Rituals Johannesburg mine dumps wall funambulist - KEYWORDS - Counterspace
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KEYWORDS
rituals
Johannesburg
mine dumps
wall
funambulist
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A Blurry Line on the Plan:
Johannesburg’s Rituals on the Edge
– Sumayya Vally & Sarah de Villiers
‘The essential thing is to etch movements in the sky, movements so still they
leave no trace. The essential thing is simplicity. That is why the long path to
perfection is horizontal.’ Philippe Petit in Man on Wire (Marsh, 2008)
It is in the fleeting act of precariously straddling a no-man’s land that an
awareness of two sides is created. The isolation on each side of the boundary
is not understood until one moves across the threshold to a vastly different
environment on the other side.
This dividing line separates here and there, this and that, us and them.
Buffers and walls are tangibly divisive devices between races, ethnicities,
faiths and belief systems, economic brackets and ideologies. In a seemingly
innocent and neutral zone (though nothing is ever innocent and neutral), that
of the sky, the drone view captures glimpses of people and goods clustering,
shifting, and traversing expansive left-over territories at the seams of the city.
We are looking for moments of suspension of the boundary. In this series of
eight drone images, we find Johannesburg funambulists’: people and systems
which navigate and circumvent its divides and thresholds.
Walking a line on the plan, the funambulist subverts the line of the
border or buffer, which divides two sides. Lambert (2013) argues that the line
is a legal diagram, instantaneously denoting a dichotomist political arrange-
ment, as soon as the pen marks the paper in a stroke, representing the wall.
In Johannesburg, spaces are divided with ‘walls’ of varying thicknesses,
sizes and gradients, and varying degrees of perceptibility and visibility.
Physical walls and dividing infrastructures include golf courses, mine dumps,
cemeteries, and retail conglomerates – often intended as non-traversable
expanses, appendages to their adjacent hosts.
Documentation of ritual practices (both everyday and extraordinary)
which, in almost all cases, involve a large-scale framing of terrain in an
attempt to portray the full logic of the divide, invites an in-between scale.
Between the zoom-out map of a planner and a zoom-in map of an anthro-
pologist, a shift in gaze takes place. This phenomenon is interesting when
contemplated through Walter Benjamin’s concept of trace (the pursuit of
nearness) and aura (feeling or experience of that which is apart from the
subject) (Benjamin, 1999: 47). It is true: seen from Google Earth’s perspective,
expanses are rendered flat, equidistant, separate – nothing is necessarily
foregrounded or biased, an analytical and perhaps not an especially felt expe-
rience. In an attempt to trace that which is normally hidden from plain sight
to the pedestrian, the aura of the space becomes somewhat elusive. One could
argue that this is both an act of seeing more (seeing objects usually hidden
from the view of the pedestrian, for example, on rooftops or mine dumps) and
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seeing less, removed from the ground and not experiencing things that may
be inaccessible from the drone view – smell, sound and touch.
Yet in the creation of these images, the camera operator certainly under-
goes turbulent ‘feeling’ of another kind. The images are captured with less
pervasive, generically-timed satellite photography (as in the case of Google
Earth imagery) and the drone photographer acts as a street photographer,
drawing and working with her interpretation of local event, light conditions
and weather. The result, we argue, is imbued with event and emotion. From
this perspective, we are able to perceive people’s trajectories, pauses or group-
ings – an odd moving dot on a great sea of toxic colour, a car dropped off for
repair in an informal mechanic’s yard, or a stark white centipede of followers
making their way from an unclaimed territory in a cemetery up to an adjacent
hill top to pray on Sunday. We are able to see these within a larger system
or spatial conglomerate, where relationships of certain spatial phenomena
become measurable.
