The Ramp
08.06 - 09.06.2024

The two-part, time-based experimental exhibition ‘Time goes bye’ took place at The Ramp – a multidisciplinary project space in Paarden Eiland – on the weekend of 8-9 June. Curators, Claire Johnson and Max Melvill based the exhibition on the question, “If no archive is ever complete, then are all archives just unique perspectives on time?” (Exhibition text) I have to admit that I struggle with the concept of an archive, I have always thought of it as a public inventory of things but by whose authority is an archive authorised? I was surprised by the answers offered by the 24 artists featured in the two-part exhibition, many of whom predominantly chose to respond to the curators’ prompts with works that critically engaged the concept of an archive. The first part, ‘Time goes bye’, involved a series of theatrical unveilings of the 24 artworks from behind a blue velvet curtain. Each of the works was given ten minutes of ‘screen’ time for the audience to observe. Melvill reflects on this gesture as an intentional pause for viewers to really sit with a work, which they might otherwise have spent one minute with, in the context of a group show. The playful temporal presentation format of ‘Time goes bye’ offered participating artists a moment to enjoy the novel experience of seeing their work engaged with meaningfully over a period of time. The second part, ‘Time goes bye bye’, was a panel discussion on creative practices “grappling with archival gestures in the contemporary South African experience”, facilitated by Johnson with multidisciplinary food justice artist, Zayaan Khan, photographer and visual storyteller, Manyatsa Monyamane and academic and author, Carrol Clarkson.

In preparation for writing, I read sections of eco-feminist scholar, Julietta Singh’s seminal novel, “No Archive Will Restore You”, the title of which I found fitting for the exhibition’s curatorial provocation: how do we grapple with archival gestures as contemporary South Africans? In the first chapter, Singh recalls a pivotal moment for her conceiving of the archive as something more abstract than a “stash of materials” (Singh 2018:22), when she comes across a quote by political theorist, Antonio Gramsci, cautioning, “The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory… Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory” (2018:16-17) Almost as though given permission to create an inventory of oneself, I understand Gramsci to confirm that we, each of us, is an embodiment of the things that came before us. 

For their ten minutes, musician and artist, Muneyi, presented an A4 print work, Ndi Mvula De? (2024) accompanied by a soundscape of acapella and flute. The print was a text piece written in an endangered Tshivenda dialect, passed onto Muneyi from their grandmother who is nearing the end of her life. While Tshivenda is one of our 11 national languages, Muneyi’s work points to the fact that languages also comprise regional dialects, which tend to become alienated when one is privileged over the less widely spoken dialects. Indeed, a dying language constitutes an illusive inventory and as it goes, endangered dialects do tend to follow their speakers. Muneyi reflects on the vocal body as an archive and asks whether their own loss of the Tshivenda dialect constitutes the second death of their grandmother? 

For her time slot, visual orator Charity Vilakazi showed a wonderfully playful tapestry, izingqondo ziyajikeleza on 150x150cm canvas fabric, using colourful imagery of birds, human figures, snakes, spiders and urns to tell the Zulu folklore story of a matriarch who ventures out to meet the “creatures that live in the rain” so that she may return to tell her family about them. I enjoy Vilikazi’s self-identification as a visual orator and I conceive of her chosen medium – which is normally painting – as a gesture to preserving Zulu oral history. However, because she is a represented artist whose work has been collected, her paintings are also preserved in the publicly heralded archives of her patrons. Singh later references a dubious Jacques Derrida, who highlights an ethical contradiction in the linguistic root of the word ‘archive’ from the Greek word Arkhē, which designates two meanings: “the place from which everything emerges” and the “authoritative law, from where authority is exercised and externalized” (Singh 2018:24). Singh asks how is it possible for these two meanings to exist together? The origins of Vilikazi’s folklore stories can certainly not be found in the private art collections of her patrons however, the provenance of her paintings are authorised within these vaults. And yet, in the years to come, will Vilikazi’s folklore story become enmeshed in the fabric of her paintings and instead serve the needs of the archive within which it exists as a category of painting amongst others? Singh’s response to the archival dilemma is to focus instead on her corporeal body, which indiscriminately holds all of the traces of her own history within in it, “I began instead to dwell on the messy, embodied, illegitimate archive that I am” (2018:27) Both Muneyi and Vilikazi appear to carry an inventory within their practices, and whether the deposits of history are kept in a foreign vault or held within a song, both artists appear to align themselves with Singh’s doctrine for the body archive as this is the source of histories untold. 

Manyatsa Monyamane’s portrait project, The Unsung Ones, is a fascinating endeavour that challenges the authorising mechanisms of historical archives in a post-Apartheid South Africa. Monyamane’s portrait, Girlie Mahlangu is an image of the photographic work’s namesake, gogo Mahlangu, taken in Mahlangu’s town of residence, Mamelodi East – a township in the Tshwane municipality, established in 1951 under the Apartheid Group Areas Act. In Monyamane’s words, “The Unsung Ones project serves as a vital archival initiative by preserving the oral histories of elders like gogo Girlie Mahlangu, who experienced the forced removals of the 1960s” (Exhibition text). Monyamane studied for her master’s at The University of the Witwatersrand and recalled how the autobiographical oral histories she had wanted to reference for her thesis did not feature in the authorised published works she was expected to cite. Monyame has taken it upon herself to document and write about the elders’ lives and stories so that they do not disappear with them. I enjoy this project as a kind of reverse entry into the archive, the photographer has taken it upon herself to authorise these stories – in whatever publishable medium available. This article included.  

For her contribution, Zayaan Khan offered works in progress from the Rahmaniyeh School in District 6, for which Khan together with spatial design studio, The MAAK (Ashleigh Killa and Max Melvill) are building a school library with the support of the OTTO Foundation – a philanthropic trust of the South African Otto family. Khan presented two architectural feature prototypes, a handcrafted push plate and puzzle-piece tile works, made from ancient terracotta clay retrieved from the mountains behind the District 6 area, “This clay exists in the mountain as an extremely deep time process of about two million years of gentle chemical and mechanical processes that transform stone to clay” (Exhibition text) Khan’s own family was forcibly removed from District 6 in the late 1960s, she expresses a deep sense of connection to the region and muses that this same clay has seen both the footprints of dinosaurs and those of her own mother. Khan’s excavation practice offers the clay as an embodied inventory of the things which have been lost and sedimented into the earth over a deep time continuum. She regards the earth more so as the archived body and herself as its excavator, digging deeper still for remnants of her family’s traces and those that came before them. 

I find it both exciting and also daunting that each of these artists appears to have such an advanced relationship to the archive and more so, to the fact that historical archives are built on more omissions than fact. In South African history, so many personal accounts have been erased through acts of colonisation, genocide, forced removals, erasure of culture and assimilation into this new national identity that us born-frees are said to represent but which has so often alienated us from the past. During the panel discussion, Khan aptly points out that not all artworks need to exist for thousands of years and that not everything needs to be archived. I find this point so apt in thinking of the works put forward by these artists, which all serve as excavation sites for history, each so filled with stories untold that it further confirms my own sentiments that we are all obliged family historians, all implicated and tasked with telling their stories, regardless of how we feel about our ancestors. There are bound to be disturbing intersections in our stories but that is all the more reason to invest in Singh’s doctrine for the body archive, “It is a way of knowing the body-self as a becoming and unbecoming thing, of scrambling time and matter, of turning toward rather than against oneself. And vitally, it is a way of thinking-feeling the body’s unbounded relation to other bodies” (2018:29).