"They work all night on the dream city and in the morning they wake up exhausted without knowing why. They trudge through their dispiriting days in the real and prematurely ruined city, which has no hope of being improved. When night falls they return to their dreams and do it all again, building the ideal and evanescent city for the umpteenth time. These citizens are unaware of the commonality of their dreams and if they were to be made aware of that nightly joint labour they might have a chance to direct their efforts towards the real city which they have essentially abandoned. But the paradox, he realised, was that they couldn't be merely told. They have to know it, it has to somehow well up in their spirits, the truth that there is no such thing as an unimprovable city and that their energies are better expended on the real." – Tremor, Teju Cole, pp. 181.
Reimagining the built environment
Structures is the second of three exhibitions comprising Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation's (JCAF) Worldmaking series. As a whole, the series looks at the ways we shape the world around us and how we inhabit it, taking perspectives and knowledge from the Global South as its point of departure.While the first exhibition, Ecospheres, focused on the natural world, and the final instalment Futures will explore technology and the future, Structures situates itself broadly around the built environment, space, and land. Importantly, Structures here "can be understood as either material or immaterial. It might represent a body of knowledge, a social framework or an infrastructural system treated as a single entity and held together by a plan, a pattern, or a guiding logic."
The exhibition surfaces new ways of seeing the structures around us, and is charged with an impetus to imagine new possibilities which are not premised on extraction and domination, and to highlight that which has been hidden from sight in our collective histories.
Introductory forms
The two special projects commissioned for this exhibition point to essential themes in the exhibition. Stephen Hobbs' Mnara, a life-sized model of the wooden scaffolding used in indigenous building practices in sub-Saharan Africa, points to the incomplete and malleable nature of spaces around us and the tensions between construction and renewal versus decay. Marks of Home by Rebecca Potterton is a mural featuring illustrations of different architectures from the Global South, and in doing so, foregrounds practices that have been obscured in the Western architectural canon and points to alternate ways of knowing and gaps in our spatial history.
These projects act as a prompt for how we think about the exhibition and begin the process of reimagining and questioning that Structures engenders. A process and call which is no doubt relevant globally, but takes particular significance in South Africa and Johannesburg, where colonialism, spatial apartheid, and land dispossession are not abstract historical events, but lived realities. As the term 'structures' tells us, this extends beyond the material and includes knowledge frameworks and our political and social structures. In highlighting and recasting material forms, as well as prompting different approaches to existing buildings and narratives, Structures pushes us to imagine and dream anew, and to approach the possibility of new structural forms with urgency and care.
Questioning informality
Hélio Oiticica was a Brazilian artist working from the mid-1950s till his death in 1980. This was a particularly turbulent time in Brazil's history, as in 1964 a US-backed military coup ousted then-President João Goulart, with the subsequent military dictatorship clamping down severely on freedom of expression. It was in this climate that Oiticica found himself creating, and his works pushed against both the government's repression and the stark inequalities of Brazilian society. His use of installation and desire to make his art interactive and engaging was pioneering. His work Tropicália inspired the name of the counter-culture movement Tropicalismo after it was taken up by singer Caetano Veloso.PN28 “Nas Quebradas” is part of a broader series of installations by Oiticica, Penetrável. The series created installations and sculptures that the viewer could penetrate and become part of. PN28 was created the year before Oiticica's death and invites you to walk through a building of wood, steel, and yellow panels. 'Nas quebradas' is a phrase referring to the periphery of a city, and the structure highlights the architectural forms of Rio de Janeiro's favelas (high-density neighbourhoods).
Though geographically different in origin, PN28 immediately makes one think of the shacks that are commonplace throughout South Africa. Their improvised forms are fit for purpose, and the parallels between them echo a line of thinking from Bernard Rudofsky, author of Architecture without Architects, who wrote that "Vernacular Architecture does not go through fashion cycles. It is nearly immutable, indeed, unimprovable, since it serves its purpose to perfection."
At the time of its creation, Oiticica's work complicated the image the Brazilian government was trying to sell. PN28 highlights the built forms of the favelas, often dismissed as 'informal', and other works in the Penetrável series focus on the culture and social practices that emerged here. His works in many ways embody AbdouMaliq Simone's concept of 'people as infrastructure', asking us to reframe how we perceive shacks and informality more broadly, and highlighting the broader social networks and structures that allow for living in urban spaces.
