notes the implications of this inheritance as the “ultimate ‘leisuring’ of colonial history” through the institution of the game lodge as a particular kind of cultural institution which “impedes the emergence of an image of Africa and its diverse cultures as transforming historical phenomena.”** That is, it fixes the landscape as objects rather than processes. Landscapes are rarely, if ever, a representation of the land itself. It is instead the substitution of representational forms for actual relations in order to transform (or obstruct the transformation of) those relations. This Apartheid inheritance, while complex in its machinations, helps us to understand - “landscape [as] not a genre of art but a medium”***. In which case the meaningfulness of any particular landscape is necessarily greater than the significance of its content. If we understand a medium as the interface between technologies and bodies**** then landscapes become intersections of our personal capacities for seeing and the technical conditions of the image. I should probably note that my use of landscape here is drawn from the “desperately confused” western terrain of landscape which encompasses: “natural, pictorial, symbolic, mythic, imagined, built, and so forth”[...] “as means to artistic, social, economic, and political ends (some nefarious, some not), as well as the manner in which landscapes of all sorts act on and shape us, as if agents in their own right”.*****
* * *
Heavy black curtains enclose a viewing room. An excerpt (which I think of as a trailer) from Menagano, an upcoming film by the artist duo MADEYOULOOK plays on a large screen hanging above eye height. A bench invites viewers to sit down, exaggerating the viewing angle. I sit down and crane my head back to take in the screen. A deep voice narrates in sePedi. Images emerge as if from a dense fog, the atmosphere heavy with clouds. Looking up at this film as it cuts between close-ups of grass, trees, rocks, and rock fences my disorientation breaks suddenly, and in silence, upon a view of the landscape. It feels like, sitting below the screen looking up at the land, I can suddenly locate myself. My head at this moment, misidentifies as the camera itself, lying just above the ground. My body, inconsequential, beneath it. I think of all that is hidden beneath the surface of the land and remember Paneng’s Venus Alchemising Below, with its unstable cohort of glitching figures. There are no people visible in this film. For a moment, I forget that I am a person, in this film, invisible. Sound gently returns to the film and the camera cuts across various scenes, lingering finally on a pool of water.
* * *
Santu Mofokeng offers an anti-definition of landscape as a portmanteau of two words: “land (the verb) and scape (to view)”******. While most landscape theory is concerned with the act of looking, and the methods of constructing a view, the thing being looked at, the “land” itself is generally under or over naturalised.******* Mofokeng shifts the grammar of land from noun (even proper noun The Land) to land as a verb, an action or the state of something in process. Viewing (-scape) then is always in relation to doing (-land) rather than to an inert object (-land) over which claims of ownership might be simplistically resolved. Landscape is then the practice of viewing a process (or processes) rather than an object. However, we must avoid normative assumptions of viewing. Colonial looking works for the construction of colonial landscape. In contrast, Mofokeng’s “to view” echoes what bell hooks calls the right to gaze, an oppositional practice of looking in rebellion against anti-Black looking relations. This is not just a defiant act of looking where one is not permitted to look but a declarative looking which reclaims agency. As hooks puts it "Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality."********
The idea of viewing-doing reaffirms the politics of landscape representation as a transformative act rather than an archival one. Representation is inseparable from redefinition (that is to determine what this land is) and so always forms part of a claim of ownership over the land. Extending Ndebele’s game lodge landscape outward we can see landscapes then as “the concrete manifestation of the movement of the dominant culture across time and space, and its ability to replicate itself far away”.********* We see how landscape reproduces the land in its own image - or at least is a critical element in the socio-political reproduction of land. Which helps to understand that contestation at the level of the landscape (that is the aesthetic practices by which we see and refigure the land) is contiguous with reclaiming the land.
