Writing the City from Below: Graffiti in Johannesburg

This thesis adopts a contrapuntal reading of Johannesburg through the work of Ivan Vladislavić. While it evaluates the dominant and pervasive readings of the city in current and historical scholarship, carefully considering the way in which its gold-mining origins have shaped a city that is dominated by a culture of surface, violence, and socio-historical amnesia, it ultimately aims to show how Vladislavić’s fiction subverts and challenges these prevailing means of perceiving Johannesburg. As part of inaugurating a depth reading of the city, Vladislavić sets about defamiliarising both the textual and urban landscape as a means of engendering a momentary state of lostness. The experience of lostness means that habitual markers are no longer able to guide or provide comfort to the textual and urban navigator. As a result, lostness dislodges accustomed ways of seeing, reading, and writing the city, thus allowing for both textual and urban rediscovery to ensue. The abandonment of conventions of meaning allows Vladislavić to render the city afresh. What his depictions reveal are the less commonly noticed aspects of Johannesburg city-life – in other words, what lies beneath its culture of surface. This depth reading uncovers a variety of palimpsests of both an urban and natural variety. Moreover, in this process, nature, something we tend to view as peripheral to the urban environment, is exposed and shown to exist in the shadows of the postcolonial city – haunting culture. This revelation ultimately deconstructs Johannesburg’s often paranoid culture of surface and proffers the ameliorative alternatives of natural flow, provisionality, and flux.

The city of Johannesburg can be represented, economically, philosophically and aesthetically, as geographically plural. The dialectic between the surface life of the city and its wealth-deriving underground spaces, and the concomitant activation of a third, liminal, space, ‘the edges’, characterises “the African modern of which Johannesburg is the epitome”. We examine the relationships between these urban spatialities as they are articulated in a programme of selected video artworks curated by the authors (L. Farber and A. Buys), which take the city of Johannesburg as their subject matter, source material or provenance. In the paper, we pay attention to how the uses and meanings of these spatialities may have shifted, or failed to shift, between their constructions in apartheid-era and contemporary, post-apartheid South Africa. We propose that the underground, the surface and the edges are at once identifiable modalities which emerge coherently in the works discussed and interconnected inflections of a singular urban phenomenon. Building on this, we observe that dialectic between the underground and the surface in Johannesburg contains echoes of the literary and artistic tropes of burial and resurrection, and Jacques Derrida’s notions of ‘hauntology’, in which he considers the spectral or ghostly as that which “happens” only between two apparently exclusive terms, such as “life and death”. In considering ‘Johannesburg’ as a metropolitan phenomenon in the selection of works discussed, we speak of a spectral, interstitial realm that exists in between the strata of surface (the stratum of life, goodness, health and visibility) and underground (a catacomb where the dead, the corrupt and the ailed are hidden). We thus offer a view of being-in-Johannesburg in which inhabiting takes place in-between, or in-passage between, porous, fluid spatial terms, wherein constant mediation takes place.

Abstract: This article examines the changing practice of urban portraiture in reference to a selection of postmillennial texts written by Ivan Vladislavić. These generically diverse texts trace and reflect on transformations sweeping Johannesburg after the fall of Apartheid, to some extent a metonymic representation of South Africa. An immediate impulse to inquire whether and, if so, how the writer explores the boundaries of portraiture, derives from an explicit textual and visual thematisation of the practice in two of Vladislavić’s works, i.e. the collection of “verbal snapshots” entitled Portrait with Keys and his joint interdisciplinary project, TJ& Double Negative, involving the writer and David Goldblatt, a South African photographer. The article concentrates primarily on the uses and adaptations of the city portrait genre. Vladislavić’s foregrounding of the genre category invites us to consider a series of questions: How does Vladislavić proceed with the appropriation and transformation of the traditional practice of city portrait? Do the portrayals of Johannesburg merely address the past? To what extent does Vladislavić propose contemporary adaptations of the practice? What happens to such categories as realism, accuracy, and likeness? What knowledge does portraiture generate? Finally, the article reflects on whether Vladislavić responds to the need for a new epistemological project in rendering the urban. Keywords: Vladislavić, Johannesburg, genre, city portrait, imaginary, epistemology

The following dissertation considers the ways in which we have come to perceive of our post-apartheid South African urban spaces. It focusses on the representation of our contemporary urban spaces as I posit that they are re-imagined in the works of Phaswane Mpe, K.Sello Duiker, Nadine Gordimer and Lauren Beukes. In particular, it is concerned with the representation of Johannesburg, and specifically Hillbrow, in relation to the space of the rural, the suburban enclave and the city of Cape Town. I argue that while so-called urban ‘slums’ such as Hillbrow have been denigrated in the local imaginary, the texts that I have selected draw attention to the potentialities of such spaces. Rather than aspiring to ‘First World’ aesthetics of modernity then, we might come to see such spaces as Hillbrow anew, and even to learn from them as models, so as to better create more fully integrated and dynamic African cities.

Avramidis, K., & Tsilimpounidi, M. (Eds.). (2017). Graffiti and Street Art: Reading, Writing and Representing the City. London: Routledge.

