In Situ: Stories of Johannesburg High-Rises reflects on the contemporary state of several key architectural structures in Johannesburg’s inner city, a place where everyone meets for a better life. The body of work comprises views of some well-loved landmark structures and their stark interiors.

The selection intentionally places emphasis on the absence of the figurative. Several of these buildings, like dormant vaults, carry the names of the giant corporate entities that were directly responsible for, or invested in, their construction. Many of them were a result of the architectural boom that occurred at the height of apartheid-era economic prosperity, and were built on the backs of the very people it sought to exclude. One cannot ignore the troubling legacy that these structures denote. 

The post In Situ: Stories of Johannesburg High-Rises appeared first on JCAF Journal.

I remember visiting the Johannesburg Art Gallery as a young boy. I was enthralled by the architecture of the cavernous building and its magnificent spaces containing artworks of varying periods, styles and mediums. Just over 20 years later, I returned as the newly appointed Head and Chief Curator of the museum. It was during this period that I organised Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent curated by Simon Njami. The exhibition had been travelling to museums in Europe, the UK and Asia but was not destined to be shown in Africa. The impetus to bring Africa Remix to Johannesburg was founded on the continued marginalisation experienced by the, then so-called, “periphery” (located outside of the centres of Europe, the US and the UK).

The centre/periphery debates were formative in the establishment of the first Johannesburg Biennale (1995) in which I was selected for the first Trainee Curator programme. As part of the programme, I worked with French curator Jean-Hubert Martin, who had curated the important and controversial exhibition Magiciens de la Terre (Magicians of the Earth) in 1989 that ushered in significant debates around multiculturalism. After a stint at the Curatorial Programme at De Appel in Amsterdam, I worked with Okwui Enwezor on the second Johannesburg Biennale, Trade Routes: History & Geography (1997), which turned out to be a watershed exhibition that didn’t so much speak about multiculturalism as it did embody it, and proved a forerunner to the epoch of globalisation we know today. Enwezor is “often credited for turning the global attention to the rich and expansive art of the Global South, he battled fiercely against the deeply embedded and reductive nature of the Euro- and Western-centric art world.”¹ The idea of decentring is at the heart of the work that JCAF is doing. Before elaborating further on JCAF and its institutional modalities, however, it is important at this point to provide some background to the idea of the South.

In 1935 Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García published The School of the South Manifesto in which he articulated his ideas about Latin American art. Torres-García was primarily concerned with how Latin American art had been positioned in relation to the United States and Europe. Through his manifesto and workshops he encouraged students to seek inspiration locally rather than following international art trends. As Maya Jiménez points out, “Torres-García upended traditional hierarchical structures by defining the art of South America on its own terms, rather than in relation to that of the North (i.e. the United States and Europe) as it had been in the past.”² In 1943, Torres-García produced an ink drawing titled América Invertida (Inverted America) in which the artist, through a single conceptual turn, inverts the map of the Americas, placing Latin America at the top and the United States below the equator. Through this seemingly simple yet profound gesture, Torres-García repositions the South at the new North.

The “South”, also referred to as the Global South, suggests an economic, social, political and cultural identification amongst postcolonial subjects who express common ideals from a variety of heterogeneous contexts identified with, but not necessarily geographically located in, the South. Therefore, the Global South is a construct and not a geographic location. Central to this construct is the idea of shared identities that affirm themselves in contrast to Western or Northern forms of hegemony thereby countering imbalances in order to produce new forms of economic, cultural, social and political emancipation. JCAF views its operational locale as strategically located within the South. The South suggests a reorientation away from concepts shaped in the North to those formulated in the South. As such, JCAF, as an active participant, imagines a critical role in producing and disseminating artistic and cultural knowledge in and from the South, what may be referred to as Southern epistemologies.

“The idea of decentring is at the heart of the work that JCAF is doing.”

