Skeletal (in-)visibilities in the city – Rootless: a video sculptural response to the disconnected in Cape Town

Abstract

This article follows the construction and outcome of a series of installations based on an artwork created by the author, a life-size replica of a human skeleton made of tree twigs and branches, which journeyed across central Cape Town on a day tour. The work drew on museums, heritage and cities research, seminars and colloquia at the University of the Western Cape that problematised memorialisation, land, landscape, tourism, human remains, memory, archive and silences in histories in Cape Town. In a collaboration with another artist, Kitty Dörje, the skeleton was performed and set up in installations at Table Mountain National Park, Iziko Museum, Prestwich Street Memorial, Rhodes Memorial and the Table Mountain view from Blouberg beach. Along the journey new connotations began to occur between the skeleton and the places visited, the skeleton performing as a linking device. The resulting short film, Rootless, combined poetry, visuals and music, and was dedicated to ‘the silenced and forgotten people of Cape Town.’ This article traces the experiential process of the construction of the artwork installations and the performance of the skeleton in different environments, as a creative research process. The skeleton artwork constructs visual and conceptual links between spaces and histories in the city. It is argued that this visually disturbs the material silencing and erasure of past and present communities through evoking plural perspectives and histories, thus raising questions on issues of representation in which landscape and artwork become alternative forms of archive.

Keywords:

• city imaginaries
• ethnographic film
• memorialisation
• heritage
• Cape Town
• embodiment
• anthropology of art
• museology

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Kitty Dörje, an artist/filmmaker on the project, for camerawork and editing, and assistance with mise en scène. Meghna Singh, a filmmaker/artist, for editing. Dino Chapman van Rooyen, a musician, for providing the soundtrack. I must also thank Greatmore Art Studios for studio space and editing equipment. Thanks are also due to the University of the Western Cape for postdoctoral funding (VLIR, UWC Museums and Heritage, Mellon), Professor Jane Taylor, Centre for Humanities Research, for initial insight and enthusiasm for this work. Professors Ciraj Rassool and Leslie Witz, Heritage Disciplines, UWC, for abundant research knowledge that fuelled my inspiration, as well as Professor Gordon Pirie and Dr Noeleen Murray of the UWC Cities in Transition project, and Professor Patricia Hayes, Visual History, and Nicky Rousseau, History, for inspiration through their work.

Notes

1. St. George's Hospital Medical School, London, where I obtained a BSc Hons in Biomedical Science before changing to art and anthropology as a research field.

2. From what I have gathered, it is possible to tell from observation the gender of a skeleton with 85–95% accuracy, which indicates that 5–15% are undefined.

3. Berger (1972) argues that European art equally distances the image as an ‘appearance, or a set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time it first made its appearance’ in which the ‘art object, the thing, must be made mysteriously so’ (p. 9).

4. According to Walter (2004), ‘In everyday language, dry bones and ashes, which have lost their soft tissue and hence their “bodily” solidity, are typically described as human remains. Mummies and embalmed objects, each of which retain soft tissues, are described as dead bodies’ (p. 474).

5. Central Saint Martin's School of Art, London.

6. During the early stages of my PhD in anthropology of art at the University of Cape Town, I facilitated and took part in a collaborative exhibition which involved creating artworks for a pilot exhibition on the theme of slavery, ‘Dis Nag’ to coincide with the renaming of the Iziko Slave Lodge. In the material absence of slave artefacts, we created artworks in an exhibition exploring the relevance of slavery to the present. See Gibson (2009). ‘Dis Nag’ – the Cape's Hidden History of Slavery. Exhibition, Iziko Slave Lodge 1998.

7. Particularly through the work of Professors Ciraj Rassool and Leslie Witz of African Heritage and Museums in the History Department, as well as being exposed to the work of Patricia Hayes of Visual History, also Nicky Rousseau in History, Jane Taylor and seminars presented through the Centre for Humanities Research, as well as conferences and discussions as part of the Cities in Transition project with Professor Gordon Pirie concerning the city, multidisciplinarity and creativity.

