Futures and Fictions Read online

  KWL: Yes, this is a very curious piece because it leads up to the next work I am going to talk about which involves Nat Nakasa, who is a funny character actually. Not funny in the hahaha sense, but very odd. Nat Nakasa left South Africa on an exit permit — he was denied a passport. This was a common thing for the apartheid government to do to punish blacks who wanted to leave South Africa. There is a picture of him taken in Harlem a few months before he died. He fell to his death in 1965 in New York. He was a writer, he was twenty-nine years old when he died, incredibly young, but he was some kind of pioneer and visionary, who started a literary magazine called The Classic. The Classic was funded by the CIA. I assume that he didn’t know — I would like to believe that he didn’t know. But the person who was also the front for the CIA, a CIA agent, organised for him to leave South Africa to go and study at Harvard. When he was leaving, the South African government had him on a watch list already because he had been mingling with white people, which was forbidden at the time. He was consequentially marked as a communist. It is curious that the South African government marked him as a communist. In fact, it issued a banning order against him but he left the country before it was signed. This document exists, but unsigned. And interestingly, on the other side, the American government was using him to further their Cold War ideology by promoting capitalism. So he was caught up in this crazy mix.

  Interestingly enough, I encountered this work in Paris by Chieko Shiomi, which is called Spatial Poem No. 3, because I was due to give a performance lecture at the New Museum with a show I was working on with the Centre for Historical Reenactments with Ryan Inouye. The work is a call for people to submit documentation of things that they make fall intentionally. In the headspace of thinking about this performance, encountering this work led me elsewhere — and sometimes I do things which are not really clear in my head but make sense later on. But because of this work I decided to go read some poetry at Nat Nakasa’s grave which I will read now. It is a poem by Syl Cheney-Coker and is entitled “Letter to a Tormented Playwright”:

  Amadu I live alone inside four walls of books

  some I have read others will grow cobwebs

  or maybe like some old friends and lovers

  will fade away with their undisclosed logic

  the world that I have seen: New York

  where I suffered the suicidal brother

  and London where I discovered Hinostroza

  Delgado, Ortega, Heraud and other

  Andean poets with a rage very much like ours!

  remember Amadu how terrible I said it was

  that you were in exile and working

  in the Telephone Office in touch with all

  the languages of the world but with no world

  to call your own; how sad you looked that winter

  drinking your life and reading poetry with me

  in the damp chilly English coffee shops

  remember I said how furious I was

  that Vallejo had starved to death in Paris

  that Rabearivelo had killed himself

  suffocated by an imaginary France

  and I introduced Neruda and Guillen to you

  and how in desperation we sought solace in the house

  of John La Rose, that courageous Trinidadian poet

  Amadu I am writing to you from the dungeon of my heart

  the night brings me my grief and I am passive

  waiting for someone to come, a woman

  a friend, someone to sooth my dying heart!

  now the memory of our lives brings a knife to my poems

  our deaths which so burdened the beautiful Martiniquan

  you said made you happy, she made you so happy, you a

  tormented playwright

  sadness returns, the apparitions of my brothers

  and my mother grows old thinking about them

  and also seeing so much sadness in

  me her living and dying son

  my mother who wishes me happy,

  who wants me to relive the son

  she lost to poetry like a husband a wife to a trusted friend

  but already the walls are closing around me

  the rain has stopped and once again I am alone

  waiting for them, the politicians of

  our country to come for me

  to silence my right to shouting poetry loud in the parks

  but who can shut up the rage the melodrama of being

  Sierra Leone

  the farce of seeing their pictures daily in the papers

  the knowledge of how though blindfolded and muzzled

  something is growing, bloating, voluptuous

  and not despairing

  I say to you for now, I embrace you brother.

  This is the poem I read at Nat Nakasa’s grave. This was shortly after I had made the video piece called The Homeless Song, produced at the time when I was already thinking about Nat Nakasa. Nevertheless, I think that there was a kind of subconscious trait at work. As a result, I decided to write a letter to Chieko Shiomi, which I started writing on my way to the cemetery. So due to Spatial Poem No. 3 I became interested in time and history, which both feed into my work, especially the drawing works. And I noticed the trait in my writing as well. It was moving between or towards a fictionalising of time in such a way that I was trying to make time elastic. Time did thus not become something that was forward-moving, but rather something that I could change backwards or even intervene in, in real time or in past or historical time as well. I wrote a letter to Chieko Shiomi in 2013, requesting that she include Nat Nakasa’s fall to his death, even though my request was forty-eight years late. You actually helped me to get hold of her at the time because I was struggling to find contact details for her. What I also did was to respond directly to the poem at the studio I was in in Amsterdam; I documented a series of things that I made fall intentionally.

  Figure 2. © Kemang Wa Lehulere (2015) Spatial Poem Reply 1.