In South Africa, the questions of what is allowed versus not, what is formal versus informal, and seen versus hidden, are all charged with the weight of our history. And while moments such as Operation Clean Sweep (a crackdown on 'informal' traders by the Johannesburg Metro Police Department in 2013) overtly display the violence underpinning this, it is a continual violent erasure, not just of what is deemed as knowledge, but of individuals lives and livelihoods with regular police raids, forced removals by private parties such as the Red Ants, and the repression of groups like the shack-dwellers movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, paint a worryingly close picture to the repression which Oiticica was critiquing in Brazil.
Examining meaning
Building Africa: The State of Things! is an interactive installation by the collective Matri-Archi(tecture). Founded in 2017 by Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk, Matri-Archi(tecture) hosts a network of African and diasporic spatial practitioners. Their work merges art, architecture, and research to learn more about our lived experiences and imaginaries.
The work Building Africa: The State of Things! focuses on Constitution Hill and the Union Buildings. Featuring podiums that contain sculptural fragments, collages of archive material, and books, visitors can reflect on the meaning of these buildings.
The archive is portrayed as a place of scraps, with Jurczok-de Klerk highlighting that it is how we piece these together that new histories and languages of understanding are formed. In inviting participation and reflection from viewers, Building Africa highlights the tensions in what these buildings represent under democratic rule.
Photo: Graham De Lacy.
Aside from being an interrogation of how buildings are used to construct the idea of statehood, Building Africa looks at the ways in which memories get imposed on spaces and buildings and how these shape experiences and perceptions of them. The monuments and architecture of apartheid and colonialism are imposed across South Africa's landscape and cities. Some are repurposed and transformed, while others, like John Vorster Square (now the Johannesburg Central Police Station Precinct), remain obstinately the same, the air around them thick with repressed and hidden memories and atrocities.
Matri-Archi(tecture) does not overtly problematise any narrative. Instead, Building Africa functions as an open-ended exploration of the state of these buildings, the politics and histories around them, and the lives which constitute them, bringing to light the conflicting nature of these subjective experiences.
Not just land
In their conversation with Ashraf Jamal as part of JCAF's Knowledge Talks podcast series (listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts), Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho of artist collective MADEYOULOOK, say, "To seek out other forms of practice, other forms of knowledge. To not necessarily replace what we had developed in our education. But I think to fill in some of those gaps of the unsaid."
In Structures, their work Dinokana, first presented at the South African Pavilion for the 2024 Venice Biennale, focuses on the persistent legacies of land dispossession and forced migration in South Africa. Pieces of resurrection plants shimmer like rainfall beneath JCAF's muted lights, curtaining slats of wood which speak to the terraces used in farming by the Bakoni (an indigenous, agro-pastoral society in present-day Mpumalanga), one of the earliest peoples to adopt this farming method.
In looking at the multiple iterations of displacement that the Bakoni and Bahurutshe people faced, the installation not only recovers histories that have been obscured but also highlights the resilience to find new farming methods and ways of connecting with the land.
Dinokana includes a 20-minute-long soundscape which blends oral accounts of the Bakoni's history, sounds of farming and the songs that accompany this, and the city which many were forced to, all moving according to the rhythms of a Joburg thunderstorm.
Central to their piece are the effects and meanings of land dispossession, what gets lost that was connected to the land, and how people find ways to recover this. Here, the words of Palestinian filmmaker Emad Burnat in 5 Broken Cameras ring powerfully, "This place ties us together. More than feeding us, the land connects us." Dinokana returns to an unanswered question in South Africa, focusing on how processes of renewal are found, in spite of devastating structural processes, and asks what future possibilities can emerge from this.
Desire lines
Across from Dinokana is Igshaan Adams' installation Gebedswolke ('prayer clouds'). The delicately shimmering lines of Gebedswolke trace the informal paths of the communities of Langa, Bonteheuwel, and Heideveld in the Western Cape. These 'desire lines' are a rejection of apartheid's boundaries, and in mapping them, the work pushes against the planned city, focusing instead on how it is shaped by the lives of its inhabitants. Above the lines hang 'prayer clouds', suspended in mid-air, the hopes and dreams of the travellers almost tangible yet just out of reach.
Structures is in many ways an intervention in author Teju Cole's dream city – both a physical space and a mental landscape. The exhibition does not tell us what this should look like or how we should be moving towards it, but rather creates a space for dialogue and new possibilities. In so doing, this offering brings an urgent sense of need to "direct our efforts towards the real city" and the structures around it.
Structures is on show at Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation in Forest Town until Sat, Nov 15, 2025. Book a free guided walkabout here.
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