8. Woodstock, Cape Town.

9. See Seremetakis (1994) and Classen (1993) for a humanities/sociological/historical/anthropological take on the issue of memory as sensual, as well as Carter (2010) for a neurological approach.

10. District Six, now a barren area of land in the city bowl, is one of the few areas where people have been given the right to return. Many other forced removal areas have been built over or have remained as is, and are not subject to similar fates.

11. There have been other fierce debates over human remains in South Africa, such as the return of Saartjie Baartman's remains (see Rassool 2011) and the exhibition ‘Miscast’ at Iziko National Gallery (Skotnes 1996). See Rassool (2011) for more details on these issues.

12. See Gibson (2013).

13. Performed at Off the Wall Poetry Sessions, Touch of Madness, 2010.

14. This does not, of course, exclude the possibility of taking the skeleton to more areas of Cape Town in the future.

15. Visiting artist at Greatmore Studios 2011, from India.

16. Previously exhibited as an installation on 5 August 2011 at Greatmore Studios, William Kentridge talk and associated group exhibition.

17. Rhodes was also almost certainly homosexual (Maylam 2002).

18. Also see Field and Swanson 2007:7#As is evident in photographs in Outeniqua Railway Museum, George.

19. Till (2008), looking at Cape Town and Melbourne, also argues for a role for art as an activist place-based memory practice.

20. Certainly many of those I have spoken to who have visited or know of the presence of the coffee shop did not realise the story behind the memorial site. Others had been past it, but did not realise it was a memorial, or were not sure.

21. To add to the irony, the café at Prestwich Street memorial is called ‘Truth’ and, as a façade, it masks the underlying memorial.

22. Rassool and Witz (1996) also write that ‘tourism is not merely a business. It is also about the construction, packaging, transmission and consumption of images and representations of society and its past…through the “tourist gaze” on landscapes and townscapes, on society and history, the visitor affirms and re-affirms his imagined world’ (pp. 335–336).

23. Conversation with Ciraj Rassool, August 2011.

24. Meghna Singh, visiting Greatmore Artist 2011, who also helped edit the film Rootless, for example, obtained permission at a later date to film in the archive within Iziko, where she conducted an interview on lace.

25. Given the date of publication of ‘Skeletons in the Cupboard’ in 2000 and the fact that de-accession was agreed only in 2011, this means the process of exit has taken over 10 years.

26. The visual writing conceptualisation was by Kitty Dörje.

27. As an aside, Kuchler (1987) has written about Malangan sculpture as a means to reference land associations and ownership through the motifs it embodies; as an analogy, the skeleton takes on associations with different landscapes on its journey, its body becomes invested with a sense of remembered place, history and space, even evoking ownership.

28. Field and Swanson (2007) state ‘All the senses – seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching – are crucial to how people engage with and process the plethora of sensations that a culturally diverse city such as Cape Town offers, shapes and denies’ (p. 7).

29. Peter Aronsson (2011), in his keynote address at SIEF, Lisbon, 2011 argued that, giving the example of the remains of the ‘Woman from Backaskog’ being presented first as Nordic evidence of Swedish nationhood and then as a universalised and de-nationalised narration of historical social life, human remains in museums too are re-contextualised and re-interpreted according to the contexts of the times.

30. Campbell (2004) argues that ‘images do bring a particular kind of power to the portrayal of death and violence. Seeing the body and what has been done to it is important. Images alone might not be responsible for a narrative's power, but narratives that are un-illustrated can struggle to convey the horror evident in many circumstances.’ The presence of the ‘proof’ of human trauma and suffering through images or even human remains is also evident, for example, in displays in Rwanda, Cambodia, Holocaust museums.

31. For example, the ‘Without Sanctuary’ exhibition of photographs of lynching in the USA (Campbell 2004).

32. Again, refer to Rassool and Witz (1996) for an in-depth discussion of these issues.