Graffiti and street art images are ubiquitous and enjoy a very special place in collective imaginary due to their ambiguous nature. Sometimes enigmatic in meaning, often stylistically crude and aesthetically aggressive, yet always visually arresting, they fill our field of vision with texts and images that no one can escape. As they take place on surfaces and travel through various channels, they provide viewers an entry point to the subtext of the cities we live in, while questioning how we read, write and represent them. This book is structured around these three distinct, albeit by definition interwoven, key frames. The contributors of this volume critically investigate underexplored urban contexts in which graffiti and street art appear, shed light on previously unexamined aspects of these practices, and introduce innovative methodologies regarding the treatment of these images. Throughout, the focus is on the relationship of graffiti and street art with urban space, and the various manifestations of these idiosyncratic meetings. In this book, the emphasis is shifted from what the physical texts say to what these practices and their produced images do in different contexts. All chapters are original and come from experts in various fields, such as Architecture, Urban Studies, Sociology, Criminology, Anthropology, and Visual Cultures, as well as scholars that transcend traditional disciplinary frameworks. This exciting new collection is an essential reading for advanced undergraduates as well as postgraduates and academics interested in the subject matter. It is also accessible to a non-academic audience, such as art practitioners and policy makers alike, or anyone keen in deepening their knowledge on how graffiti and street affect the ways urban environments are experienced, understood and envisioned.

T he inner city of Johannesburg is about as far away as one can get from the popular image of the African village. Though one of Africa's most urbanized settings, it is also seen as a place of ruins-of ruined urbanization, the ruining of Africa by urbanization. But in these ruins, something else besides decay might be happening. This essay explores the possibility that these ruins not only mask but also constitute a highly urbanized social infrastructure. This infrastructure is capable of facilitating the intersection of socialities so that expanded spaces of economic and cultural operation become available to residents of limited means.

Space and Culture, 2018

Research in African Literatures, 2013

Visibility and invisibility are fundamentally social categories that reflect and shape social acknowledgement, acceptance and interaction. The relevance of inter-visibility between urban dwellers as a mode of negotiating social tensions, racism or genderrelated aggressions becomes apparent in particular situations in public space. Performance artists in Johannesburg such as Anthea Moys and Athi-Patra Ruga relate to these situations by performing well-elaborated roles in specific social and territorial settings. They bring somewhat invisible discourses, ideas, and notions of normativity into social visibility. Johannesburg is a city marked by enormous political and social shifts, accompanied by a strong persistence of normative ideas partly deriving from the former segregationist politics during apartheid. In rendering these mental topographies visible through their artistic practice, the performance artists offer moments of renegotiation on diverse levels of social (in)visibility and unlock spaces for potentially new modes of perception and public agency.

Public Art Dialogue, 2018

In this thesis, the development of graffiti and street art in Nijmegen (Netherlands) is researched from four different, yet overlapping angles: language, materiality, urban spatiality and memory. A combination of academic sources, interviews, council archives, social media archives and archives from citizens were used. The notion of citizenship flows through this thesis and is viewed also from different angles.

Anthropology Southern Africa, 2019

This paper reflects on the discussions of a collective of academics in and around Johannesburg, Africa's iconic city built on the extractive capital of gold mining. Captured aptly in William Kentridge's art film Johannesburg: Second Greatest City after Paris (1989), the city is brought into an imaginary relationship with a romanticised Parisian experience. This comparison is taken up through an endeavour to read, re-read, imagine and re-imagine Johannesburg in relation to visions of the French capital contained in the writings in Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project with its "convolutes" of the Parisian arcades of the nineteenth century. The authors locate these discussions within debates addressed to urban anthropology in South Africa now, delving into the theories, methods and insights presented in a scholarly meeting and associated city tour held in 2017, and through the papers submitted for this special issue. This essay considers how an authorial collaboration comprising an anthropologist, historian and an architect might contribute differently to debates current in the spatial disciplines and anthropology, and how such a multidisciplinary reading of a seminal text about a European city might resonate with our location in Southern Africa. Este artigo reflete sobre as discussões de um conjunto de acadêmicos em Johanesburgo e arredores, cidade icônica da África, construída a partir do capital extrativista da mineração de ouro. Capturada de modo apropriado no filme de arte Johannesburg: Second Greatest City after Paris (1989), de William Kentridge, a cidade é trazida para um relacionamento imaginário com uma experiência parisiense romantizada. Essa comparação é feita por meio de uma tentativa de ler, reler, imaginar e reimaginar Johanesburgo com relação às visões da capital francesa contidas nos escritos de Passagens, de Walter Benjamin, com seus "convolutos" de galerias parisienses do século dezenove. Os autores localizam essas discussões em debates atuais dirigidos à antropologia urbana na África do Sul, aprofundando as teorias, os métodos e os insights apresentados em uma reunião acadêmica e num city tour a ela associado, realizados em 2017, através dos artigos submetidos a este número especial. Este ensaio examina como uma colaboração autoral envolvendo um antropólogo, um historiador, um arquiteto e um especialista em música, sons e cultura pública pode contribuir de forma diferente para debates correntes nas disciplinas que lidam com os espaços e na antropologia, e como tal leitura multidisciplinar de um texto seminal sobre uma cidade europeia pode ressoar com nossa localização na África Austral.

Roadsides, 2021

Not No Place. Johannesurg, Fragments of Spaces and Times, 2013

A book that was formed through 6 years of collaborative research into the city of Johannesburg, through historical archives, fictional accounts, films, as well as walks, drives, letters, friendship and love. In the book we attempt to understand a city that is composed not of one single image, but of several often incommensurable imaginaries. A city of the future, that all too easily forgets its recent, short and violent apartheid past. The book draws on Walter Benjamin's notes that formed the posthumously published 'Passegenwerk' (Arcades Project) to bring together a series of fragments, from archives, photographs, novels, films, artistic interventions, drawings, maps, forgotten books to trace the way Johannesburg has been and is imagined. The double negative of the 'Not No Place' ascribes this same ambiguity within the Utopian impulses of a city described as elusive, emerging, extreme, divided, in transition, world-class, afropolitan. We did not find an equivalent conceptual structure to the ‘arcade’, but rather a set of complexities around ‘place’ that in each instance produced their own vocabulary. Not a single image, but many fragmentary images. Note that this is a proof copy and not the final complete manuscript that went to print in 2013.

Antipode 44(4): 1569-1571, 2012