segopotso sa gomora: a form(less) archive

Refiloe Namise. 2022. Episode 1: Conversations that happened at #39 -. image courtesy of the artist

I’m about to rewind to a number of scenes fromEpisode 3: Ditshwantso Tsa Rona – translated it means “Our Images”. Segopotso sa Gomora is an exhibition by Refiloe Namise and it is laid out as a trilogy that follows a sequence of contemplations around embodiment, meaning making, collecting, feeling, materiality and translation with the Alexandra township archive. 

The trilogy, like a mise en scene, crossfades between different media, texts, drawings, performances and video works that each bookmarks iconic events that took place in Alexandra Township. Episode 1: Conversations that happened at #39, Episode 2:Bus ea ko 7, The Inauguration and Episode 3: Ditshwantsho Tsa Rona are events that entail the bus boycott movement, the housing projects of the 70s and the mass migration to Johannesburg. Colloquially known as Gomora, Alexandra is a place that is predominantly a black settlement where many migrant labourers from rural South Africa settled when they worked in the gold mines of the city. Gomora is a space that is characterized by the precarity of its housing infrastructure and living conditions. It is located on the outskirts of the wealthiest suburb in Johannesburg, Sandton. Due to the marginalisation of Alexandra township a veiling of its own struggle narratives during Apartheid South Africa have been invisibilized, furthering a singular story about this place.

Going back to these scenes;- the artist centre stage is adorned in a red outfit. For the artist, Red is a character whose form shapeshifts into hand painted texts, costumes, a red bus, a shovel or a red “stoep”- veranda. Red is a recurring vessel that locates the past to the current re-enactments that are re-performed by the artist in Alex and in the gallery. 

The artist is photocopying handmade bricks that were made in Episode 1. The grating sound from the copier is amplified in the background as the public enters the Point of Order, the gallery of the Wits School of Arts. Immersed in the compilation of the “findings”, a video of a second figure, also in red, dances in an open veld. This body moves with softness against a dry and dirtied terrain. 

A series of A2 sized, black and white posters- coarsely grained depict proclamations that mirror the societal tensions in present-day Alexandra. In them you will find statements such as “Talking Walls of the voiceless” and photographs of the police presence in the community are plastered on the walls of the gallery. In conversation with Refiloe, the artist narrates the exclusivity of the Alex archives, and the difficulty behind interacting with its contents. She describes how this particular archive that she was engaging in was not permitted to leave the premises of the Cullen Library at the University of the Witwatersrand where she studied. The limited proximity to the archive generated a broader questioning around belonging and for who it was intended for and negotiating the inaccessibility via re-enactments from the archive.

Her reinterpretation of the archive engages the politics of authorship that determines which spaces, and which people become worthy of being acknowledged or memorialised in Gomora. A photocopier as a technique allows the audience permission to claim a piece of the archive by giving back reproductions of this knowledge. A copy of the river sand brick, in a banal representation, still carries an elusive meaning to the public regarding how it was made and where its materials were sourced. This contradiction could speak to the unobtainable knowledge(s) and basic skills gap that have perpetuated the high rate of youth unemployment in South Africa. The loose bricks contain a connection to the construction of the houses that were built using the river sand, but they also become symbolic of the protest culture whereby infrastructure is often destroyed with them. 

Taking its influence from media formats like television and documentaries, Namise’s recollection of the archive is “republished” in a visceral material language. She transcribes the house plans from the archive into a life sized charcoal mural drawing that towers over a dropsheet of dried river sand bricks laced with gold leaf that she made by hand. Buckets containing the brick mixture remain in the space as remnants of the labour. These gestures become a negotiation for the artist in how to embody and to care for the space. 

The exhibition through the medium of materials offers a moment for stillness and carefulness. Most of the re-enactments see the artist wearing a dress and safety gloves which contrasts the rigidity of the materials that she works with like cement and finished bricks. Reused buckets and dust residue from the bricks is contrasted by a video of the artist sifting the waters of the Jukskei river that runs through Gomora.

The Collective Accountability in How We Remember: 

Episode 3 offers a critical lens into the habits that often impact the relationship(s) that ordinary citizens have to the spaces they inhabit. These spaces made up of homes, vacant land, abandoned buses, or rivers that have over time become polluted, carry memories from the past. Namise reflects on multiple moments where the act of remembering is faulted by a neglect from the state. Remembering should not be an event that becomes a spectacle but rather, it should be a gesture that is invested in finding other means for communicating and commemorating the past even in simplistic approaches, however subtle or overt the gestures may appear, how can we hold ourselves responsible for our own remembering. 

Segoposto sa Gomora was shown as part of Refiloe Namise’sMFA in Creative Research submission at the point of Order in Johannesburg.

shorter version of the review was published on the SARN newsletter: https://sarn.ch/publications/microreview-segopotso-sa-gomora

Images courtesy of the artist

Refiloe Namise. 2022. Episode 3: Ditshwantsho Tsa Rona. image courtesy of the artist

Refiloe Namise. 2022.Episode 2:Bus ea ko 7. image by Reshma Chhiba 

Refiloe Namise. 2022. Episode 1: Conversations that happened at #39. image by Reshma Chhiba