The place of JCAF’s making is Johannesburg, a city notoriously framed as crime-ridden, with failing infrastructure, and often referred to as looking more and more “African” (sic). Although these challenges exist, the reality is that Johannesburg is the site of continuous re-invention and imagination. It is a thriving metropolis described by Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe as follows:

Johannesburg is the premier African metropolis, the symbol par excellence of the “African modern”. It has been, over the last hundred years, along with São Paulo, Mumbai, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, Seoul and Sydney, one of the critical nodes of Southern Hemispheric capitalism and globalization. The African modern is a specific way of being in the world. As elsewhere in the global South, it has been shaped in the crucible of colonialism and by the labour of race. Worldliness, in this context, has had to do not only with the capacity to generate one’s own cultural forms, institutions and lifeways, but also with the ability to foreground, translate, fragment and disrupt realities and imaginaries originating elsewhere and in the process place these forms and processes in the service of one’s own making. This is why modernity and worldliness, here, have been so intrinsically connected to various forms of circulation – of people, capital, finance, and images – and to overlapping spaces and times.³

There is a sense that cities like Johannesburg and others in the South (New Delhi, São Paulo, Mexico City) are dynamic spaces for new forms of cultural expression that both straddle a decolonial moment and signal emerging signs of identity formation. Whilst they don’t necessarily compare to the cultural infrastructure of cities in the North, they offer new possibilities for re-imagining museums in ways that differ from that of the North. As Enwezor states, “We cannot take for granted that museums remain very important sites of judgement, the power of the Western idea of beauty and of aesthetics accomplishment has already been written.”⁴ And so the 18th- and 19th-century model of the museum as an institution of elite culture predicated on the “collecting of other cultures” through a dominant Western worldview has been replaced in the 20th century with a museum model espousing what purports to be a global view of the world in spectacular architectural temples, whose values are increasingly aligned to the art market, commodity culture, leisure and entertainment. As Claire Bishop points out, “Today however, a more radical model of the museum is taking shape; more experimental, less architecturally determined, and offering a more political engagement with the historical moment.”⁵ Could some of these museums (institutions) be emerging in the South as sites of dialectical engagement, embracing political modalities whilst embedded in the temporal realities of time and place? Eduard Glissant imagined the museum as an archipelago – a place that is responsive to its cultural context and capable of embracing new spaces and temporalities, what Glissant referred to as “globality”, “a form of worldwide exchange that recognises and furthers diversity and creolisation.”⁶ Glissant’s museum was inspired by the Antilles, a group of islands in the Caribbean that formed the crucible of his ideas and writings. He formulated the idea of the museum as resisting the homogenising effects of modernity.

“The history of the South and its artists is still being written by the West in the West for Western consumption.”

How might JCAF feature in this narrative? Whilst recognising the important contribution that the North has made to cultural institutions and museums, JCAF’s aim is to bring the periphery back to the centre, both in terms of the material (the physical institution) and the immaterial (its discourse) in the spirit of Glissant’s Les Périphériques vous parlent (the Periphery is speaking to you).⁷ This is analogous to Torres-García’s conceptual turn of the map of the Americas – once you invert the North with the South, shifting centuries of colonialism and Western hegemonic influence to a new subaltern reality, you call into question who decides, who gets to author history, who curates and narrates our stories, how meaning is determined institutionally in global semantic terms infers a very important question, who writes our histories.

We have to research what constitutes our art history. It didn’t start with colonisation; it started much earlier. We have to write this history. Because in Morocco, we do not have a book about our history. And Africa is not a country, it is not homogeneous; West Africa is not the same as South Africa and North Africa. We come from different realities. It is very important that we know where we are coming from, because we have a rich culture. It is our duty to archive, to write and rewrite this history.⁸

The above statement by Meriem Berrada, Artistic Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL) in Morocco, expresses a significant issue around representation – as to who has the right to represent our artists, our artistic histories and cultural narratives. Who is telling our stories? Numerous exhibitions by artists in the South regularly take place in art institutions and museums in the North (the US and Europe) as part of a larger circuit of solo and group exhibitions alongside commercial galleries and art fairs. The curating of Southern artists is typically orchestrated by curators from Northern institutions who also produce the accompanying curatorial texts that elaborate on the artist, their practice and often engage with the context or place in which the artist operates in the South. Moreover, the institution presenting the exhibition is typically framed within a Western, white-cube-type experience, that more often than not contrasts with the artworks on display and the socio-cultural context in which they were produced. The experience of the artwork by an audience in such institutions is mediated through an accompanying education programme, guided tours and publications that in turn become the archive and institutional memory of that artist and their work. The history of the South and its artists is still being written by the West in the West for Western consumption. This means that audiences in the South are usually not part of the conversation.

