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the whites are gong to end up pulling out of south africa altogether, leaving the natives to their primal scene, the simian condition, condemned as they are to endemic aids and mutual extermination, thanks to the weapons the west generously continues to send them.

a whole continent is being sealed off - not to make it a protected sanctuary, but a sink to be done away with.

jean baudrillard
fragments

AFTERMATH ARTEXTRA 7 MAY - 7 JUNE / www.artextra.co.za

Artists: Joni Brenner, Guto Bussab, Natasha Christopher, Adam Davies, Stephen Hobbs, Bronwyn Lace, Churchill Madikida, Sandile Zulu

In his book, Scene of the Crime (1997), curator and theorist Ralph Rugoff discusses artists from the west coast of the States, who, over a period of 35 years, produced a body of work that embraced the logic of forensics - evidentiary markers, traces, and residues that speak of an ‘aftermath’ of an event, action or happening.

In the introduction to the catalogue, Rugoff outlines his conceptualization of this aesthetic - an artistic practice that suggests a link to forensics, or addresses the art object as if it were a kind of evidence, where emphasis is placed on the viewer’s role as investigator, and where works often have a trace, or reflect a history, of prior actions and motivations. The use of such an aesthetic offers a moment where we may ‘raise reasonable doubt’ around any given narrative, or more rhetorically, around the very instability of Narrative as a concept. The word ‘aftermath’ also refers to the concept of consequence, a ‘given result’; the term may also refer to a trauma suffered, or an event endured.

This show seeks to engage with a group of contemporary practitioners who embrace this ‘aesthetic of the aftermath’, and whose works are linked by ‘”…the type of approach they demand from their audience. Taken as a whole, this art puts us in a position akin to that of the forensic anthropologist or scientist, forcing us to speculatively piece together histories that remain largely invisible to the eye.” (Rugoff, 62)

Using enormous photographic prints, horizon-forming wall paintings,
sculpture the scale of architecture, collosal scaffolding structures and gargantuan installations, Stephen Hobbs draws on the nature of the physical, psychological and social urban beast of Durban to explore how the city is in constant flux. Hobbs notes that “Modern cities are organised into grids, but within those grids there’s disorder. It’s a phenomenon of the city I try to image.”

world premiere at the floor party, johannesburg, 15 march 2008

william kentridge watching “click here to unsubscribe” during the floor party

Responding to the space in three parts, Stephen Hobbs has produced a body of small scale assemblage sculptures incorporating found objects, a large scale assemblage installation and a site specific exterior building treatment. This body of work has been inspired by Hobbs’ visit (in late 2006) to Jeff Koons’ Studio and photographic documentation from the top of the Lever House and Seagram’s buildings in New York respectively. Having used the building as a space to develop the work over the past month, the ‘closing’ will culminate in the revealing of the three parts mentioned.

From the start Digital Africa felt different. First there was its setting. Located in amongst the art at the Africa Remix Exhibition at the Jozi Art Gallery in the heart of the city’s CBD, getting there required us to first navigate the chaos of the down-town taxi rank. 9am and bizi-ness already in full swing: office-bound suits jostling against illegal immigrants; street vendors selling black pirate technology; a cardboard signing promising “Dr Abu solves all your problems. Brings luck in business matters. True & lasting love.” A place where worlds collide and the sounds come from outside –American gangsta rap mixing it up with kwaito beats and Soukous sounds; a polyglot of different rhymes and rhythms reconfiguring the notion of ethnicity and identity in a crazy stew of “anything goes”.

Entering into JAG offered little relief. Instead we were faced with Simon Njami’s sprawling Africa Remix: an explosive exhibition featuring 85 artists from 25 countries on the African continent and the Diaspora that aimed to reshuffle the cards, “to show that our present situation is hybrid in character and therefore a reflection of globalization.”

Then there was the conference’s structure. Instead of corralling speakers, practitioner and thinkers into their respective disciplines or framing sessions under neat headings, Digital Africa mixed it up. Session One set the tone: throwing together artists, curators, architects and urban geographers and interspersing them with art interventions and live link-ups to the rest of the continent.

Straight outa Egypt, curator Bassam El Baroni kicked things off. He started with a warning on the postcolonial drive to deploy technology as a social and political tool. Speaking out against what he termed “digital orientalism”, he called for artists to fly in the face of the rhetoric of education and business and to seek out a “new New Media language”, one cut free from the traps and tropes of old mean-and-manipulation systems.

Next up, urban geographer and artist Ismael Farouk presented examples of his own practice. Inhabiting the borderlands between commercial needs and urban activism, Farouk detailed his drive to find new artistic and technological methodologies to understand, map and explore the contemporary African urban environment and in so doing to challenge the forces of globalisation in their race to realign the city in the heirarchy of the global economy.

The live crossing to Saki Mafiundikwa at the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts further undermined the myth of the global economy. Breaking with the utopian belief that globalization automatically equals the “global village”, Mafiundikwa highlighted the imbalances of power that characterise contemporary Africa – quite literally by drawing attention to the unstable power supply that prohibits the use of technology in so many African cities. “Digital Africa,” suggested Mafiundikwa should be renamed “Africa Offline”.