* * *
My favourite entrance to the JAG is from the north, walking across Joubert Park, the largest public green space in downtown Joburg, and between the vaulted roofs of the 1987 extension. This is the back entrance in the original plans. If you enter JAG from this direction you begin Soil Conversations with Paneng’s installation. This is not how I enter or exit when I visit Soil Conversations but the memory of this alternate route haunts my visit to the show, subtly suggesting the possibility of two beginnings to the exhibition. Two endings as well. The southern entrance to JAG is the historical main entrance and looks across the Metrorail lines which cut into the earth and continue below street level. This trench is where the train lines enter and exit the underground tunnels leading to Park Station. These lines run east to Germiston and then northward to Pretoria and further into southern Africa or south toward Durban, Gqeberha and the ocean. There is a large fence between the railway and the gallery. If you enter JAG from this direction, you begin Soil Conversations near MADEYOULOOK’s installation. This is the actual beginning of the exhibition, starting with the exhibition wall text and Io Makandal’s work This Too Shall Pass: iteration #4 and Untitled (Clay impressions series: JAG #1) which forms a poetic prelude to MADEYOULOOK’s installation. In my mind at least, the shadow of the other entrance unsettles this sequence, perhaps inverts it. I’d like to think of these works as punctuating the beginning-endings of the exhibition. In the south end Menagano (excerpt) forms one node and in the north end Venus Alchemises Below and Venus Finds Balance by Natalie Paneng form a compound node (with Decomposing Lullaby by Mia Thom). I’m inclined to read axial relations as spectral, to see Menagano and the Venus dyad as intensities of a shared spirit with variable but opaque expressions. Both works gesture towards moments of rupture, wherein the political stakes of the work are made legible, for example in Paneng’s ghostly figure kneeling at the waterside in Venus Finds Balance, or the murmuration of short cuts in the tempestuous middle sequence of Menagano. These ruptures are countered by gestures against revelation. The works simultaneously open lines of possibility while critically curtailing any easy (read careless) sublimation of the anti-Blackness and misogyny of the landscape (even, or particularly, in the form of Black gendered suffering).
* * *
If we understand the landscape as a medium through which the political, economic, ecological and spiritual relations of land are rendered visible and invisible. Then these two works offer us ways to question the adequacy of our grammar for thinking beyond the Apartheid inheritance, or critically toward the end of the Apartheid inheritance. This residual political and cultural supremacy, our Apartheid inheritance, is enabled by control systems which legally proscribes (and now economically segregates) access to and exclusion from the land and claims over the landscape. Taken as a whole this cultural-legal framework institutes a white-supremacist sensibility over the landscape. Indeed, insofar as it pertains to landscape (not necessarily land itself), the combination of proscribed movement (access) and language (narrative, aesthetic, grammar) form the basis of white-supremacist claims over the South African landscape.
In trying to determine who “owns” the South African landscape Mofokeng bypasses what he describes as “a cacophony of sounds narratives and narrations, a delirious, rather, a deleterious mix of claims”********** and offers in their place a programmatic re-definition of landscape as a particular kind of social construction, a sociogenic matter. To borrow from the philosopher Sylvia Wynter “the code, the law of the code, the principle, which functions as the ground of the history [...} will itself be the a priori or ground of the history to which it gives rise”.*********** Which is to say the landscape is produced, simultaneously as it reproduces, the anti-Black society from which it emerges. I am interested in understanding the enclosure of history as a zone of knowledge in which Wynter’s sociogenic coding grounds our understanding of the landscape as already restricted by what indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith calls the “classification” systems, rules of practice and methods developed to allow for knowledge to be selected and included”.************
That is, we are embedded in a history which demands we reflect on the landscape as a medium caught between power and powerlessness. Or more appropriately to understand the landscape as a medium of interrogation and reclamation, which is nonetheless also the medium of dispossession and redefinition. To return to Smith, landscape operates alongside other forms of colonial “redefin[ition of] the world and where indigenous peoples were positioned within the world”.************* The question of course is what happens when the dispossessed use landscape as medium for our own projects of redefinition and relocation? To paraphrase media theorist Friederich Kittler: “the eye armed with lenses performs a paradoxical operation [...] as it extends and amputates itself at the same time”.************** Mofokeng describes his own landscape project in parallel terms “reclaiming the land for myself”.*************** A retro-reflective gesture which reinstates the material stakes in viewing the land. A reclamation of land through landscape. It seems to me that Mofokeng asks us to embody the paradox suggested by the landscape differently, to ask, what kind of powers emerge at the “interface of the inner and outer – interior / exterior – worlds, where the objective / subjective environment inform/determine the experience of being at a given time and space”.**************** To go beyond normative codes which condition us to see in images of the South African landscape the question “how did it feel to be a colonialist?”.