grafmom: July 2011

inroad: (n; an instance of something/someone being reduced by something/someone else)

My first woman, although she is only a little one, is a little girl named Sinenjongo which means we have hope. She regards me as her Other grandmother and has periodically been part of my household.

She loves playing with the old white, blue eyed baby doll given to me as a child by my grandmother. The image is a metaphor for her complicated and confusing situation being tied to the white and all it implies seen against the background of both our histories.

A large part of her life is spent traveling from one home to another - from her grandmother in the Eastern Cape, to her mother's apartment, to my house. The poster was pasted as part of my first phase onto a wall facing an unoccupied, liminal area next to her mother's apartment in Hillbrow.

It lasted from 16 to 30 July.

(grafmom only uses homemade, wheatpaste glue to paste her posters - for what it is worth!)

The Deconstructed Halo

After I found the comments on my graffiti labeling Jacob Zuma as a rapist, I decided to focus in my new intervention art-project on women I am involved with, who are still today, 17 years into the history of a New South Africa, victims of patriarchy, paternalism, stereotyping and abuse. I ask myself how much has really changed for ordinary women in this country.

My concept is grounded in the theory of liminality, as described by Victor Turner. The term refers to a state of in-between, denoting the second phase of initiation ceremonies when the initiant become symbolically detached from an earlier fixed point in the social structure and her status becomes liminal, even marginal. The individual lives outside her normal environment and are brought to question herself and the existing social order. She comes to feel without identity, nameless, spatio-temporally dislocated and socially unstructured (Turner 1974:231-270).

He states: "One's sense of identity dissolves to some extend, bringing about disorientation, but also the possibility of new perspectives".

If liminality is regarded as a time and place of withdrawal from normal modes of social action, it potentially can be seen as a period of scrutiny for central values and axioms of the culture where it occurs; one where normal limits to thought, self understanding and behaviour are undone.

I find myself also in such a liminal phase - no longer the privileged white woman, having to re-evaluate my own perspectives and cultural frameworks.

I chose seven women or madonnas; real individuals who survived their period of liminality and suffering, and re-assimilated into society on their own terms.

Although damaged and scarred, and with deconstructed halos, I regard them as the real saints.

Is it the end of the long walk?

Benson, the guard, told me that "many, many" pedestrians asked after the Mandela image. I placed a much smaller image, featuring an Eastern Cape landscape and cliched vanishing road on the building. Many notions around an icon becomes idealized and the ones who do the idealizing create their own versions of the truth.

A presence through absence

By the time of the first world wide Nelson Mandela Day on 19 July 2011, Mandela has left Jhb to return to his home in the Eastern Cape. Everybody realizes that he is very, very ill and fragile. I decided on a small performance during which I systematically removed his image.

A sad comment from a bystander (Benson, a guard) : "This is true. He walked."

Nelson Mandela: on becoming a modern icon

27 January 2011: Nelson Mandela was rushed to Milpark Hospital. Journalists went crazy and the streets around the clinic were closed to photographers. Rumours quickly started flying around that Nelson Mandela had passed away. The atmosphere was one of uncertainty and despondency.

I realised again how much Madiba has become a modern icon and forms part of the subconsciousness of all South Africans as a redeemer.

I created this mapping intervention on the side wall of Rosebank Fire Station, an iconic building to Jhb inhabitants. It soon became a landmark. Says Olivia Leich (Olafilms): "People in the area, including myself, use the Mandela image to give directions, such as: my office is just down the road where the Mandela is."