Shade
28.05 - 30.06.2022

The reclaimers (or bagerezi) collect, divide and select materials that find their way back into useful life through buyback centres. As in other types of marketplaces, transactional prices oscillate. Inflation certainly didn’t miss the Newtown buyback centre, where a kg of aluminium sold for R11 in 2020 and R16 in 2021, and the price for one kg of copper increased from R50 to R145.¹Pricing Source: Waste Not Want Not exhibition fanzine. Published by Shade, 2022. Considering Joburg has a limited amount of landfill space and there are no plans to create new ones, the reclaimers’ silent and often unacknowledged work is buying the city time. 

In Brixton, Tamzyn Botha is a local. She drives in her bakkie and purchases all sorts of non-recyclable objects: x-rays, photographs of the late 1800s, rubber gloves, toys, wigs and treated wood. She places orders with the reclaimers who work in the area, and sometimes gives things back so they can re-sell them again. Tamzyn is a visual artist and a curator; she uses collage, costume and light, and when she finds the same objects in different parts of the city she feels like her “worlds are colliding.” She curates the Brixton Light Festival, owns Shade and in it a Materials Library, which prompts a different way to relate to what others discard. This ‘waste’ library offers a wide range of sourced objects and is accessible to both their artists in residence and Brixton’s youth. In one of the fanzines available at Shade, Botha writes: “If creating waste is inevitable in all communities, can curating waste connect communities?”      

Central to Shade’s methodology is to hold on to objects for longer. Members of the Brixton Photo Collective and Botha welcome me at Shade before people from the Open Studios programme arrive. I speak with them about recycling, community art programmes, photography, Brixton, their current show PLAYCE and more. 

An opening night at Shade. Photo: James Puttick

Ecosophy and building a community-led practice

Installation view of Behind that Window. Photo: Alet Pretorious

Shade is a soon-to-be registered NPO that opened in 2019 as a plant shop. Since then, it has collaborated with artists, hosted workshops, residencies and an experiential cinema, and served as a studio space for Botha and others. Located at 166 Caroline St, Brixton, the place was once a corner shop run by the Hong family up until Mr Hong retired in 2018. Shade’s first exhibition, Behind that window, opened in November 2020 and centred on the Hongs: the emigration from China to South Africa,  their experience running that cornershop for 60 years and their world-views from thereof. “That first show was very important for people that traverse Caroline St., especially because it’s all people who knew the Hong family,” says Botha. 

In spite of many art spaces in Joburg being free, few feel as welcoming as Shade, where the door is open to all walk-ins. “The space allows for people that would not go into a gallery space to come through. I guess that is also because there are identifiable objects displayed that give one a quicker stepin than an oil on canvas painting in a gallery,” Botha comments. 

Tamzyn runs art classes on Fridays for junior school kids from the area. A different artist is usually invited every week to come in and work on a specific piece. Shade’s previous show, Waste Not Want Not, exhibited a 360° music video jointly created by the children from the youth programme, Botha, artist Francois Knoetze and musicians Riccardo Benigno and Jarred Parenzee. For this video, the kids posed dressed up in waste costumes from the Materials Library and were also photographed by the Brixton Photo Collective. Instead of operating as ‘outreach’ – a term I notice Tamzyn intentionally doesn’t use during our conversation – Shade’s youth activations have a place in a broader curatorial vision, and are everything but a guilt-ridden side feature. 

Visitors experiencing the 360 music video at Waste Not Want Not. Photo: James Puttick

In view of how this forward-thinking venue dealt with the history of its space to foreground their exhibition practice, their environmental and community-based approach to art deserves a deeper reading. These gestures resonate with the non-hierarchical concept of ecosophy coined by Felix Guatarri, where cultural transversality is thought of in conjunction with ecological and social interactions. In a context where the mechanisms of late capitalism have been exposed by academics and thinkers from around the globe, Argentine sociologist Maristella Svampa points out: “The extractive economic model reminds us that a new cycle of abuse of ecological and collective human rights is beginning.” This line of thought is relevant in the cases of independent institutions defying the status quo. Especially those with no major financial support like Shade: it is mostly self-funded, except for occasional project-based funding from the Goethe Institute or the British Council, and some small material and monetary donations from neighbours. It is crucial, but not easy, to be conscious of the close relationship between social and environmental struggles. Shade not only understands this but also manages to tie it all together: youth programme, exhibitions, residencies, workshops, the Brixton Light Festival and the work with the reclaimers through the Materials Library. In that vein, Shade’s position in relation to Joburg’s environment and Brixton’s community is revolutionary. 

PLAYCE and the Brixton Photo Collective

Opening this show in the context of Open Studios, Botha opted for an obvious exhibition name to make explicit what Shade is all about: play and place. Their exhibition text reads: 

[PLAYCE is] Curated in such a way to give those new to our space insight into what we have done, are doing and will be doing. A kind of map of tenses, a landscape of explored tendrils and a birds eye view of our community, Brixton and beyond.  

Benjamin Mndau posing in front of his works High Street (2022), Kingston Frost  (2022) and Zoo Lake (2022)  at PLAYCE. Photo: James Puttick

PLAYCE is curated by Botha and questions how geography can influence artistic practice. Take Malawian born painter Benjamin Mndau, who paints Joburg’s intersections. Several layers seem to be at play: ghostly characters are camouflaged with dim urban landscapes and crashing vehicles; green sceneries in the middle of the city break the scene to show Joburg can also be a forest. In these mappings, the city cannot be easily defined and remains somehow unfamiliar. Mndau’s works are exhibited alongside a series of clay masks created by Shade’s youth programme. These masks were inspired by the work of the Well Worn Theatre Company, a group of theatre practitioners and activists who perform stories that centre on ecological themes and are mostly addressed to young audiences.

