1:1 PAULO MENEZES
Johannesburg 1:1
Johannesburg 1:1 Š 2016 Paulo Menezes
Contents
Foreword Preface Introduction Looking at the City The Periphery Engagement Modes of Looking Acknowledgements References
Foreword
doung Anwar Jahangeer Urbanity in African cities is elusive. It is a 'non-system' in constant shift in order to support natural communities in the practice of their freedom1. In South Africa, the phenomenon of urbanization has led to the juxtaposition of an organic intelligent matrix of people within the instituted Cartesian blueprint inherent in the design of our cities. City walkers unwittingly subvert the utopian ideologies imbedded in the European models of city-making imposed on the African city through colonization, by this everyday movement. From the soil paths (indlela) in the rural areas, to the pavements of the inner-city to the taxi ranks, this movement network has all the characteristics of a matrix which presents fertile ground for a productive dystopia. It is 'map-like' - a wide array of attractions and influences with no specific origin or genesis. Here rules become a set of terms to be negotiated, characters become interchangeable assets and physical space becomes a place of resistance where the African public redefines herself. This matrix is non-linear and sensory. Like a rhizome2, it has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing. In an urban scenario, the pavement and the street incarnates as the ‘indlela’, which in its turn smoothes the path of an additional set of unexpected survivors. Street traders and taxi operators have generated industries which are directly responsive to the walkers. They are agile adapters in a twisted ecosystem whose strengths are intensified by shifting environmental conditions beating the system at its own game. In a space of conflict and adventure, where the collective imagination assimilates the city and reimagines their forms of governance, social organisation and infrastructure in novel and innovative ways. This is when a new democratic politics of the urban become a new framework for producing socio-spatial and economic justice. 1:1 is a momentary insight in this elusiveness of the African city. Situating himself in the interstices
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of inner-city Johannesburg, Paulo questions and provokes our perceptions of how we visualize and research the built and lived urban. Oscillating between looking and seeing the protagonist explores movements and moments inscribing insights into the spatial functions of cities. It is a catalyst for critical thinking and more importantly it acts as a motivation to re-envision an alternative reading of city spaces.
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The contemplative turns away from aesthetics, where he would run the risk of losing in art; and yet support of the aesthetic order inclines him to cross the (fictional) barrier separating the sensory from the intellectual and the mystical. He frees himself from his body by placing it into the action, onto the stage. The aimless promenade that takes place between the hours of prayer and spiritual exercise. Henri Lefebvre
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Preface This work is the result of the Visual Arts Network of South Africa (VANSA) Open Office Research Residency, a programme that aims to support the development of arts research and arts researchers in South Africa. The material in this document was created during the course of a 7-week research period in Johannesburg, South Africa. This period of time and the resulting work represents a first-time experience of Johannesburg for the author. While this work is created in Johannesburg, the actions and methodologies identified are not exclusive to Johannesburg, but rather offered as experimental practices to be applied in cities across the African continent and further afield. The Open Office Research Residency is made possibly by the support of the National Arts Council of South Africa (NAC).
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Introduction This work aims to investigate and develop new modes of rendering the built environment. The works, both visual and textual, are the result of a sensory experience with the surface of an African metropolis, considering these surfaces from angles of image-making, civic movement and geo/topography. In creating these works, I aim to situate myself on multiple axes of the city. First of these is the establishment of my physical contact point with Johannesburg – its tarmac, its pavement, its concrete cracks. Here, I attempt to render the surface of these contact points, ‘transferring’ them onto material that can be separated from its original reference points – pieces of the city that are obtained as markers of place on linear traversals of it. Here I determine my positioning on the city’s ‘y’ axis. Second of these axes is the situation and orientation of myself within Johannesburg’s geography – its ‘x’ axis. In doing so, I plot a series of boundaries within which I base my study, collectively forming a parameter of work. These points span the outer-city suburb of Kensington, Hillbrow, Braamfontein, Southwest into Fordsburg and Newtown and returning East through Marshalltown. Finally, I plot a latent bearing – the positioning of this study in a vast library of texts and visuals on Johannesburg. I approach this work with the intention of rendering a perhaps lesser-explored area in this library – the physical surface of a city that has become the subject of thorough thought and analysis, covered by multiple faculties the world over.
