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."