Considering the number of masks from the African continent shown in European ethnographic museums’ permanent collections, it’s difficult to see masks in an exhibition setting and not think of the looted pieces and the recent ‘attempts’ from Belgium to express their regrets for the atrocities committed during the colonial period. The British Museum, for example, has a massive collection of artifacts, textiles and masks from the African continent (amongst other places of the ‘Global South’) where for most of the cases the acquisition details are ‘unknown’. With that in the back of my mind, I wonder, what does it mean to see masks made by South African youth in a contemporary art exhibition in 2022? From these clay masks, Botha explains: “The kids modelled paper mâché versions which they used at the Brixton Burn festival in August 2021.” The Burn happened at the base of the Brixton tower, showing how contemporary ‘mask play’ is still relevant in public art activations and performances. Is it possible to think, then, that with all of the technology at disposal in this age, masks still contain psychological, educational and creative possibilities for the young? Shade’s youth programme success and joy points in that direction.

A member of Shade’s Youth Programme wearing their paper mâché mask during Brixton Burn 2021. Photo: Alet Pretorious

Botha describes herself as a “hoarder” and admits the Materials Library is not the only place where she collects objects. At PLAYCE, she exhibits a piece of her own: the whore-duh immersive VR experience, a prototype Botha created at the Design Future Lab 2022 . Botha first gathered real life waste objects, repurposed them as circular design works and jewellery, and then replicated these designs in a virtual waste landscape. This virtual landscape introduces the viewer into a universe where secret messages have to be discovered and waste forms part of a utopian world where information can be recovered from found objects, instead of a dystopian reality. This trippy-world experiment was created in collaboration with artists Francois Knoetzee, Tinyiko Makwakwa and Jumping Backslash. What was initially born as a retail idea to sell jewellery pieces developed into something more experimental, with an artist residency and tech lab approach that invites other artists to collaborate in that VR space too. However, in order for the VR experience to be more complex and explored by visitors for longer, the prototype still needs refinements to be made.

Although the exhibition transmits an overarching sense of “things in the making,” where visitors have more of a glimpse into the artists’ processes than a sense of finished pieces, the photographic series by the Brixton Photo Collective stands out. These are mostly shot around Brixton in black-and-white film. The images are concise and powerful, especially considering how young their creators are. The members of the collective Mpho Khosa, Percy Zimuto, Nigel Kamodzi and Bernito Vithaldas are only between 16 and 18 years old. James Puttick, a photojournalist and documentary photographer, is the collective’s elder and facilitator. 

The Brixton Photo Collective: Mpho Khosa, Bernito Vithaldas Percy Zimuto and Nigel Kamodzi. Photo: James Puttick

The group started meeting in 2021 when Puttick moved to Brixton and met Tamzyn, who introduced him to some teenagers in the area who were interested in art and photography. James donated some cameras and started engaging with them more often. Now, they meet every Saturday in Brixton, sometimes at James’ house, other times at Shade, and more recently at the Brixton club. Occasionally, they work through themes together.  A series on the prison industrial complex sees the collective produce work that focuses on walls, fences and abandoned buildings. But mostly, each one has the liberty to explore their own interests. 

Percy Zimuto, Untitled 4, 2021.

In one of Percy Zimuto’s exhibited images, Untitled 4 (2021), the protagonist is an abandoned land plot with a wired fence where there used to be a community feeding centre. “The demolition of the building affected me because I used to frequent that place often,” Zimuto comments. The space stands vacant and Percy doesn’t know what are the plans for that land, or if the feeding centre will be relocated elsewhere in Brixton. 

Frequently, Mpho Khosa envisions an idea for a photo and then makes the necessary arrangements to get the shot materialised. In one of his photographs, three  young men dressed in vintage 70s clothes pose with German shepherds, a common breed for members of police forces worldwide and a staple of apartheid terrorizing tactics. In this scene they’re no longer a threat. The image “gives you a different sense of a past,” Khosa says. 

Nigel Kamodzi is generally more drawn to photograph youth culture. His digital image of dandelions has an overarching naiveness to it, where Kamodzi changes his usual focus and captures an ethereal moment in time where natural beauty can be dreamt of. In the midst of the everyday hustle and movement in Brixton, Kamodzi pauses and reflects about his neighbourhood’s possibilities and green spaces: “Brixton is where I grew up, I would love people to enjoy this place at the end of the day,” he assures.

Recently, a friend shared an excerpt of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents that made me think of Shade. The passage goes like this: “Partnership is giving, taking, learning, teaching, offering the greatest possible benefit while doing the least possible harm. Partnership is mutualistic symbiosis. Partnership is life.” By empowering the youth with knowledge, materials and safe spaces to create and reflect, Shade has won a place in the community. What’s more, Shade’s relationships are never unilateral: there’s always a dialogue between two or more parts, and as much as Shade gives, they also receive. This small venue has solidified its position geographically and politically through the creation of as many partnerships in Brixton as possible, which in turn continues to open the door for new projects and futures, showing us there can be life after waste. 

PLAYCE is open and free to visit during June, on Saturdays and Sundays from 11am to 4pm at Shade, 166 Caroline St, Brixton. The exhibition fanzine is available to purchase at Shade. The zine was designed by francis burger, who has been working with youth programmes throughout Joburg for the last years and now is facilitating some of the youth art classes in Brixton together with Botha.