  I produced a diptych of Polaroid works and as you can see there are empty spaces there, and those are the photographs which I have taken out and I have sent to Chieko Shiomi in a package. Again, the choice to move into Polaroid as a medium was due to my interest in the kind of ephemerality, that is, something that cannot be really fixed forever like an oil painting but can still live a long life, so to speak.

  To come back to this video work, it is all interlinked somehow and it happened over a period of about three years. When I went to read the poetry at the grave, I went back to Amsterdam, recorded this video and I was watching this footage repeatedly in the studio, both when I was sober or if I had gone out for a drink, came back to the studio and watched the footage, so this messy kind of thing. It struck me while doing this, that when I went to the cemetery, I had received a map of the actual grave with information of who owned the title deed of where Nat Nakasa’s final resting place was. And it struck me in the studio one night that the person who owned the title deed was the same person who had organised for Nat Nakasa to go the US, the same person who was funding him, who was a CIA agent. And it was the same person who owned the apartment in Manhattan where Nat Nakasa fell to his death. This is something that was really troubling for me. I mean I didn’t want to kind of start some conspiracy theory but I was like, “fuck, what a way to exist in the afterlife”. And so, in the drunken state I was in the studio, I booked a flight to New York where the intention was to go and cut a piece of grass from the grave. The idea was to take it back to South Africa. So I went back to New York and for me it was my kind of rebellion. So yes, I went there and cut this piece from the grave. I have a text here that I wrote in 2013 which links to this work and also which is part of a film script. It is called Scene 55.

  Scene 55. A Grave Misunderstanding. Exterior. Somewhere. Day.

  I once mistook orthodontia as a fear of death. Upon reading its meaning twice, I realised it was a fear of teeth instead. This is interesting. Because an artist once wrote: ‘teeth are the
only bones that show’. A few years ago, I was digging in someone’s house, I discovered some bones. Where I come from people go to a special school to learn how to ‘read’ bones. Once read, these bones are said to uncover the past and even unveil the future.

  At the end of last year the South African government decided to officially bring Nat Nakasa’s remains back to South Africa. It was quite a big state memorial, which was actually the opposite of what I was trying to do. In fact, we had done a project at the Berlin Biennial before they announced that they were taking him back and it was called Digging Our Own Graves. It was a publication project, not about this particular work but a number of various works. So starting from the video piece I just wanted to make these links that it was an extension of a larger body of work which resulted in the government taking his remains back to South Africa.

  EDO: You follow the traces — spontaneous moments such as those in which you start with an afro-comb to dig that grave in Gugulethu that lead to a series of concerns in which your interest in archaeology as a political gesture develops. But it is interesting that you also in a way leave the project at the very moment in which that history or that story becomes public. The way you were engaged with it is over to an extent. You had to go to other stories that needed to be uncovered. Perhaps we can move to A Homeless Song 3, the project that somehow unveils the work of Gladys Mgudlandlu and also speaks to some of the collective experiences that are your interests nowadays.

  KWL: How the project came about: when we were working in the Gugulective, Unathi Sigenu, who passed away almost two years ago now, was always obsessed with Gladys Mgudlandlu, who was a black woman painter, considered the first black woman artist in South Africa. She worked in the 1960s for about a decade only and she died in 1979. Unathi Sigenu always wanted us to do something about her but I could never connect to his desire. Partly because he had access to archival material and the owner of the material would only show it to Unathi. He would not show it to any of us because it is stuff that his father collected, like newspaper clippings. He did promise to show it to the rest of us but he never did, so I never saw these things. Last year I was visiting my aunt and a neighbour came who had a book on Gladys Mgudlandlu and gave it to me as a gift. I became interested in Gladys Mgudlandlu then and I started to do research about her. I started working with my aunt because she mentioned that she had seen murals, which for me was the interesting point.

  EDO: How important is this return to the Gugulective to you and are you still using archaeology and digging as a way of bringing back history?

  KWL: Again, it is not something that I had planned. I had very different plans for this year. But based on the conversations with my aunt I became interested in finding these murals — which she had seen in 1971, when she was a teenager. This interest really was about my own murals, chalk drawings, which, within the context of an exhibition, I would create and that would be destroyed at the end of an exhibition. So I was curious if Gladys Mgudlandlu’s murals would still be there. And if so what they would look like — and if they were not there, what that might mean. I was working on a project for the show which is currently travelling and I titled it History Will Break Your Heart because I was already anticipating that I might not find the mural. And even if I did find it, I still think it is heartbreaking because this work has not been documented and never been seen. Through the conversation with my aunt they have now kind of come to light. What I did in the meantime was to ask my aunt to recreate the mural from what she remembered and in the course of working on the project, Mgudlandlu’s work came up on auction here in London in March 2016. With the help of someone I managed to acquire some of the works. I bought a small portion of the work, not the entirety that was auctioned. What I then did was to exhibit those works and pair them with drawings that my aunt had made, with my intervention. My interventions were mainly erasures and whatever text you would see. In this context the project is something that is still ongoing.

  Figure 3. © Kemang Wa Lehulere (2015) Homeless Song 3: The Bird Lady in 9 Layers of Time, video still.