A second element of this problem exists in the form of collections and the collecting ethos by major museums in the North. Ostensibly, large museums have established a system of committees based on geographic territories – so, an Africa committee, a Latin America committee, etc. – whose function is to support (through financial means) the purchasing of artworks by Southern artists from those geographic locations. The members of these committees are most often collectors and philanthropists (from these locations) who, for the privilege of being associated with the said museum, donate works by Southern artists to the museum’s collection. Effectively the patrons from the South are subsidising wealthy Western museums through this patronage system. And whilst the exposure in these museums of a handful of artists from the South is important, one wonders if it wouldn’t make better sense for the same resources to be used to support local artists and institutions in the South, thereby strengthening the local art context.

A third aspect of the North–South museum conundrum is related to loans. To illustrate this point I will use an example from JCAF pertaining to the artist Frida Kahlo. In October 2022, JCAF presented a three-women exhibition, Kahlo, Sher-Gil, Stern: Modernist Identities from the Global South. The process to secure a loan of an artwork by Frida Kahlo took four years. As curator of the exhibition I undertook extensive research and travelled to six museums in the US to explain and motivate for the unprecedented loan of a work by Kahlo to an institution in Johannesburg. This would be the first time that a work by Kahlo would be exhibited on the African continent, more especially alongside the Indian modernist Amrita Sher-Gil and the South African modernist Irma Stern. Five of the six museums declined to loan (the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Austin, Texas agreed to a loan), and further requests were denied, including by MOMA and the Centre Pompidou. It is understandable that a loan is not always possible, but regular “blockbuster” exhibitions by Kahlo occur in museums in the US, the UK and Europe amongst a network of closely affiliated museums that present themselves as global. They do this through the diversity of their exhibition programming and their collections, curating a mix of Western artists alongside Southern artists to present a globalised representation of themselves, similar to the art world in general. What becomes apparent, however, is that when it comes to North–South institutional relations, globalisation works only in one direction – toward the North.

To establish a more sustainable and truly globalised art world requires institutions (museums, foundations, biennales, NPOs, artist-run spaces, collections, art centres) to be established in the South. Their purpose is to promote Southern artists (alongside international artists); to develop the local art context; to educate local audiences; to produce local knowledge (curated exhibitions, texts, publications etc.) and to archive these activities for future generations. If institutions in the North are genuinely wanting to support a globalised view of the art world then it is incumbent upon them to change the existing modus operandi to a more equitable exchange which recognises that knowledge exists in the South.

“What becomes apparent, however, is that when it comes to North–South institutional relations, globalisation works only in one direction – toward the North.”

Recently there has been exponential growth in private- and government-supported museums in the South, particularly in China and the Middle East. Instead of following the traditional model of the Western museum being perpetuated in these regions, there is ample opportunity to redefine museum and institutional models in the South. Instead, several iconic architects have built “spectacular” architectural statements and select Western major museums have extended their “brands” and expertise to these regions at great cost, resulting in instant cultural manifestations. What is needed is an alternative model of museums and cultural institutions to be developed to counter the hegemonic influence of Western cultural imperialism toward a version that recognises the local conditions, thereby taking on a vernacular embodiment that fuses the local and global into new hybrid entities.