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In rendering the surface of the city, within the set parameter of work, I become lost, a vagabond. I suspend all motives for movement and action in order to find my contact point with the city. I walk. Along the way I drift through theories of Guy Debord and the Situationists, the intuitive mappings of the Stalkers, Francesco Careri’s nomadic city and doung Anwar Jahangeer’s spaces in-between. I take off my shoes, walking ten steps more, inviting the reader to do the same. David Bunn speaks of Johannesburg as a city with skin, once-supple, now hardened into keloid scars.1 This study attempts to render the city in its current state, providing a tactile precursor to the abovementioned bodies of work – touching the skin of Johannesburg, carefully rendering the contours of its fingerprint during a brief encounter.
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Looking at the City The Johannesburg skyline, by virtue of the mechanics of vision and perspective, can only be seen when positioned some distance away from the city itself. This distance immediately removes the viewer from the physicality of the city, from the city’s appearance beyond its façades and exterior form. This distanced perspective allows the viewer the luxury of looking at the city endlessly. Here the viewer is not impeded by bound vision or time – two inherent characteristics of a walker’s experience in the city, nor do the city’s peripheries exist as mere memory maps – in many cases, the city can be viewed from its western boundary through to its eastern boundary. This viewpoint of the city can be perceived as a somewhat ideal perspective. Ideal in a way that; it can be categorized alongside alternate mode of looking at cities – modes that include the satellite image, or surveillance, or looking at the city from an airplane. These are views that require little interaction with the city itself beyond the visual act of looking. However, on looking at Johannesburg from ‘the outside’, despite the viewer’s physical exclusion from the city, it is automatically and instantly a city imaged; a city imagined. It is this realization that offers the point of departure for this study of the city. The M2 freeway that hugs the south side of the inner city offers such a perspective. During the few minutes that the commuter travels on it, a cross-section of the city can be seen that spans the Standard Bank complex in the foreground, right up to the Johannesburg Sun and into Hillbrow in the distance. It is this vista from the M2 westbound that offered my first encounter with the city of Johannesburg on a visual level. I would frequent this route before substituting it for routes through the inner city itself. Here I become familiar with notions around looking at the
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city from this distanced perspective. I imagine the city beneath the building tops based on a combination of limited prior knowledge about Johannesburg, and memories of other cities that I have spent time in, South African and abroad. It is this experience that prompts my next step in getting closer to the city – the satellite map. Soon after my arrival in Johannesburg, I explore the inner city for the first time in the form of panning across it’s Cartesian grid from above. Here the viewer has complete freedom of the virtual city with continually advancing technologies. Once again, separated from the city itself, the metropolis is lifeless, still and placid. Perceived chaos becomes perfect geometry, and imagination moves a few steps toward reality.
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The Periphery My proximity to the city shifts, this time higher on its ‘y’ axis. I substitute the distanced cross-section and the virtual satellite perspective for an aerial view in reality. Careful not to prematurely engage with the surface of the city, I ascend to observe the Cartesian image in motion.
Nothing. Mute. Inner city apartment blocks packed into demarcated squares and rectangles. Fragments of people’s lives in the form of hung laundry offer a fleeting glimpse of colour amongst the greyscale. Beyond the city’s limits suburbs become anonymous. The aerial gaze. Vision becomes surveillance. Otherwise estranged lives bound by city blocks. The black shadow. Static in its crawl. A bullet hole interrupts the blue panorama eastward. Silence again. Deafening as thoughts forge their own paths through complex histories of a worn city. Although seemingly flattened. Life finds function on multiple levels. Roads rise 8 floors high in the form of rooftop parkades. Arrows and markings mirror those on ground level. Both unaware of the other’s existence. A city never reveals all of its surfaces at once. Johannesburg is no exception. Descend.