“Digital Africa,” vs “Africa Offline”; mobility vs memory; fixed lines vs commuter culture all came into play in architect Mpheti Morojele presentation on his provocative architectural practice that attempts to deal with legacies of the dislocated city, to accommodate rural habits in urban settings and to allow for the new lifestyles of a culture going through transition. In the light of his experiences, he called for artists and urban planners to rethink their concept of the 21st century city and to displace stereotypes with strategies that look at the “city as road”, account for commuter culture, address the lack of infrastructure and highlight the ongoing interplay between mobility and memory that characterise today’s migrant mobile populations.

Respondent Jason Hobbs advocated a similar from-the-ground-up approach. According to Hobbs, instead of falling victim to the “World Wide Wait” that comes with the delay in government delivery of infrastructure, African cities are “getting on with it” themselves, setting up informal internet cafes and switching over to cellular culture.

The final provocation from the panel was a hard hitting one, coming from artist, film maker and provocateur Aryan Kaganof who bit back at the Afro-digirati for playing into the hands of commerce in their preoccupation with mapping. Dismissing the practise as the “Emperors New Bytes”, a fashion trend that mindlessly follows corporate concerns he suggested that perhaps “New media is a good place not to be.”

Being and non-being? Wired vs weird? Kulcha and commerce? The contradictions didn’t stop there. In fact if anything, the second panel was more dizzying. Writer, academic and cultural producer Adam Haupt opened up with a paper addressing global capitalism, technology and intellectual property. He explored how the balance of power was upset in favour of the corporation and highlighted the need for new ways of approaching the creation, the production and the dissemination of knowledge.
From there it was a fast jump-cut to archaeologist and museologist Lorna Abungu, who took on the challenges of reconciling history and development, tradition and technology. Drawing on her experiences at institutes across the continent, she warned against global hi-tech hegemony and called for technology to be adapted to suit specific local contexts.

Similarly entrepreneur and businessman Pavlo Phitidis cruised the contradictions of Digital Africa, calling for a new definition of “upwardly mobile” that includes tech-savvy, lower-income urban dwellers and commuters who are creating a new, dynamic street-level high-tech economy based on mobility and the mobile phone.
Finally it was over to the respondents who were left to sum things up. An impossible task? Precisely! As both Christo Doherty (Head of Digital Arts at WITS) and story-teller Lindiwe Nkutha suggested: the discussions at Digital Africa left more questions than answers. It is, however, precisely this irresolution that constitutes a large measure of the discussion’s value.

Rather than offer specific solutions, answers to all your problems, luck in business matters, true & lasting love, Digital Africa was a provocative remix that brought about sense of permanent uncertainty about the role of art and technology in our lives. In this sense it was a true African Remix: an open system mash-up that invited us all to break with the utopian belief that globalization automatically equals the “global village” and that hi-tech solutions are smarter than low-tech interventions. Think a sometimes chaotic, even incoherent intellectual mixed tape that provoked us all to use technology to question both the silence of colonial domination and domination of post-colonial discourse: to excavate forbidden pasts; to express nonconformist desires; to create dis-census in the pursuit of “usable” solutions to present-day representational dilemmas - and to do so in a way that privileges the telling of a much more complex story of African life, one that reflects the myth of “post-colonialism” (where traditional colonial “mother” countries have simply been replaced by multinational corporations) and explores our cities as the archipelagos of cultural difference they truly are.

At the same time it was a call to remix, re-look, relocate and radicalise the very discourse and the language we use to explore and discuss these issues; to be aware of the relationship between technology and language and to acknowledge how language is used to dominate and control. And, yeah, call it over-optimistic or even jingoistic but, in so doing, to just possibly begin to create a new language, a multidisciplinary one that reflects that “difference determines differently” and speaks to the here and the now; a language that is our own and empowers us to explore and work in the continual slipstream between our memories of the past and our aspirations for the future.

AFRICA REMIX PANEL DISCUSSION # 2
DIGITAL AFRICA
28 July 2007 10:00-16:00, Johannesburg Art Gallery
The Digital Africa discussion explored a diversity of approaches to the debate on art and technology in Africa. Examining locally relevant and creative uses of technology across varied fields and disciplines, the panel focused on how this ultimately influences the production and definition of contemporary African art.
Chaired by Marcus Neustetter and Stephen Hobbs (The Trinity Session)
The discussion panels comprised of Adam Haupt (Cape Town), Ismail Farouk (JHB), Mpheti Morojele (JHB), Lorna Abungu (Kenya), Bassam El-Baroni (Egypt), Pavlo Phitides (JHB), Jason Hobbs (JHB), Aryan Kaganof (JHB) and Christo Doherty (JHB), Stacy Hardy (CPT), Gerrard Foster (JHB), Lindiwe Nkutha (JHB)

Artist projects, online and mobile contributions and a live reports from Saki Mafundikwa (Zaimbabwean School of Vigital Art), Goddy Leye (Cameroon), Marion Louisgrand (Senegal), James Webb (CPT) and Keith Goddard from the Tonga.Online project (Sinazongwe, Zambia) were presented during the day. Interactive mobile phone question and answer opportunities were provided during the sessions.