What could these new entities look like? There are several existing examples within the South that address concerns of local knowledge such as MASP in São Paulo, which uses the curatorial to address local and indigenous knowledge through their research, exhibitions and programmes. Similarly, the Zinsou Foundation in Benin has rethought the traditional museum model from an African perspective, while the Sharjah Art Foundation has developed an ambitious programme that intersects the local and global, and the Dhaka Art Summit in Bangladesh has put forward a model that emphasises engagement over that of the white cube. Institutions in the South need to think differently and stop modelling themselves on the typical Western museum model, one that increasingly is predicated on consumerism, the decontextualisation of artworks and ultimately promotes Western ideas and motives.

At this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale led by Artistic Director Lesly Lokko, one of the video works by artist Ursula Biemann presented a project to develop a university (based on local Indigenous knowledge systems) in the Amazon. In the video, one of the local Inga people who is being interviewed, expresses his view of the proposed university. It is not a building or university campus located in the Amazon but instead, as he poignantly suggests, “the Amazon [itself] is the university”.⁹ This idea that knowledge stems from the local is intrinsic to the DNA of JCAF.

JCAF was founded as a philanthropic initiative whose mission is to foreground knowledge about and from the South. It functions with an epistemological framework that places research at the centre of its exhibitions and technology. It curates its exhibitions internally within the organisation according to a theme that runs for a period of three years. Our first theme, Female Identities in the Global South, focused exclusively on women artists, architects and academics. This established a pedagogic methodology linking ideas to research to practice as a feedback loop culminating in our primary research output, the JCAF Journal: Interdisciplinary Knowledge from the South. JCAF is an institution that may be best described as “a museum as a thinking protocol”, a term coined by the Colombian educator and artist Beatriz Gonzalez¹⁰ who emphasised the relationship between a viewer and an artwork as a “great mystery”. This ethos is a value system that JCAF employs in our exhibitions, emphasising an encounter between a visitor and the artworks on display that might lead to what is best described as an “epiphany”. We do this by producing only one museum-quality exhibition per year. For each exhibition we have removed all wall texts and labels, replacing these with a three-fold methodology, incorporating (i) the viewer, who is encouraged to look and “see” the artworks as primarily visual rather than reading textually about the artworks; (ii) guides who are trained to encourage dialogue with viewers and to engage in discussion about specific artworks and the issue the exhibition presents; (iii) a digital app, for visitors who require a different experience, that works with beacon location technology to push contextual information about the exhibition and artworks to a visitor’s device, allowing for interactive engagement. Our visitor analytics indicate that our audience members spend, on average, more than an hour in each exhibition with much deeper levels of engagement.

“JCAF was founded as a philanthropic initiative whose mission is to foreground knowledge about and from the South. It functions with an epistemological framework that places research at the centre of its exhibitions and technology.”

JCAF launched in February 2020 with a Lecture from the Global South presented by Arjun Appadurai (included in this edition of the journal). Under the auspices of the School of the South, JCAF presents lectures related to our exhibitions by scholars in the South. All the content is available on the JCAF website and our interactive touchscreen. We developed a “digital universe”, establishing a user journey that includes online booking, our website, Instagram, virtual tours of all exhibitions, our interactive touchscreen and exhibition app. Here the emphasis is on digital technology supporting the art-viewing experience for visitors. Our visitors are personally met by JCAF staff when they come to visit the exhibitions, which facilitates a more bespoke experience with the longer-term aim of developing a “knowledge community” of visitors who will become more closely associated with JCAF, creating relationships and interactions that deepen over time through our various offerings. In developing the model of JCAF we have endeavoured to reflect on issues that are culturally and socially relevant, while maintaining the highest quality artistic programming as a critical space for ideas and debate. Our values promote a cosmopolitan view within the South, advocating for knowledge as an instrument for building and shaping society in an ethical and sustainable model that places art at the heart of all we do.

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In 2023, Johannesburg has been in the news a lot, mostly for the wrong reasons. This trend found its apogee during the last gasp of August when a so-called hijacked building caught fire and 77 people lost their lives.¹ The scale of the tragedy brought a longstanding pattern of governmental neglect into stark relief. Joburgers felt silently vindicated that their ever-deepening disillusionment with the city government, and their withdrawal from collective commitments were justified. Everyone must accept that they’ve got to look after their own interests even if the post-democracy social compact around redistribution and redress, embodied in the slogan “one-city-one-tax base”, was once widely accepted.

