![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
Almost two decades into the post-apartheid era, inner-city Johannesburg – like much of South Africa – remains structured by deeply ingrained forms of physical and imaginative segregation. Building on architect Sarah Calburn's suggestion that one way to address these divisions would be to make the city's external or outside spaces feel more like domestic interiors as well as on the calls of writer Njabulo Ndebele for new forms of public intimacy, this article explores three distinct artistic projects that each attempt to push beyond segregation by opening up private homes for public perusal and/or making public space more intimate and home-like: Kgebetli Moele's novel Room 207, Christoph Gurk's performance art collection X Homes Johannesburg and Terry Kurgan's public photography/digital media experiment Hotel Yeoville. Working with concepts of home, hotels and hospitality, it theorizes the modes of ‘intimate exposure’ these projects enact as forms of hospitality or Derridean ‘hos(ti)pitality’ potentially capable of welcoming diverse groups into a shared public space while at the same time foregrounding inequalities in need of redress. While the role of artistic projects in shaping culture should not be overemphasized, the article also underscores how such works have emerged in contemporary South Africa as vibrant ways of thinking in public and thinking the public.
Notes
1. For more on Ndebele, see below. Liz McGregor and Sarah Nuttall's volume At Risk (Citation2007) is another key source for the idea of intimate exposure, which my use of the term ‘risky’ here references. In their introduction to At Risk, McGregor and Nuttall locate risk at the centre of post-apartheid culture, and define it and its importance in the following terms: ‘To take a risk is to embrace uncertainty; to accept the possibility of danger, distress or disaster. It is also an inherently creative act: without taking a risk, there is no prospect of surprise, change or unexpected gain … It is a way of taking on the unknown’ (Citation2007, p. 11). Finally, I should mention Neville Hoad's (Citation2007) work theorizing intimacy in the African context; Hoad usefully points out that the term ‘intimacies’ can function as ‘a frame for negotiating those various scales of analysis [transnational, national, local, personal] in the language of imagination and affect … bypass[ing] many of the difficulties in talking about the socially mediated experience of desire and embodiment in a global context that have plagued the older (and in many ways, more precise) vocabularies of psychoanalysis or anthropological reductions of these experiences to kinship patterns’ (Citation2007, pp. xxxii–xxxiii).
2. The concept is explored more thoroughly in Bystrom's unpublished manuscript, The Ties that Bind: Family, Home and Relation in Post-apartheid Culture.
3. For more elaboration of this point, see the introduction to this special issue.
4. On these last points, see also Ndlovu's contribution to this special issue.
5. For another, and excellent, reading of how such threading works specifically in the realms of fiction and non-fiction, see Meg Samuelson's essay ‘Walking Through the Door and Inhabiting the House’ (Citation2008).
6. For a more extended discussion of questions of security, see Cobi Labusagne's reading of Jane Alexendar's ‘Security’ installation in this special issue.
7. See for instance Andy Spitz's documentary, We Are Nowhere (2010), which captures on the film attitudes that led to the destruction of migrant homes and the struggle to rebuild them.
8. Specific essays where these points are made include ‘The Lion and the Rabbit’ (1999), ‘Iph'indlela?’ (2000) and ‘Learning to Give up Certitudes’ (2004), all in Ndebele (Citation2007a).
9. Key works about Hillbrow include Matabane's previously mentioned Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon; Ivan Vladislavic, The Restless Supermarket; Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to our Hillbrow; K. Sello Duiker, The Quiet Violence of Dreams; and M. Paul Grootboom, Cards.
10. See Hoad (Citation2007, pp. 113–114, 123) and Samuelson (Citation2008, p. 133) for discussions of this term in relation to Mpe's text; see also Kruger (Citation2008, Citation2009) for visual imaginaries of hospitality in recent South African film and television set in Hillbrow.
11. Michael Titlestad, ‘The Pitfalls of a Literary Debut’, 25 March Citation2007, Sunday Times. For a broader outline of the controversy, see Sam Raditlhalo (Citation2008, p. 93).
12. Indeed, it comes from Guy Tillim's haunting series Jo'burg, which documents the precarious conditions faced by many poor black individuals and families who moved to downtown Johannesburg after the apartheid laws were repealed and many middle-class and white citizens fled to the suburbs. It shows the decay of the living spaces that they are forced to inhabit, given absent or corrupt landlords and the ongoing inability of tenant committees to gain the legal status and material resources needed to transform buildings and urban blocks. The specific image chosen for the cover of Room 207 shows an image of a bar inside a house on Joel Road, Berea, where each room in the house has been transformed into a ‘one room hom[e] for family units, couples or individuals’ (Tillim Citation2005).