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Double story tin roofs. A rhythm of hoots. Alma’s Cash and Carry. Photo copies doing here. An Arab man and his young son offer a telephone on the corner. 12:40. Historic Johannesburg lined with the now. Lost lover. Braamfontein. Anonymous mannequins stand in the windows. Top hatted. SAPS Hillbrow 200m. Jungle Inn. The ¾ trench coat becomes synonymous with confidence on the hard streets. Johannesburger Hotel. Affordable room rates. Bustling Hillbrow. Ceaseless. There are no roads here. Merely pavements for people and cars. The promise land. Assorted clothing lines the pavement. Leather shoes in ones. Newtown. City text and graffiti become one. No trading. Card games on the corner. Hard industry in the wake of the inner city. The deep blue shade. Greys and browns. Alma’s Cash and Carry. Photo copies doing here.
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Engagement I am walking on the same streets I had panned over during initial explorations of the city. I begin on the east side, drifting toward the northern parts of the original inner city. As my perspective shifts imagination quickly becomes image. The macro becomes micro, only to become macro again within itself – the entire city can be seen beneath the walker’s feet as the pavement tessellates into the Cartesian. I begin to interpret the city street as a branch in a complex and vast urban fractal. Each street is dependent on the next for its connection and continuation. The geography of the street corner repeats itself infinitely on a linear passage through the city, mirrored again when the walker changes direction. Rhythmic, at times harmonious, other times jarring but never ceasing. However, the word ‘fractal’ here can only be used cartographically, as the symmetrical and linear plan of the city is completely non-existent at street level. Recurring pavement greys from above become complex assemblages of goods, produce, colour, innovation and architecture – instant, temporary, resilient and brilliant. AbdouMaliq Simone describes this assemblage when referring to urbanism as ‘increasingly heterogeneous elements’ together forming a collective whole.1 In my analysis of proximity to the city, I begin to layer these elements, almost from the view and trajectory of a satellite, edging closer and closer to the earth’s surface. Here, the macro takes on the homogeneous, exponentially dissolving as it nears the micro; the heterogeneous assemblage. The site on which this assembled architecture occurs is one of movement – trade is done on the pavement, almost in motion with the walker. Spaces of transition share their function with that of trade, conversation or rest. Therefore, the two functions or adaptations are in constant expansion
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and contraction within the pavement space, shifting the path of the walker as the two jostle for priority. This adaptation from ‘empty’ space to one of multifunctionality sits interestingly next to thoughts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who describe similar spatial concepts as: The sedentary space is striated by walls, enclosures and routes between the enclosures, while the nomadic space is smooth, marked only by 'strokes' that are erased or shift with the journey.2
Francesco Careri expands on this stating: […] sedentary space is denser, more solid, and therefore full, while that of the nomad is less dense, more fluid, and therefore empty.3
Johannesburg, and certainly the African city, contradicts these descriptions (more so the latter than the former) as lines between ‘full’ and ‘empty’ spaces are increasingly blurred, and pavements become an extension of the built form. Few places epitomize this phenomenon like ‘Little Addis’ in the Johannesburg CBD’s northern sector. Considered home away from home for many Ethiopian migrants, nomadic space and sedentary space are close to indistinguishable. Pavement stalls and their stock rise high above the walker on either side of the thoroughfare, while passers-by shuffle through the inside/outside space in single file. The ceaseless assemblage continues into the foyers of high-rise blocks, up the staircases and throughout the floors – spanning 4,5 or 6 high. As the mind zooms out again to an infinite and duplicating grid of greys, the heterogeneous returns to the homogeneous – the eclectic assemblage departs from the imaged to the imagined.