In the wake of the devastating fire on 31 August, the responses from political leaders across the ideological spectrum laid bare thinly veiled xenophobia and scapegoating. Political courage and magnanimity were in desperately short supply and the moment congealed a longstanding culture of neglect, mendacity, ignorance, populism and opportunism. There is seemingly no one on the political horizon with an appetite to engage the city in all of its localised and global complexity, contradictions, unknowns and potentialities. Joburg residents and institutions have effectively been left to fend for themselves. The near daily crisis of failing water supply, low water pressure, electricity blackouts, sewerage spills, rampant crime, unreliable public transport, pervasive corruption and tender rigging, aggregates into a widespread societal disdain for the political class responsible for the running and futures of Johannesburg.

Johannesburg is not alone in its downward spiral of disrepair and interminable crises. They are perhaps not as extreme, but Pretoria (Tshwane Metropolitan area), Durban (eThekwini) and East London (Buffalo City) are not much different; nor are any of the townships with the highest rates of violent crime in Cape Town. Profound development challenges can be traced back to deep economic and institutional issues. In terms of unemployment, South Africa is an outlier for an upper middle-income country with unemployment at 42.1 percent during the first quarter of 2023.² Shockingly, the figure jumps to 60 percent for youth. These alarming figures reflect a long-term trend that marks most of the post-apartheid era and is not unrelated to spatial inequality and the concentrations of various forms of economic, health, material and development disadvantage in so-called townships and informal settlements where the urban poor are concentrated. The challenge that South Africa faces is to address profound economic exclusion whilst simultaneously attending to the imperatives of decarbonising the economy, which could, if poorly managed, exacerbate structural unemployment and inequality. Furthermore, economic policies must also align with a Pan-African agenda – the African Continental Free Trade Area – that South Africa signed up for. But it is possible that in the short-term this agreement could further undermine the competitiveness of South African firms, exacerbating the employment crisis.

Triangulating between the imperatives of deep inequality, achieving environmental sustainability and integrating with the regional African economy demand political imagination and strategic clarity and resolve that are in short supply across the political spectrum in South Africa. The polycrisis vortex seems destined simply to gather violent momentum, leading to unthinkable social dislocation and pain.³ Agony and cruelty  seem to be the defining experiences of numerous cities, nations and communities across the world as war machineries re-enter geopolitics at various scales, not least across the Saharan belt of West Africa, the Great Lakes, Ukraine and, most recently, Palestine and Israel. These visceral arenas tend to overshadow the greater, low-intensity carnage meted out by organised criminal gangs (in collusion with criminal actors in security forces) in Haiti, many Mexican cities, El Salvador, Brazil and, of course, in South African cities such as Cape Town, to name a few. Different forms of structural violence such as hunger, poor health and inhumane living conditions are a fact-of-daily-life for three billion people across the Global South, concentrated in complex makeshift neighbourhoods in cities and towns marked by vulnerability to incessant intimidation and the prospect of violence.

We face a profound existential political crisis.⁴ Current systems and forms of governance are out of sync with the systemic factors that drive the polycrisis and its maldevelopment effects. The most telling examples are in the climate change crises. We do not have the global governance institutions that can legislate, as well as regulate and sanction parties failing to comply with the necessary radical changes to production, manufacturing and waste systems that directly produce unsustainable carbon emissions. The science is clear about the speed of decarbonisation required as well as the differential contributions of various national economies. These have been calculated by governments themselves as well as by oversight institutions. Yet, every year when nations congregate at the Conference of Parties it is the same story: no one is following through on their inadequate commitments, and as a result the crisis deepens and even more radical mitigation and adaptation actions are required, with even less likelihood of success.⁵ The resource and material demands of the global economy fuelled by unbridled consumerism represent a predicable disaster unfolding in slow motion, and as witnesses we seem paralysed.

