a r t i s t
the chandelier project
CREATING AMIDST DESTRUCTION
"Bona ma lights!"
The Chandelier Project - first intervention in a series of five
Site - shack settlement under the M1 highway, Newtown, Johannesburg - unexpectedly, at the time of the intervention, city council workers were destroying the settlement - this area is the site of a new highway off-ramp and the proposed Mandela Bridge to Braamfontein
Part of the intention of the Chandelier Project is to shed light on what is seldom seen, and the powerful video documentation of this first intervention accomplished that.'Red ants' are militant city council employees, dressed in red overalls and armed with crowbars, who demolish informal settlements at the order of the sheriff of the court. Like the red ants they are nicknamed after, they invade a settlement and violently destroy it.
I have never before seen the red ants swarming over shacks with crowbars swinging, and the flying tin and ripping plastic and falling boards and scraps that were a shelter being so easily unthreaded - what a dance!
Our rough footage record is a strange visual; a white man in high heels wearing an illuminated chandelier tutu and improvising movement amidst a community of black squatters who's shacks are being destroyed by the city council workers, in their own ballet of violence . is very South African.It was hard for me to set myself up as, in part, a privileged white luxuriating among the despair of our lowest class citizens - Nero fiddling while Rome burns.
I felt displaced (hectic in heels and strange place to be near-naked) - and in a sort-of unreal and slow-motion-type-paralysis I am more used to experiencing in my nightmares than on a Thursday afternoon in the real world.
Artists have always painted the social concerns of their time, and by my moving in a chandelier-tutu through shackland being demolished -and filming it- that's what I'm doing too, digitally painting a social record . half beautifully imagined, half horribly real.
The sound-track of the first intervention is as multi-layered as the visual record; the tinkling of the chandelier crystals, the bashing and hammering and falling tin, singing, the confused voices and animated reactions I elicit.
Reactions ranged, from 'go away' and 'what's wrong with you?' to biblical comparisons 'Jesus", 'Mary', and 'angel' (I think that's 'cause of the lights) to a bloodshot man who presented his Hustler centrefold in one hand and me in the other, saying 'I got it, I got it'. Blown away on drink and dreams of cunt, he kept showing me vulva after vulva, and making pumping fuck-motions against me. He didn't even see the chandelier, he just saw a shaved Hustler pussy come to life - the slut of his dreams - and he wasn't going to let that pass without embracing it. His Hustler was soon snatched away and ripped up by an offended fellow-squatter.
There was a man who shook his knobkierie at me, a woman who kissed my hand (and me hers), some women sang Nkosi Sikileleli'Afrika, one woman said The Lord's Prayer, some people clapped, some people scorned.
It is the unpredictable and diverse responses that people bring into the work, as well as the intimacy of those interactions, that actually construct the work - also visually it is very strong, both in beauty as well as in it's ugliness.
My body language, in the context of the chandelier work, had a radical range of meanings. In the footage, if I lift my arms commandingly, I appear to be directing the destruction. If I raise my eyes and palms to God, it is as if I am also suffering, when I kneel in the dirt, it reads as a prayer for peace on earth.
Demolition time is volatile when people are losing their homes - even if 'homes' are shacks on an abandoned railway line under a highway, scattered with a dead black cat, lots of human shit and a swamp of garbage.It was a miraculous day for art.
First in the immaculate timing - I have been observing and visiting this site for six months and had no idea that on the day we made the work we would be the voyeurs of an eviction. It was also a miracle that the deputy-sheriff of the court did not order us to leave - he complained and questioned us all, grumped and gritted his teeth, clenched and unclenched his fists - and in that new-South-African way, he tolerated our bizarre presence and reluctantly acknowledged that we had a right to (believe we were making) art.
Both under-dressed (all art is made from a position of nakedness) and over-dressed (bare bummed 'though surrounded by crystals) I certainly hogged the show with my portable limelight.
But it was Elu who provided a spiritual balance to the work, reassuring a spun-out photographer with "don't lose your humanity", refusing to film the starved-to-death cat as "it didn't feel right", and understanding the consciousness awakening that's evoked by the lights emerging as darkness fell - "at least it brightened up the removal".
By the time the sun had set and my chandelier lights were emerging, the settlement had been razed into a sea of scrap iron, cardboard and wood .. and people with well-rehearsed packing routines were already slowly making their way along the railway line, deeper into the city.
With grateful thanks to funders:
METTLE
Marcus Stuart
Les Spiro
Daniel Bennet-Mindl
Henri Vergon