13. Even a highly appreciative critic like Deji Olukotun (Citation2006) notes that the text is ‘overly celebratory of womanizing’.
14. Lilienthal theorizes the original project in ‘Das voyeuistiche Erschrecken. Zu Idee und Konzept von X Wohnungen’ (Citation2003). He notes that the project was designed to address forms of social exclusion since Duisburg, in the industrial Ruhr region of Germany, is the home of large numbers of Turkish, Polish and Russian immigrants unevenly integrated into German society. Versions of the project have also been staged in Sao Paolo and Istanbul. For English-language information, see ‘Backstage with the Curator of X Homes Johannesburg, Christoph Gurk’, Sunday Times, 5 July 2010 <http://www.timeslive.co.za/entertainment/article535022.ece/Backstage-with-the-curator-of-X-Homes-Johannesburg-Christoph-Gurk> and ‘X Homes Marks the spot’, Mail and Guardian, 9 July 2010, <http://mg.co.za/article/2010-07-09-x-homes-marks-the-spot>
15. For a short clip from this performance, see ‘X Homes Johannesburg—Theater in the forbidden zone’ available online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w44121g4EuA
16. Specifically, she claims that ‘The most challenging thing I would say would be trying to be as realistic as possible. Because you have to grab the audience, you know, their attention, and you have to make them wonder is this still a show, or are we in the wrong place, what is happening’ (‘X Homes Johannesburg—Theater in the forbidden zone’).
17. In these tours, mainly white spectators are brought into the townships by private companies to experience ‘real’ African life. While the tours are often promoted as good for both the spectator and the host community, since it raises awareness and local revenue, there are numerous critiques of them.
18. See Kruger (Citation2008, pp. 8–9) for a fuller description of Tour Guides of the Inner City. The other exhibitions she cites are Inner City Works by Jo Ractliffe, CityScapes by Jay Pather and Urban (and) Fabrics by Hannah Le Roux, Katherine Rohde and University of the Witwatersrand architecture students. They all are, she notes, ‘ephemeral events with both found and created built environments and with the social performance of inhabitants alongside staged acts of temporary sojourners’ (Citation2008, p. 6). Kruger reaffirms her assessment of the usefulness of such projects in a later article, where she notes how they ‘challenged locals to undo their habitual relationships to the city’ (Citation2009, p. 239).
20. Kurgan explained the title of the project to me as follows: ‘The name had to do first, with thinking about hotels as being places that offer temporary, or transient private space. And hotels as the temporary repositories of so many private stories. And then of course the fact that so many people in Yeoville, living under the radar of the authorities in this country, have a very tenuous hold on both home and private space’. Personal communication, November 2011.
21. The following description is drawn from a visit that I took to the exhibition in July 2010 along with comments from a personal interview with Terry Kurgan carried out in March 2011 and Kurgan's presentation at the Wide Angle Public Photography conference at the University of the Witwatersrand, also in March 2011.
22. See http://www.flickr.com/photos/39982561@N06/4649552806/in/photostream/lightbox/; http://www.flickr.com/photos/39982561@N06/4929351744/in/photostream/lightbox/; http://www.flickr.com/photos/39982561@N06/4928764667/in/photostream/lightbox/; http://www.flickr.com/photos/39982561@N06/4929358750/in/photostream/lightbox/; http://www.flickr.com/photos/39982561@N06/4708430511/in/photostream/lightbox/
23. Alex Dodd nicely describes it in the following manner: ‘A utopian attempt to bind a community through a kind of inventory of interpersonal and collective relations, the project was forged on the premise that we do have time for each other's stories, that we are capable of celebrating each other's differences, that we are interested in knowing where people come from and how they grew up, what is precious to them. Rather than enumerating and describing the ways in which migrant communities have been excluded in South Africa, the exhibition attempts to sculpt a parallel space (both real and virtual) of inclusion, welcome, hospitality, acceptance, interest …’ (Dodd Citation2013, p. 10).
24. Kelly Gillespie powerfully expressed a similar caution about romanticizing home spaces in her presentation on intimate violence at the ‘Crime and Africa’ Conference, Yale University, March 2012. See Ndlovu (Citation2010) for a wider view of some of the problems that home can present.
25. I base this observation on Kurgan's ‘Wide Angle’ conference remarks.
26. Quoted in ‘X Homes Johannesburg—Theater in the forbidden zone’.