Similar dynamics apply to various biophysical systems that constitute our planetary boundaries, reflected in a dramatic overshoot of our safe operating space as a living planet, demonstrated in the figure below.

The deep ecological crisis intersects with an equally profound crisis of inequality linked to obscene wealth differentials within countries, between countries, between regions and, of course, within cities where the global economy is anchored. An equally profound political crisis of legitimacy and opportunism means that most countries have very few ideas, leaders and institutions able to come to terms with the polycrisis, let alone systematically and creatively address it. Yet almost all economic growth remains anchored in cities. Ninety percent of urban growth will be in Africa and Asia and an enormous amount of investment will have to be mobilised to remain ahead of this demographic curve in terms of infrastructure and buildings, and attend to the gigantic price tag of refurbishing the built environment of established cities in OECD countries.

The aggregate of these investments is what will determine the fate of the Global South, the global economy and especially cities because they will have to be the primary theatre of action to figure out new, circular, sustainable, inclusive and regenerative forms of value creation, that can produce universal, mundane comfort (decent quality of life) and opportunities for flourishing.

There is an inescapable aporia at the heart of this story: the powers that control states and multinational corporations do not see their interests reflected in taking painful corrective short-term action, yet changing course towards a just, sustainable transformation requires collective action that involves states and major corporations. This begs the question: how will systemic change come into the world, and from where? Neither philosophy nor social science can answer these questions. What is called for is an inhabitation of the aporia through artistic thinking and practice. Development actors who are fiercely committed to figuring out new forms of questioning, language building, representation, affective dispositions, strategy and tactics will best be served by entering into argumentative dialogue with artistic and aesthetic registers. Such encounters could also infuse the arts and artistic movements with a renewed sense of urgency and relevance. What remains unclear are the institutional frameworks and spaces that can engender such encounters. We clearly need a new grammar for imagining and experimentation to decipher the pathways that lead away from emergency response, to systemic change and regenerative futures.⁶

“This begs the question: how will systemic change come into the world, and from where?”

Let us travel back to Johannesburg and the urban scale. Given the coexistence of urgent emergencies and the need for systemic change, we must cultivate a double-mindedness. We always need both incremental (ameliorative and modest) and systemic (structural and radical) change. Their articulation is optimised when incremental and political acts feed off strategic ruptures in the fabric of normality, such as when the inner city building was gutted by the fire. It is during these moments of intense outrage and anger that it becomes easier to mobilise the full democratic range of public passions and cultural attachments. By definition such a political disposition can accommodate generosity, openness, rage, patience, experimentation and impertinence. These are not contradictory sensibilities but the very entanglements that artistic thinking is so powerfully equipped to embody. Thus, in my research I am always hunting for stories and examples of people and organisations inhabiting this messy and uncertain space. This work is at the root of an exhibition-in-a-box that I am co-curating with Tau Tavengwa focused on patterns and instances of emergence in cities across the Global South. In closing this reflection I want to invoke two stories from a basket of twelve we are collating for the exhibition.

One of the harshest places to do imaginative work is Tijuana in Mexico. Yet, in our research we found a remarkable example of audacious practice to alter the realm of the possible and imagination in the work of a local project space called The Farm. It was initiated by Raúl Cárdenas and compadres about 25 years ago when they established Torolab and curated successive experiments to carve a safe haven where artists, musicians, children, scientists, farmers, care workers, mothers, scholars, activists and former gang members could be enlisted in a wide range of programming that almost always took its cue from artistic thinking.

One of the outstanding interventions involved an experiment between nutritionists, food stall workers, community cooks, designers and entrepreneurs. The humble mission was to reinvent the staple tortilla. The challenge was to ensure that the required minimum daily nutritional intake is embedded in the recipe, which demanded a change in the conventional formula. The alternative had to be as affordable and tasty as the tortilla that people consume daily. As part of rethinking desirability and aesthetics, the carts used by the vendors were also redesigned to ensure a novel experience and sense of beauty for residents when buying the new and improved tortilla. Most importantly, rigorous scientific research underpinned the experiment and enabled the harvesting of tacit knowledge through constant feedback from residents and community cooks. All aspects were documented and tracked to create a new archive of community life, desire and movement.⁷

None of this work solves the larger systemic questions but it operates at a level of everyday intimacy that is a fundamental dimension of both imagining and instantiating different kinds of future potentialities.