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The old Market Street on the east side. Shops and their trade move out onto the pavement. Westward. Merchants attempt to grab the attention of possible customers with chants and tongue clicks. Cont. Use next door. The Johannesburg Sun. Lifted off the ground. Removed from street level and all of its associated connotations. Fears. Preconceptions. Appearing safe. Jeppe Street. An abandoned tower block. Burnt in a blaze stands as a place-marker. Building façades hold an anonymity in total contrast to their street-level hives of sounds and scents. Eloff Street. BreÍ Street. Then Plein. Then de Villiers. The walk allows one to become invisible but for mere split seconds. Moments of eye contact caught between co-walkers. Both invisible bar for that moment in time. Airtime airtime airtime airtime. Von Wielligh Street silent southward.
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Memory Map
Modes of Looking Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.1
I begin my thoughts with a reference to those of Susan Sontag on the photograph as object. It is here that I begin to redefine my own visual representation of the built environment. I begin to depart from the photographed image in favour of an increasingly tactile mode of image-making. Through the act of walking, I am urged to feel the subject rather than merely represent it through a series of mechanical and optical processes. Classic or established modes of rendering and looking at the built environment are therefore altered through methodologies that I have developed, adopted or drawn inspiration from. Herein lies the frame through which this study is composed. It is this frame that allows me to render an image that is a truer representation of the African city at pavement level. This frame, however, is one of contradiction: During my wandering and interaction with the surface of the city, I make a realization suggesting that the photographic image may serve as less of a truth but further toward an untruth in the context of rendering contemporary urban space in the African city. Or rather, a medium that rarely renders the said subject in its totality. Typically regarded as the contrary, John Berger speaks about the photographic image in relation to other forms of documentation, stating: No other kind of relic or text from the past can offer such a direct testimony about the world which surrounded other people at other times.2
It is through the creation of two works titled The Outer City and City Centre (seen on the following pages) that this realization takes root. The Outer City is a series of
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photographs made in a periphery zone in relation to the Johannesburg CBD. Here I photograph twenty-five concrete columns situated on the pavement in order to control the access of cars onto it. I then arrange these photographs in order of occurrence during a circuitry walk ‘around the block’. These photographs render a textured and somewhat stylized image of the city’s hard surfaces, however, it is here that the sensory experience ends. In seeking to lessen and ultimately minimize the layers between myself and the surface of the city, I interrogate the camera as a tool for visual representation. I attempt to bring the inner workings of the camera onto the outside, discarding the lens and aperture along with its manipulation of reality. In doing so, I introduce paper as a medium, inviting reality to manipulate it. The result of this action comes in the form of City Centre, as well as a number of works that followed using similar techniques. This piece sees the layering of paper directly onto the surface of the pavement, pressed with graphite to reveal its impression. Here the tactile path becomes image. Further to the physical process of imaging the surface of the city, I add a geographic element to the exercise; the consideration of the image in relation to Johannesburg. In determining the point at which this action is to take place, I establish the co-ordinates on which the centre of Johannesburg occurs – Jeppe Street, just outside of the Johannesburg Post Office the base of its pin in contemporary cartography. Through this action, I answer a question that had hovered over this study since the first commute across the M2 westbound what does the centre of Johannesburg look like, what does it feel like?
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The Outer City
City Centre
In creating a body of work inspired by the surface of the city, much like my view on the camera in this urban context, I attempt to render a tactile image that is as accurate as possible to that of a contemporary African city, and the hive of activity that buzzes on its multi-faceted surface. Not only is the image a representation of a 10x10in square, pressed with graphite, at a certain point in the city; it is the African city from above and the market place at street level – both the macro and the micro. It represents the city walker on the journey of everyday urban life – each stroke in the wake of the pedestrian collectively forming the moving parts of a nomadic city3. It is here that I take recognition of the importance that the walk holds in the urban experience as well as in the field of urban research. Through this mode of engagement, the walk takes on a significance that is two-fold. First of these is the unrivaled sense of place that is achieved through a physical traversal – a sense of place that has resulted in the works in this study, as well as being a crucial component in looking at African cities. This sphere of urban research is considered by Rike Sitas as she contributes: […] much urban research still tends to focus on rational means of enquiry. […] This rigidity to the normal research process may produce rigorous results, but may not be able to adequately deal with all the surprises of African cityness, in all their aesthetic and affective messiness.4
It is as a response to this observation that I wish to place this work – rendering not the homogeneous city in its statistical rigidity, but rather the city that is felt and experienced by the walker on its dynamic streets.