***************** Sensibilities of dispossession, possession and reclamation form the field of contestation in the South African landscape. Actual repossession alongside. The liquid surfaces of Venus Alchemises Below first rendered through iridescent fabric and then again digitally over the soil in video unsettle the material credibility of their landscapes. We might be dealing with something other than the representation of a landscape. The iridescent fabric shimmers like polluted puddles in the soil, reflecting the room in shimmering misshapen patterns. Maybe it's a representation of a landscape in the absence of material relation? The digital ripples over the soil in the video highlight the figures glitching in and out of screen, they glow as if covered in oil. Perhaps this is a rendering of unreliable materiality. If reliability is a measure for trustworthiness these gestures carry the weight of mistrust. Better still the rejection of a material sensibility perpetuates phallocentric white supremacy. It's particularly interesting that it is not the soil but the not-water which holds the weight of this scepticism. I am reminded of a conversation where writer and critic Zoe Samdudzi suggests: “in order to better begin to comprehend the multiple temporalities of/in/on land, oceanic thinking ironically might be more methodologically useful. Tidalectics permit land’s [biochemical-spiritual-political processes] to inhabit the same fluidity as water.“******************
The final scenes of Menagano take place in the twilight of a darkening landscape. The hills silhouetted against the sun reflecting against the clouds, slowly disappearing into the black of the night sky, or is it another darkness? The final light we see is not the sky but its reflection in a pool of water, ripples distort the image. A chorus sings as the screen fades to black. I am still looking up. Menagano, with its meticulously shot and edited scenes, makes bare the excruciating ambiguities of media as “a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy”.* ******************
Menagano resonates with two forms of discomfort in me. A sense of dread that something is hidden beneath the surface of this landscape, that these images are hiding something all too familiar out there. While at the same time a sense of unease with the beauty of the actual landscape images reproduced in the film. A creeping sense that this kind of enjoyment is not for me, that I am not meant to appreciate this, to possess this feeling. A fear of falling into something too unfamiliar inside myself. If landscapes emphasise representation of the land over relation to the world, I am left wondering what kind of relation is possible where representation is a part of the destruction of relations? To paraphrase hooks: a history of white representations of landscape have done violence to the image. Is a liberation of the image possible? Ndebele, thinking along similar lines leaves us with a simple answer “there is no peace for those caught in the process of becoming.”*******************
*Santu Mofokeng’s Land- scapes, Johannesburg: Warren Siebrits, 2008. Exhibition: 12 August-12 September 2008.
**Njabulo S Ndebele. Fine Lines from the Box: further thoughts about our country (Roggebaai:Umuzi, 2007)
***Landscape Theory, J. Elkins & R. De Lue ed. New York: Routledge, 2008
****Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, F. Kittler trans. A. Enns, Polity Press: Cambridge. 2010
*****Landscape Theory, J. Elkins & R. De Lue ed. New York: Routledge, 2008
****** Santu Mofokeng’s Land- scapes, Johannesburg: Warren Siebrits, 2008. Exhibition: 12 August-12 September 2008.
******* Landscape Theory, J. Elkins & R. De Lue ed. New York: Routledge, 2008
******** bell hooks, in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 115-31
********* Njabulo S Ndebele. Fine Lines from the Box: further thoughts about our country (Roggebaai: Umuzi, 2007)
**********Santu Mofokeng’s Land- scapes, Johannesburg: Warren Siebrits, 2008. Exhibition: 12 August-12 September 2008.
***********David, Scott, The re-enchantment of Humanism: An interview with Sylvia Wynter. Small Axe 8: 119-107. 2000
************ Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2012. Decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. London; New York : Zed Books, 2012
************ ibid
*************Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, F. Kittler trans. A. Enns, Polity Press: Cambridge. 2010
**************Santu Mofokeng’s Land- scapes, Johannesburg: Warren Siebrits, 2008. Exhibition: 12 August-12 September 2008
***************Santu Mofokeng’s Land- scapes, Johannesburg: Warren Siebrits, 2008. Exhibition: 12 August-12 September 2008
****************Njabulo S Ndebele. Fine Lines from the Box: further thoughts about our country (Roggebaai:Umuzi, 2007)*****************Nolan Oswald Dennis and Zoé Samudzi, Land: experience, Myth & Memory, 2022 https://onscreen.thekitchen.org/media/land-experience-myth-memory
******************Njabulo S Ndebele. Fine Lines from the Box: further thoughts about our country (Roggebaai:Umuzi, 2007)
*******************Njabulo S Ndebele. Fine Lines from the Box: further thoughts about our country (Roggebaai:Umuzi, 2007)
*Nolan Oswald Dennis is a para-disciplinary artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Their practice explores ‘a black consciousness of space’ - the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization - questioning histories of space and time through system-specific, rather than site-specific interventions. They hold a Bachelor's degree in Architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and a Science Master’s degree in Art, Culture and Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Their work has been featured in exhibitions at the Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg, Cape Town, London), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), MACBA (Barcelona), AutoItalia SouthEast (London), CAN (Neuchatel), the Young Congo Biennale (Kinshasa), FRONT triennial (Columbus) among others.They are a founding member of artist group NTU, a research associate at the VIAD research centre at the University of Johannesburg, and a member of the Index Literacy Program