Another example is on the other end of the spectrum: the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) in Bengaluru, India is an audacious effort to reimagine the university so that it can equip a new generation of urban practitioners to advance alternative forms of urban life, infrastructure, building, literature and visual cultures.⁸ IIHS invented a post-disciplinary faculty system; introduced a radically different curriculum; enabled direct engagements with the “real” world in the state and private sector through various internships whilst academic learning is happening; and brought in artists and writers to rescript the frames of reference for urbanism. Story development and telling, hidden away in the case study method, are central to their practice.

“None of this work solves the larger systemic questions but it operates at a level of everyday intimacy that is a fundamental dimension of both imagining and instantiating different kinds of future potentialities.”

This radical epistemic and pedagogic project dovetails with an insistence on occupying the worlds of policy research, theory building, advice and intermediation, resulting in, for example, the building of a completely new institutional architecture to advance universal access to sanitation in a state with a population of 55 million people. There is no equivalent institution anywhere in Africa, but it offers a reminder that the Johannesburg city-region can reimagine and reinvent itself despite all of our messy political and institutional challenges. India is nothing if not politically messy and complex.

My current obsessions compel me to scour the Global South for urban experiments that offer clues about how to inhabit our time of dissonance, a veritable interregnum that demands a commitment to radical experimentation, deep learning, fierce debate, and the fostering of beauty, insight and transdisciplinary knowledge magnetised by artistic thinking.

The post Johannesburg as Refraction of Dissonant Times appeared first on JCAF Journal.

THE BLOOM

If visualised, new global criticism and knowledge production would represent a bloom located in what we may once have termed the subaltern, but now perhaps something more substantial and methodological in this positioning: the African communal egalitarian frame, the East Asian technical and scientific formation, bio-cultures and the review (in some cases, the refusal) of South American colonial criticism, and what may very well be in the new future (as opposed to the old future) a premise for the critical Anthropocene from the Middle East. Each of these represents a distinct methodology and offers renewed criticism in response to knowledge justice.

Historically constricted by the Euro-American tradition and denied both participation and acknowledgement through systemic colonialism and technological neo-colonialism, this bloom of positionality is now no longer limited by the networks of the old guard. Instead, instant networks and digital publication in all its forms – text, media, audio, live engagement – allow for new global knowledge pathways.

This network is produced by the need for methodological diversity found in the creation, production and dissemination of knowledge. The network is constituted by those working at contributing on their own terms, in and across their communities, and linked by the common purpose of justice – justice for culture and knowledge.

These knowledge networks exist as “practice” in the Global South and they encompass a wide range of actions: from architecture in South Asia responding to climate change and affordability, to public universities in South America still challenging race, to “poor” communities engaging kindness as research. The list continues.

AFFORDANCES AND THE NETWORK

The bloom of knowledge in networks at this time benefits from transmission across the Global South of global digital networks. We should therefore reflect on the cybernetic origins of these networks, which were built not only on the desire to share information and data, but on a system of technological and digitally interactive affordances and constraints.

In global knowledge dissemination, a key affordance of digital networks is the ability to bypass historical institutional gate keeping. In digital interaction design, we work to maximise the affordances of a medium, and in so doing create satisfying experiences that are defined as agency in this realm. The affordance of bypassing institutionalised gate keeping through open digital networks is, therefore, agency in the Global South. Yet agency in the digital world is understood through the lens of semi-automative agency in interactive environments (as seen in examples such as games and user-led experiences),¹ where, by design, the user experiences agency due to a maximising of affordances, while simultaneously being in a position where the user is less concerned with constraints. My question here is: how can we better understand the control systems (the algorithms) of knowledge production, transmission and dissemination in Global South networks.

