Inhabitant By Sello Pesa and Vaughn Sadie (2011) or how to (re)imagine public spaces in Johannesburg through art

Abstract

Why look at art to understand an African city like Johannesburg? African cities are often studied through the lens of urban dilemmas that are supposed to characterize them. Whereas it is common to study the role of art in the (un)making of Western cities, it is still quite uncommon to do so for African cities. In the case of South African cities, more and more scholars are nevertheless using art in order to challenge this imbalance and to propose a more qualified and sensitive approach to daily life in urban spaces. This paper aims to pursue this effort by looking at Inhabitant, a performance organized by Sello Pesa and Vaughn Sadie in Johannesburg in 2011. From a cultural and urban geographer’s perspective, this performance is particularly interesting since it is offering a new vision of Johannesburg and its public spaces as they are lived by city dwellers, while inviting the audience of the performance to act upon this vision, if not to perform it. Through close qualitative analysis of Inhabitant, I will argue that art can transform urban spaces, both symbolically and materially, by fostering a change in perceptions and, consequently, in representations and practices.

Pourquoi s'intéresser à l’art pour comprendre une ville africaine comme Johannesburg ? Les villes africaines sont souvent étudiées à travers le prisme des problèmes urbains qui sont censés les caractériser. S'il est courant d’analyser le rôle de l’art dans la (dé)construction des villes occidentales, cela est rare pour les villes africaines. Dans le cas des villes sud-africaines, un nombre croissant de chercheurs utilisent néanmoins l’art afin de contrebalancer ce déséquilibre et de proposer une approche plus nuancée et plus sensible de la vie quotidienne dans les espaces urbains. Cet article cherche à poursuivre cet effort en étudiant Inhabitant, une performance organisée par Sello Pesa et Vaughn Sadie à Johannesburg en 2011. D'un point de vue de géographe culturel et urbain, cette performance est particulièrement intéressante puisqu’elle donne à voir une nouvelle vision de Johannesburg et de ses espaces publics tels qu’ils sont vécus par les habitants de la ville, tout en invitant le public de cette performance à mettre en oeuvre cette vision, à en être les acteurs. A travers une analyse qualitative d’Inhabitant, je montrerai que l’art peut transformer les espaces urbains, aussi bien symboliquement que matériellement, en nourrissant un changement de perceptions et, par conséquent, de représentations et de pratiques urbaines.

Keywords:

• art
• performance
• public spaces
• Johannesburg
• South Africa
• geography

Mots clés:

• art
• performance
• espaces publics
• Johannesburg
• Afrique du Sud
• géographie

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors of this special issue, Shari Daya and Rike Sitas, as well as the reviewers, for their valuable and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Statement of ethics

The research was approved by the Ecole normale supérieure de Paris.

Notes

1 To avoid any confusion, I will use the expression ‘art in public spaces’ rather than ‘public art’ to designate all types of art made in public spaces, irrespectively of funding sources.

2 This point may be qualified with regard to certain private secure spaces open to the public, such as shopping malls, which are more mixed and where a new relationship to others (Houssay-Holzschuch and Teppo 2009) and to oneself (Nuttall 2004) can be invented.

3 This feeling of insecurity stems from real violence: South Africa in general, and Johannesburg in particular, are among the most violent areas in the world. On a national level, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that the percentage of homicides in 2010 was 31.8 per 100,000 population, and, according to the South African police, the number of rapes reported was 127.6 per 100,000 population in 2012. However, the insecurity felt by the population of Johannesburg is not only a consequence of this real violence; it is also the result of an imagined violence, which is created from the representations that people have of this violence (Houssay-Holzschuch 2002).

4 The #FeesMustFall movement is a student-based one which started in 2015 in South African universities, particularly the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Students were protesting the increase of registration fees, while calling for a decolonization of education.

5 Since 2000, the City of Johannesburg has encompassed the former white, black, coloured and Indian municipalities, which were separate administrative entities during apartheid, in a single metropolitan region.

6 http://vaughnsadie.net/portfolio/inhabitant-johannesburg-dolly-rathebe-street.

7 http://www.vaughnsadie.net/v1/downloads/inhabitant%20version%20final%202%20email.pdf.

8 The performance was later shown in other urban contexts: Istanbul in October 2011, in the western part of Johannesburg’s inner city in 2012, and San Francisco in March 2014. This leads to the question of whether a performance created for and in a specific place can be transposed to other spaces (Kruger 2013).

9 The Goethe-Institut is a non-profit organization funded by the German Federal Government.

10 In the late 2010s, Jonathan Liebmann’s company, Propertuity, went into liquidation, but the broader Maboneng precinct still exists.

11 ‘Un événement microsociologique c’est toujours une aventure, dirait Simmel, quelque chose qui serait à la limite de l’essentiel et de l’accidentel. […] L’essence se manifeste, non dans l’apparence, mais dans l’occasion.’ Translated from French.