AVA Gallery
02.10 - 13.11.2025

In the essay ‘A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,’ award-winning science fiction writer Octavia Butler emphasises the importance of looking to the past and honestly confronting the present in order to forecast humanity’s fate. “We must pay more attention to history” she cautions while adding how foretelling “doom in difficult times may have more to do with the sorrow and depression of the moment than with any real insight into future possibilities”. Svea Josephy offers her own predictions through analogue and cameraless photography in ‘Cities of the Future in the Past’. Using ambrotypes, cyanotypes, AI-generated images and sculpture, Josephy maps out how South Africa’s cities are constructed and envisages how these landscapes might change through social and environmental catastrophe.

Drawing on the language of urban planning and architecture, Josephy poignantly sensitises us to the politics of spatial planning in Masterplan 1-9. The artist utilises the vibrant blue hue that characterises cyanotypes to invoke the blueprint, denoting a sense of idealism on which the technical drawings hinge. However, any romanticism regarding the landscape is quickly disrupted by the critical vantage point offered by the work’s bird’s-eye view. With this, I could not help but read the jagged edges and obtuse shapes that make up Josephy’s abstract cityscapes as reminders that reality is far from perfect. Especially in South Africa, life on the ground is harsher than the ease alluded to by the neat right angles of an orthogonal city layout.

The precarity of the urban landscape in the face of the climate crisis is also hard to ignore in the work. Along the right side of Masterplan’s 3 x 3 layout, a promenade emerges through the dotted border that separates buildings from ship-lined waters. This seafront scene codes the cyanotype blue as water, and my eye suddenly catches onto the movement created by the uneven gaps between buildings. The feeling of this empty space growing at the edges of several exposures makes the buildings feel like they are floating. I struggle to shake the sombre image of rising sea levels—a city slowly coming apart at the seams.

Josephy also constructs cityscapes through three-dimensional objects in her ambrotype works.  Her sets, and the small glass plates on which their image is transposed, shrink her imagined cities in the same way the scale of architectural models compresses space. Drawing on the maquette this way expresses an interplay between reconstruction and fabrication that is present throughout the exhibition. The urban landscapes before us appear simultaneously familiar and alien. 

Time is unusually fluid in these images too, which warps reality. The black and white quality of ambrotypes casts the scenes in a historic film, while futuristic forms seemingly place them in a distant future. This layering of timelines disorients, imbuing the ambrotype images with an eerie quality. I want to take comfort in the unique character of South Africa’s major cities as I recognise Ponty Towers and bulging mine dumps in Johannesburg Strip 1-5, or the Voortrekker Museum and Unisa’s main campus in A Tale of Two Tshwanes. But, I feel torn. Are the miniature cities evidence of a future in which human beings and the structures that hold us endure, or a mock-up of the relics we were never afforded? City After Apocalypse feels like a particularly sobering warning of how these distinct landmarks can easily crumble into unidentifiable debris in disasters that raze cities to the ground. 

The past and future are also superimposed in Durban 2057 (+- 100 000 years) as a dystopian scene foregrounds an old photograph of Durban’s harbour. People and trees find shelter in a glass dome. This image echoes throughout the exhibition, a recurring motif in the science fiction genre to which it nods. It feels unnerving to see the glass dome placed within South African cities—a sign that we are not immune to catastrophes that can render the elements around us hazardous. The safe distance of fiction quickly collapses through this montage. How long until the air becomes dangerous to breathe? How will life feel in a bubble? How will inequality in our country shape who can access unprecedented forms of shelter?

Another theme that permeates science fiction is the fear of artificial intelligence as human beings confront the power of the data, systems, and machines they have created. In a fitting addition to her process, Josephy uses AI to envision the major disasters that threaten South Africa’s leading cities, such as landslides in Johannesburg, desertification in Pretoria and tsunamis in Cape Town. 

In Cape Town in the Future, it is both humorous and chilling to see high-rise buildings breach Table Mountain, transforming it into a fortress from monstrous waves. Josephy cleverly uses the limitations of AI, especially its tendency towards hallucination, to again make the divide between reality and fiction glaringly thin. For now, there is the temporary consolation that the uncanny image in front of us is not real. However, it is confronting to consider how this will change as climate change leaves us more vulnerable to extreme weather patterns.

Seeking reprieve from the unsettling vision of the future of South Africa’s major cities, I found solace in The Park and lingered on it longer than others. Though their white silhouettes, flattered form, and softened edges make them appear ghostly, it felt important to regard this sprawling mass of people scattered across the large cyanotype as a feat. Traces of human form gathered and standing by a train line, amidst trees, animals and bikes. Proof of life. However, the idyllic scene is marked with interruptions such as rigid ladders, street lights and a protective fence that ripples across the work. I could not help but see the railing, much like the glass domes and mountain-top retreats Josephy imagines, as another reminder of the barriers erected in the name of safety during a time of crisis. The utopian park dream is also flanked by two unassuming white sculptures of a surveillance camera and a street light. I would not have noticed the sculptures because of how well they blend into the gallery walls if the artist had not pointed them out during a walkabout. In this way, they do their job as markers of the discreet mechanisms of control and surveillance present throughout our cities.

For Octavia Butler, “the very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.” While acknowledging that this hope will not shield us from disaster or catastrophe, it feels impossible to exist and carry on without it in a world that feels like it is coming undone. Butler also prompts us to “Count On the Surprises” when predicting the future. It was refreshing to stumble upon a few throughout Josephy’s exhibition. My favourite were nods to photography in Cameraman in the City and the reimagining of film developing equipment, such as funnels and film canisters as buildings in Johannesburg Strip. Hearing about the frustrations Josephy navigated while working with AI and ambrotype photography, as well as the wide-ranging references she cites, also helped lighten the gloomy mood. Knowing that the artist found inspiration in Star Wars, Nnedi Okorafor’s book Lagoon, James Ford’s painting Holiday Time in Cape Town in the Twentieth Century, and a bit of Oasis and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, I started to sense a playfulness in her approach to visualising how cities are built and speculating how they might change.

Perhaps that is why, somehow, the naive hope I carry moving through the world is not shaken off by my encounter with Josephy’s exhibition. In the face of the past, present and gloomy possibilities Josephy’s exhibition confronts us with, it feels brave to see that distant future, and the ability to imagine it, as a superpower, an answered prayer, or a gift. Related to African cities and futures in particular, there is a quiet yet radical power in hope and imagination. 

 

This review was produced as a part of the AVA Art Writing Workshop, facilitated by Keely Shinners. This project was made possible thanks to the support by the City of Cape Town.