I discovered tomasons when I read the book portrait with keys by Ivan Vladislavic. Everybody who lives in Johannesburg, or has lived here, should read this book.
"Johannesburg is a frontier city, a place with contested boundaries. Territories must be secured and defended or it will be lost. Today the contest is fierce and so the defences multiply. Walls replace fences, high walls replace low ones, even the the highest walls acquire electrified wire and spikes.
The tomason of access is our speciality. There are vanished gateways everywhere"(Vladislavic 2006, 185).
The term "tomason" originates from an art and architecture collective formed in 1986, called Rojo Kamatsu or translated, "roadside observation". It was recognised as part of the New Dada Movement and founded by Akasegawa Genpei.
Tomasons are the flashings and detritus of the incessant churn of buildings; of the destruction and redevelopment that characterizes all cities. Cities are no longer clean slates.
Tomasons are the useless, abandoned leftovers of the city. Stairs to nowhere, bricked-up windows and doorways, empty poles.
Genpei regards tomasons as elements attached to real estate, preserved in a way as to become useless objects. He views such objects as entirely passive, "eye-of-the-beholder" art; or meta-art. It is art created by the city, unintentionally.
I see tomasons as ultra-art: it observes the urban landscape and calls attention to to extraordinary aspects of ordinary objects. It creates disturbances between perspectives and reality.