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Second of this double-fold significance of the walk, here, is the walk as object. In becoming part of the street’s ebb and flow, I consider the act of walking as a medium during my rendition of the city. Similarly in my interrogation of the camera and the eventual reconfiguration of it, the walk becomes both action and aesthetic object. Referring to the following piece titled Walkscapes, I illustrate motion as a byproduct of walking. During the course of 10-step movements through the inner city, I suspend a pen above my notebook, allowing the ink to span the pages as the elements react to motion. The result of this deliberate action drawn from an otherwise banal activity is a cross-section of human kinesis – a topography of movement.
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Walkscapes
During the course of this study and my aim to image an imagined city, the journey has revealed a series of renditions framing and layering a city through its surfaces, objects and routes. On completing an initial, experimental phase of rendering the contemporary urban environment, one can’t help but imagine again.
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The points of departure and arrival are less important, while the space between is the space of going, the very essence of nomadism, the place in which to celebrate the everyday ritual of eternal wandering. Francesco Careri
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Acknowledgements To the organisations and individuals who have contributed to the realization of this work, minor or influential, direct or indirect; thank you: VANSA, NAC, Africalia, dala, Lauren von Gogh, Vaughn Sadie, Molemo Moiloa, Lorenzo Nassimbeni and Sumayya Rawat. A special thank you to doung Jahangeer, whose thoughts and encouragement has inspired so much of this work.
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References Foreword 1. Foucault, M. (1982) Space, Knowledge and Power. In Dryfus, H & Rabinow, P (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. 2. Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia. Introduction 1. Bunn, D. (2008). Art Johannesburg and Its Objects. In Nuttall, S & Mbembe, A (Eds.), Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (137-169). Engagement 1. Simone, A. (2008). People as Infrastructure. In Nuttall, S & Mbembe, A (Eds.), Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (68-90). 2. Careri, F. (2002). Walkscapes: Walking as an aesthetic practice, 38. 3. Careri, F. (2002). Walkscapes: Walking as an aesthetic practice, 38. Modes of Looking 1. Sontag, S. (1973). On Photography, 2. 2. Berger, J. (1972). Ways of Seeing, 10. 3. Careri, F. (2002). Walkscapes: Walking as an aesthetic practice 4. Sitas, R. (2016). Approaching African Cities: Public-Facing Cultural Co-Production. [Contributor; Approach: Cultural Production in a Shifting Social Context. KZNSA, April/May 2016. Curator Vaughn Sadie]. Concluding quotation Careri, F. (2002). Walkscapes: Walking as an aesthetic practice, 38.
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Paulo Menezes is an artist/photographer based in Durban, South Africa. His personal work is located in the realm of conceptual documentary, with a keen interest in the notion of process. A large portion of his work explores the built environment; this allows him to visually explore the foundations of a city and, more specifically, how people navigate through urban space. More recent works have explored mapping of spaces on a macro and micro level. In 2013 Paulo completed a National Diploma in Photography through the Durban University of Technology. Paulo is Vice Chairperson of the Durban Centre for Photography (DCP) – a collective of photographers that have realized a number of exhibitions and projects, both locally and internationally. As well as facilitating educational programs, he has taken on the role of a mentor. Paulo is also part of the team at dala alongside Creative Director doung Jahangeer. dala is a multi-disciplinary creative collective bringing about social change through art-architecture.
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