South Africa - Biennale Arte 2015

What remains is tomorrow
... the past of slow violence is never past …

At the time of writing this introduction, a photograph
detonated in our collective consciousness. On the
front page of the South African Sunday Times, a
Mozambican man called Emmanuel Sithole was
shown being stabbed to death while people looked
on. Those of us—not only in South Africa, but all over
the world—fortunate enough to be in the comfort
of our homes as we flicked open the newspaper,
set aside our coffee cups, and looked again at this
horrific image.

This photograph, and the events of which it
was only one part, was a deadly and unwished-for
representation of the central and underpinning
idea of this exhibition, that the past has come back
to haunt us, that in fact the past is by no means
gone, and if we are to understand our contemporary
moment, and plot our future so that it is more
equitable, just and humane than the present, we
must grapple once more with our history.
The title of our exhibition, What remains is
tomorrow, is therefore neither a resigned acceptance
of the mixed blessings of that history, nor a utopian
gesture. Instead it conveys a desire to weigh the
present against what has preceded it and to cast
ahead to the possibility of alternative ways of being
in the world, and of making the world. In this respect
we have taken our cue from Okwui Enwezor’s title for
the 56th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di
Venezia, All the World’s Futures, and sought to give it
a particular interpretation—in light of what we know.
And what we know best—what touches our lives
most directly—is what is unfolding in our country
through a series of violent and explosive events.
But these localised upheavals are embedded in a
global matrix of power and capital, apart from which
we cannot begin to understand ourselves and our
social, political and cultural situation. Indeed, if we
read our own predicaments and achievements as the
products and expressions of a narrow, idiosyncratic
nationalism for which we alone are responsible, we
will sink.

Power and capital are multivalent, and
present in an array of guises. They connect us to a
conglomeration of relations that not only emerge
from the past (from imperialism and colonialism)
but also stand somewhat apart from history’s grand
narratives that give birth to the notions of nation
and state. Power and capital make use of the nation
state, but they do not believe in it. They believe only in
ownership and profit and they employ the trappings
of the state to extend these privileges to a few.
The state, on the other hand, believes in itself,
and perpetuates its own mythology of the nation
as a coherent entity, logically explained by history,
to which the citizens must declare their allegiance
and from which others are excluded. This is a
little-examined aspect not of the xenophobia that
is erupting in South Africa at present, but of the
analytical discourse surrounding that phenomenon.
So although there has been a vociferous and
outraged reaction—a resounding condemnation of
acts of violence against people who have come from
other countries in order to make for themselves a
meaningful and dignified life—a blind spot remains
in the assessments. Xenophobia is attributed to
unemployment and poverty, and the lack of delivery
of basic services to communities is decried, but
surfacing repeatedly in the discourse is the criticism
of the government’s failure to police our ever more
porous borders.

This imperative to police is fed by the deeply
held belief that some are ‘naturally’ inside and some
are outside. Certainly, decent, law-abiding people
condemn the persecution of those who are outside,
but don’t imagine that they can undo—or question—
what is assumed to be their fundamental lack
of belonging.

The artists whose works are presented here
venture into this terrain. They take issue with deepseated
assumptions about who is in and who is
out. They have a sense that there is a narrative
of belonging that must be interrogated. Without
exception, while they are no doubt as susceptible as
the rest of us to the spectacle of violence, they are
also cognisant that beneath spectacle are insidious,
‘slower’ forms of violence that are eating us from the
inside out.

In curating What remains is tomorrow,
however, we have not wanted simply to present
works that hold up a mirror to our society, or offer
a litany of wrongs and injustices in order to give an
international audience a sense of the local zeitgeist.
The work that we have engaged in over the past
several decades, individually and together, has
made us deeply suspicious of lists of wrongdoing
or lists of achievements. Such things give us only
the illusion of having done something. We have both
worked in fields—the public sector, museum design
and curatorship, architectural practice—that have
obliged us on occasion to inhabit the past. Having
done so has made us wary of nostalgia, and of the
perils of a mythologising, museological approach
to history. But even so, we have not abandoned the
idea that the past is an important reference, the key
to knowing what to do, even if, as humans, we seem
unable to learn from our mistakes.
We are not, however, historians. Rather, we think
about the world in visual and bodily terms. Visual
in the sense that we spend a great deal of time
contemplating how things look, and bodily in the
sense that much of our work involves considering
how human beings move through, and engage with,
space, built environments and landscape.
So in order to create something out of the
potential cacophony of a group of individual works
of art placed together in a single, enclosed space, we
have organised the exhibition not so much around
a theme as around a moment, signalled by a small,
darkened, cell of a room at one end of the exhibition
around which the other works are, more or less,
gathered. This room is a direct reference to the
Rivonia Treason Trial of 1963–4. A video work in close
proximity to it connects the trial to the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission that began thirty-two
years later as an attempt at restorative justice. These
two moments are presented here as undeniably
connected, but not in order to suggest that one fulfils
the other. Certainly the viewer is invited to revisit
these past events, but the presence of the other
works permits no nostalgia, no sense of fulfilment.
The material of these two installations is
sourced from and commissioned, respectively, by
the Apartheid Museum, the one institution in South
Africa whose relationship to the past—the bad
past—is undisputed and necessary. In the context
of the exhibition, however, these museum artefacts
are now, inevitably, aestheticised. This is a deliberate
manouevre since what we want to do, precisely, is
look at the past through an aesthetic lens. Not in
order, crassly, to beautify it, but because we have
given ourselves the liberty to apply different rules
to it than those that might apply in the context of
a museum. And so we have uncoupled from their
original context, and from their museum home,
two fragments of history—a trial and a truth
commission—in order to revisit that history via a
different set of pathways than the ones usually
open to us. We have engaged a group of artists to
help us enact this process (and in doing so have
perpetrated the inevitable violence on their work
that a group exhibition cannot escape). In particular,
we have imagined that the looped recording of the
disembodied voice of a man speaking in quiet but
impassioned defence of the struggle to overturn
white domination, will sound new. That the very
textures not only of the voice, but of the defunct
technology that captured its cadences, will make us
hear something that we have not heard before, or
have not heard in a very long time. We have imagined
that the sheer repetition of the voice in a darkened
space will not only move those who hear it, but will
unsettle the useless mythologies of democracy,
ubuntu and nationalism.

That is perhaps as much as we can wish for.