Sweet Stickiness of Forced RemovalOn February 11, 1966, the Apartheid government of South Africa declared District Six, Cape Town to be a white-only residential area under the Group Areas Act, they forced everyone out, even the white families.
My ‘non-white’ family (they lived on Dover, on the corner) were one of the last households to leave, my grandfather just refused. With this forced move came a cultural shift – no longer were doors always open for unexpected guests: not a plate of food for hungry souls nor a couch to rest on for weary travellers. Gates remained locked and neighbours gradually became more distant. Every time I walk over the fallow land of District Six, I imagine the hundreds of little feet kicking up dust, the neighbours, the friends, all the loves and all the calls to prayers that echoed through the streets. The Apocalypse came through the foot of this mountain and in its place sprouted hundreds of fennel. The sweet one, not the bulbous one. Where you might see weeds, I see sweets, wild and dripping. And while I’m harvesting and licking my fingers, I’m doing soft calculations of how much this costs me in the slave house of capitalism: two hours’ intensive harvesting of pollen (in glaring sun and even sometimes South Easter tempest) gets me an amount that makes it very expensive to sell. And who would buy it at such a price? My pantry is invaluable, the collections of flowers, resins, salts, woods, minerals, herbs, insects – how could you charge for such things? Money makes no sense here. This thing of owning land – with all the roots in the ground, every stone and every hole – is this where all the trouble started? When the continent was divided by the colonisers? And we are still here, with the majority of the people landless and the forced removals continuing. Land occupation is something that stems out of survival and a need to sustain livelihood. It is as if the Apocalypse came when the colonisers hit, then had a biggerlypse in Apartheid, and now all the residual shrapnel lingers in the land and people. In the aftermath – surrounded by growing yellow sweets and memories, in the quiet and heavy heat, the heady fragrance of hot grass and hot fennel – there’s no way to change this devastation, only to continue to pluck and suck, licking sticky beads of pollen sacs that cling to me. |
Deep ListeningThis land calls me, it’s a deep distant call but right in my ear. Can you hear it?
I walk slowly, mindful of being a woman alone and always watching my back, but my curiosity is strong and the deeeep lalela listening pulls my feet along. Can anybody hear it? What I’m looking for I do not know but it doesn’t even matter, I’m looking for sound, I’m looking for what I’m hearing. And I keep my eyes up to the mountain and down to the ground. There are so many of us here, millions of tiny ants, antlions, grasshoppers, crickets, cockroaches, so many birds watching me, all these seeds landing and rooting in this sandy clay soil. The foot of this mountain is prehistoric, it's known so many big footprints; like the Cape Lion who was killed off, most likely for their beautiful big black manes, elephants, hyenas, leopards, hippos, crocodiles, zebra, even giraffes potentially. But the point is, so many animals you could never count. They’re all gone now, waves of ecocide that started through colonial intrusion in the 1600’s, although I wonder about the botanical colonisers who visited here before – what these mountain plains must have looked like during their seasonal washes of colour, swathes of pinks and purples and yellows and blues, all the geophytes this area has adapted to having over the millennia. This whole area where I’m standing used to be under water, under the sea and this mountain range was an island. I feel like, and this is completely my supposition, but the reason this area (as depleted as it is in parts) is still one of the most biodiverse areas of the world is because of this prehistoric oceanscape. Have you seen how many different species live in the rocky shore? In the tiny ecotones between land and sea, whole worlds evolve. And in this place in particular, we see so much endemism, beings that live only here, nowhere else. What this land must know, in all the deep time of existence. This land knows dinosaurs but also my mother’s feet. My mother who, as a young child, was forced out of their home along with her family and entire community in District Six. Soon the bulldozers came and demolished any remaining buildings. Still the foundations remain, shards of pottery can be found, remnants of tiles, of kitchen walls painted layers of colours over the years. I’m picking through what I can find to see if I can hear any stories. All the detritus of domestic life through the destruction of bulldozers, I hear the panic, the anguish, the grave injustice. The fear. Pottery really lasts forever, ceramic shards of European pottery, white and brittle. What meals these pieces of crockery must have sat with? This land is stone and sand and clay, the clay moves with water and settles below the ground or in the places that water settles. I collect this clay, I am asked to, the clay beckons me. There is no purpose other than to work this clay, who knows what will come, is that even the point. It feels as though this moment with the land, the reckoning and connection, there is a slow murmur of acceptance, I am moving in the right way and with the right intention. |
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Artist Statement: I have been able to allocate 2024 as a time to deep dive into the clays of Devil’s Peak, a mountain we have grown up on for generations. I am particularly interested in the stories the land reveals through working with the land directly; the clays, sand and stone in this case. This land has homed us for generations but has also seen my family forcibly removed from there, District Six particularly.
Using process as praxis, this exhibition presents the research process of clay harvested from Devils Peak, Cape Town, South Africa, building towards using clay in a manner of means and different processes to be completed early 2025. |
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