Urban Fabric Melville

This intervention forms part of the Melville Poetry Festival, 2012 on the intersection of 4th Ave and & 7th Str, Melville.

It is a comment on the state of our roads. I inserted some words to resonate with the festival title "More than just Words". I used left- over pieces of fabric donated by various people to literally weave into the fabric of the city - almost as if I am trying to mend the roads myself. With the left-over pieces of fabric I aim to address Johannesburg inhabitants who often feel powerless to do anything about the neglected state of our city - even the smallest action makes a difference and has the potential to become something more.

Melville Poetry Festival

I have been very busy with various art projects recently, but when the organisers of Melville Poetry Festival approached me to help promote the festival, I saw it as a good opportunity for grafmom to comment on the city of Johannesburg.

New readers of my blog should go back to my my initial posts to understand what street art is all about and what my personal aims are. My street art interventions (to recap) are about interaction, debate, fun and even irritation on the streets of Johannesburg in an effort to comment on the city, its workings and its people.

Currently I find Johannesburg a dirty, neglected, almost abandoned city mainly due to poor services and management. I drive past the chaos that the Rea Vaya transport project (BRT) has become on Empire Rd daily and am constantly disturbed by the way in which the yellow barriers seem to migrate over the streets and pavements. I decided to relocate some barriers in a quick street art project to create awareness and promote the festival simultaneously.

The coloured pipes spouting from the tops of the barriers in a festival manner were made from off cut pipes left behind by Neotel after ripping up our pavements and leaving a general mess behind.

As always I shall clean up after myself.

Self portrait: imbrication: the bluest eye

(Found wall with graffiti posters, spray paint, pastel pencil using collage)

on being grafmom

.....consciously playing a role, acknowledging the relativity of my reality or the fictional character of my reality.

Learn the text expected of me, wear the suitable costume. Get my body in the shape considered pleasant and find a mask that would not show too much of my individuality. I am a spectator of myself, constantly judging and adjusting my performance.

I believe if I can achieve this and live with it I shall find my own reality and true identity.

"Women invented a reality they could keep under control, a consciously subjective reality: they became artists."

wiry

Another madonna - the barbed wire a metaphor for the barriers she faces in her complicated life.

inspired: Ernest Pignon Ernest

Wall of JCE, St Andrew's Rd, Parktown:

Deborah, meaning honey bee, is known for her flaming hair. After being abused by her first husband, she became an alcoholic and ended up on the streets. Fourteen years ago she fell pregnant and turned to the Anglican Church. She was rehabilitated and has been running an Anglican Nursery School for the children of abused women for ten years.

The dual nature of the bee symbolises the material and the spiritual aspects of life, as well as the creative feminine aspects of in all people . The image further plays on her nourishing and sustaining work in her community,

inspired by Swoon

Corner Jan Smuts and Bolton Ave, Parktown North:

moving forward

Yesterday: 14 Sept
Today: 15 Sept
Vrededorp:


The third woman is an amalgamation of several women. I named her Aisha, which means alive; she who lives. She was born into a Muslim family and grew up in Vrededorp where her father owned a dressmaker and fabric shop. She qualified as a teacher. After an arranged marriage she was expected to wear a burka and was subjected to emotional abuse and a very restricted life.

With the support of her moderate Muslim community and friends she divorced her husband and now lives with her two children. She discarded what she experienced as limiting and restrictive clothing and today is a senior teacher.

The image portrays the discarding of liminality and re-integration into society.

Finding my feet

Jan Smuts Ave, going north, just before highway offramp, next to KPMG entrance.

The second woman I portray is Mamello ( meaning patience) . She grew up in the Free State. She was raped by her uncle at the age of fifteen. She left an abuse marriage after 27 years when she was 46 years old and fled to a home for abused women in Johannesburg where we met. She has four children. Her body bears permanent scars. Today she makes and sells vetkoek to schoolchildren and workers who pass her makeshift stall every day.

Mamello dreams of her own little house with electricity.

In this work I allude to the performance art of Nelisiwe Xaba (Black!White? - 2009). She states: "In my art my body is my instrument" (Sichel 2009,29).

Mamello's instrument is damaged, but she can dream again. The traditional skirt refers to a Sesotho female initiation garment.

Acid water still spewing

Corner Jan Smuts and Empire Rd: 24 Aug 2011. Refer to relevant post of 2010

.

Someone is keeping the acid mine water message, with boots and all, going. Keep it up!

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."

The image denotes the power of an icon, especially in its absence.

Jacob Zuma not perceived as a saint

Interesting feedback comments on my graffiti found during March 2011.

St Jacob ( Escom edition)

Why graffiti?

Graffiti (and other forms of urban art) has its own beauty, as does the city in which the art finds itself. It takes the form of an ongoing conversation. It is an expression of the city which lives and breathes: discovering, erasing and editing its opinions as its inhabitants discover, erase and edit their own.

This artistic expression is organic and so is its reception, especially as it is part of the public domain.

(quoting Alex van Tonder)

"I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself - that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips;

and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself" (Claus Oldenburg)

St Jacob on cnr Empire and Jan Smuts.

St Jacob

2011. I think we are going to see and hear a lot from our politicians. With so many poor South Africans living in conditions that can only be described as hellish, I guess it is true their only hope for improvement will be in another life.

Mr Zuma claiming special powers on Barry Hertzog, Emmarentia.

....and to end the year on a great note:

Recognised here for their unique creative voice and first class execution, the top three winners:

Grafmom!! (and two others). Have a look at the latest one small seed magazine. Winners of the

"are you the new banksy" competition.

Cinderella

And with the year coming to a close, I just had to ask this question:

What now South Africa