Ritual and residue create a new landscape on the host territory; the
in-between becomes inhabited in the photograph, occupied both in an instant
and forever. As Tuan remarks, the border or fuzzy line offers a political
quarantine as a space itself, escaping the rules of its bordering zones (2005:
120). All sorts of strange things emerge here, but not without a lesser sense of
status, as they are declared neither ‘in’ nor ‘out.’ And so, apart from the gaze
of some nosey celestial being, these phenomena remain largely unrecognised
as sites producing fascinating, context-specific mutants of cultures, ecolo-
gies and political arrangements. Mine dumps, originally used as a divisive
urban tool between privilege, in small moments become loophole pedestrian
thoroughfares, or a site for illegal informal retrieval of precious metals, or a
place to conduct a baptism.
It is interesting that, in some cases, the images reveal that the occupa-
tion of the ‘line’ reverses the role of ‘host’ and ‘parasite’. Where before, these
practices were informed or produced by a set of phenomena of different
attributes lying on either side of the line, the occupied in-between now
becomes host to new functions to the territories outside of it – such as a
bustling sidewalk of informal trade in a Johannesburg township, adjacent
to a strip mall; or light manufacturing and recycling retailers adjacent to a
conglomerate of informal recyclers on the edges of Maboneng.
The give and take: gentle and violent forms of ‘hustle for the uitval-
grond’1 remain relentless. As an open project, we continue to trace this oscil-
lating membrane of transaction of the land in our city, in a visceral pursuit of
its shifting geographies and conflating, spatialised crunch of need and ever
more unsecured resources.
1
Uitvalgrond: Original piece of triangular ground at the centre of eight farms claimed
for mining diggings in 1886 Johannesburg. Uitvalground translates to ‘surplus ground’
in Afrikaans, given by the ZAR as a word to describe land leftover between farm portions
whose perimeters were defined by the distance a Boer farmer could ride in the day from his
or her farmstead (Weizman, 2014: 184).
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01
Monday
06h08
Intersection at Nugget Street – traders,
travellers and children
cross into the city.
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02
Tuesday
10h12
Next to the M2 ‘Old Kaserne’ off-ramp, economic
opportunists walk across and underneath the highway
into an occupied yard to sort bales of goods collected for
recycling.
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03
Wednesday
08h18
Music, braai smoke and the incisive taxi-toot waft across
the fenced edges of Pan-African Mall in Alex.
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04
Thursday
17h30
The mine water sleeps next to the city at the site of
the old Top Star drive-in cinema.
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05
Sunday
09h37
Drive up through the cemetery, and slip through a
forgotten hole in its fence to reach a demarcated
Shembe sacred space, an elevated clearing in a thicket.
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Saturday
12noon
It is believed that God directs the worshippers to the space 1. Chase former evil-dwellers
to be prayed in. An exercise in place-making — preparing 2. Remove dirt
the space for ritual prayer. 3. Dig a hole, place salt in the hole
4. Add a sheep's tail to the hole. Sheeps'
tails act as good amulets against
witchcraft
5. Cover the hole with soil
6. Draw a circle of hot ashes within the
limits of the cleared space
7. Have priests gather with a bucket of
water in the middle
8. Mix coarse salt in water
9. Pray over the water, simultaneously
sprinking it around
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Friday
15h22
Over the M2 interchange and the Mai Mai traditional
market, adjacent to the Maboneng Precinct.
References
Benjamin, W., The Arcades Project, Harvard Weizman, E., Architecture and the Paradox
University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 447. of Dissidence, Routledge, London, 2014.
Lambert, L., 2013, ‘The Law Turned into Yi-Fu Tuan, Y., ‘Architecture, Route to
Walls’, Volume: The Shape of the Law, no. 4 Transcendence’, in Ockman, J. et al (eds.),
Archis + AMO + C-Lab, 1983, p. 83. Architourism, Preston, Munich, 2005, p. 120.
Man on Wire, dir. James Marsh, Icon
Productions, 2008, [film].
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DEVELOPMENT
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DISCIPLINE
RADICAL
DISCOURSE
FOLIO is produced by the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, located in
the southern hemisphere, and The Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, New York City, in the
northern hemisphere. 1 One person’s winter is another’s summer.
2
radical (adj.), relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough;
advocating or based on thorough or complete political or social change; (noun) a group of atoms behaving as
a unit in a number of compounds.You can also read