  When I discovered the mural, in conversation with the art restorer, we only uncovered a little piece as there was a chance that we would destroy the mural through the very exposure. They have been safe all these years, half a century or so. I now need to think about how to move forward with it. This becomes increasingly important to me as I have lost a dear friend, Unathi, who started the Guglective work in terms of the conceptual grounding and who was obsessed with her. Coming back to Gugulethu where I grew up and which was also very formative for my art practice, it feels very important. So in line with that I have a hope to not only establish this house as a museum but also to reactivate some of the programmes that we had started with the Gugulective — be it a film screening programme, poetry, music — to reactivate the kind of work we did because the collective is no longer working at the moment.

  I would like to end this conversation with a work entitled Some Deleted Scenes Too which also speaks to the notions of future and fiction. I first published this version of the film script in early 2013. It is a text I worked on for many years. I struggled with it until Gladys Mgudlandlu’s mural project. Again, with my work I feel like something, a kind of meditation and obsession that materialises itself later on without me necessarily driving it into that direction, but by chance or this offer from the universe, if I were to put it like this. Basically, the script is about 1989 and it was me thinking about the fall of the Berlin Wall. But instead of the wall I used the fall of the stars as a metaphor, also thinking about the fact that 1989 was a very important year not only globally but specifically for South African history. When the wall fell that was when the political parties were unbanned in South Africa and Mandela was released from the prison. I am also interested in a kind of historical narratives and how they are affected by this moment moving forward, but also how we look at the past up to this point. So I was writing this film about a man who was burnt by one of the falling stars. And when the stars fall they wipe out all memories in the world — photographs, any pieces of paper, everything. So there is no kind of archive or history left except for the oral ones which leads to this huge crisis that people feel. Once people discover there is this man who is able to restore these images or memories, there is a pilgrimage to his house to have people restore their memories and images. This speaks to the idea of time-travel — or what I have recently termed as an interest in the intervention in time.

  Figure 4. © Kemang Wa Lehulere (2013) Some Deleted Scenes Too, film script excerpt.

  STAGES, PLOTS AND TRAUMAS1

  Robin Mackay

  Our hero stretches taut the last strand of scarlet twine, pushes the pin home, and steps back to take it all in: the sprawl of facts, the network of inferences, evidence, mug-shots, locations, everything almost tied up, but in waiting for a synoptic overview to coalesce, affording the pivotal insight that will reconfigure this data into a coherent whole, and close the case. The frustration, the pressure, and the dogged working of cognition are palpable.

  In this scene, familiar from countless televised police procedurals and thrillers, it’s as if the closed chamber of the detective’s office serves as a proxy for the internal operations of his mind: a kind of camera obscura within which the network of relations between things, people, and places is refracted, projected onto a surface where it promises to finally come into sharp focus.

  The operation does not feature in any policing manual or private detective’s handbook; there has probably been no instance of any professional dedicating working hours to crafting a pastime of such dubious value. This fictional in camera exists only on camera: it is a diagram of a diagram of thought in action. The function of the yarnwork is to provide us with a static two-dimensional image of thought, itself embedded within visual narratives which themselves are moving images of the construction of knowledge.

  If proof were needed of the popularity and power of the trope, we need only note that the term it
self (more Etsy than homicide division) is drawn from a fond parody. In the high-school farce 21 Jump Street (dir. Phil Lloyd, 2012), presentation of the “yarnwork” sets the scene for a revealing joke. For the failure of communication between two enthusiastic yet incompetent amateur sleuths played by Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum and a disgruntled police captain played by Ice Cube harbours a rather profound truth about the relation between knowledge, art, and the (dis)orientation of the subject in search of truth:

  Schmidt: Okay, so we stayed up all night making this. It’s awesome, you’re really gonna like it. All yarnwork was done by Jenko.

  Captain Dickson: Who put this together? Are you autistic?

  Schmidt: It is artistic, sir, because the thing is, the yarn actually indicates….

  Indeed there is an art involved in the construction of the yarnwork, in the sense that there is no self-evident or conventional procedure for stringing together the elements of a case — like the cognitive process it diagrams, the yarnwork is a matter of invention, construction, and perhaps individual talent; usually the result of one individual’s more or less competent, distressed, sometimes desperate attempt to gather, connect and map information. In itself the yarnwork asks the methodological question: How to proceed? And in so far as it figures this predicament, there is also something potentially autistic about the yarnwork, too: rather than accurately diagramming reality, the yarnworker is always in danger of projecting onto the blank wall his own preoccupations, vendettas, personality flaws and, when things get really murky, sheer delirium. There is always the looming possibility of apophenia, of creating patterns where there are none — a charge with which the detective will inevitably be confronted, when time is short and tempers are high, whether by an impatient superior or by the pen-pushers down at City Hall.

  Figure 1. Robin Mackay, Paul Chaney and Sam Forsythe (2015), Installation “Speculum Topographicum”. Bergen Kunsthalle.