M.O.L 17
ANALOGUE DORP
Roger Ballen
Ashraf Jamal
I
’m 20ks inland on the Breede River, paging through Roger Ballen’s book of photographs on dorps. An American photographer long domiciled in South Africa, Ballen remains a stranger. It’s what gives him the perspective he needs to find the kinks in what we commonly and unthinkingly see, old buildings, empty streets, a man with ‘a strange collection of objects, prints from Egypt, old family pictures … piles of pristine white pillows on various beds and odd pieces of furniture throughout the house’. Ballen’s interiors and exteriors are off-kilter, he has a voyeur’s eye for the strange. For some his photographs are invasively peculiar, absurdly eerie. For me, however, they capture the fact that everything deemed familiar is never thus.
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There is ‘something special’ about small towns and villages, says Ballen, something ‘odd and quixotic’. I picture Cervantes’ Man from la Mancha with lance outstretched, atop a bony horse, prodding at imaginary windmills. The dictionary definition for quixotic reads, ‘extremely idealistic; unrealistic and impractical’, but one wonders, paging through Ballen’s collection of photos of small and remote towns, whether his vision is solely surreal. Under a yearlong lockdown, with increasing numbers forced to work remotely, small towns – especially those within a 3hr radius of cities – have become increasingly appealing. These towns, once seen as holiday getaways, are now the favoured retreats for fulltime occupation. Are dorps the new normal where we can permanently decompress? No longer, or not quite, part of ‘a disappearing South African aesthetic’, dorps are experiencing a new lease of life. Ballen believed he was recording ‘the elements of a dying culture … arresting the utter extinction of the South African dorp’, today, however, this is not quite the case. In Richmond in the northern Karoo we have an annual literary festival and MAPSA – Modern Art Project South Africa – an artists’ residency and permanent exhibition devoted to works inspired by arte povera, in the Riebeeck Valley there’s the olive festival started by my late wife, Christine Solomon, in 2000, as well as a host of other inspired cultural initiatives elsewhere. Whether remotely located, or in close proximity to urban hubs, small towns are rejuvenating. There’s a spring in the step, a determined self-belief that life is possible, economically, culturally, humanly. ‘Utter extinction’, in this time of extinction, is being avidly combatted. Perhaps this rebirth is quixotic after all, as idealistic as it is absurd and beautiful.
W W W. A R T T I M E S . C O . Z A