In the digital world, agency is not understood to be a product of the artefact, much like knowledge is not necessarily the product of an institutionalised regime. And yet we are distinctly aware of the relationship between artefact and agency. The well-used phrase of Marshall McLuhan “the medium is the message” comes to mind.² So when agency is taken as a goal, we can’t help but become aware of its opposite in the product, which is powerlessness, confusion or frustration.

Murray speaks of internet or digital networks as having four primary and inherent affordances:

When viewing knowledge of the South through this lens – and here in regard to these associative affordances, I mean both locative and methodological – then the spatial, encyclopedic, participatory and procedural can be read as potentialities for knowledge agency. In Global South knowledge transmission, spatial affordances add to knowledge of what has been both denied and forgotten, allowing for the redrawing of territories, and the creating of new knowledge spaces beyond the institution and the premise of the subaltern.

Encyclopedic affordances for the South allow the inclusion of previously excluded and alongside new knowledges from the South. However these should include the methods of the South. The separation of knowledge from active and social participation is no longer tolerated, and we therefore see an entwining of encyclopedia and participatory affordances in the South. Alongside subaltern methods of knowledge production, methods of communal databasing, organising and archiving are being explored in networks to maximise these affordances towards agency.

It is well known to those who work in digital interaction design and use affordances to build agency-driven environments, that the last item on Murray’s list – procedural affordances – is central to supporting the other innate affordances. Yet what is often unspoken in both knowledge and digital design is that the participatory, encyclopedic and spatial contribute to how the procedural is manifest. A case in point currently is the growth of artificial intelligence and its applications: these show extreme bias to particular types of knowledge, thought, individuals and methods due to the biased institutionalised material on which these artificial “minds” are being trained.

The Global South is both unrepresented and unengaged by AI applications as a result of this bias. Information engineers, computer scientists and media artists from the Global South are, therefore, working at bringing into question and to the fore the “procedural” affordances of the “subaltern”, or what can be described as the participatory methods of the South. These are significant contributions and afford better representation in encyclopedic contributions from the South.

An instance of this is the work of the Africa-wide Maskhane network (https://www.masakhane.io/), which insists on both data sovereignty and open access in the use of African-language model training. Another is Karya, a non-profit launched in 2021 in Bengaluru, which sees itself as the world’s first ethical data company using data collection to reduce rural poverty as well as influencing associated metadata when collecting globalised data sets.⁴

The question of procedural affordances is one I have posed in an ongoing work titled A School for Vernacular Algorithms (2021), in which the procedural parts of digital computing are demystified so that it can be understood as an influence-driven system.⁵ The work aims to reduce the persistent reverence for technology’s procedural ability, and rather to view the procedural aspects of digitality as an extension of power and society, and a society that is non-representative and non-inclusive at best.

In contrast to technological procedural algorithms, A School for Vernacular Algorithms considers and takes seriously the algorithms of the subaltern found and transmitted in art, song, poetry and language in Southern vernacular knowledge systems. These systems are centuries old and contain histories of radical responsiveness, transformational methodologies and environmental learning. More importantly, vernacular systems are held and transferred by people in social, animist and object-ontological relations (as opposed to institutionalised regimes), thereby incorporating egalitarianism and environmentalism as a procedural affordance.

CITY, DECAY AND (NET)WORK

Like many Global South cities, Johannesburg holds explicit spatial, encyclopedic, participatory and procedural affordances unique to its history, cultures, economies and climates. Yet, much like the current state of global networks, these affordances are not seen for their potential towards agency, but rather as procedurally amiss. Johannesburg is a place in which many people are ground to the bone by the need to survive. Corruption and violence are part of the status quo in its procedural algorithms, and lead to the steady decay of systems that were once drawn from colonial encyclopedias. Other affordances that are inclined to the egalitarian are engaged by only a few who are able to sustain humility and hope in this system.

“Information engineers, computer scientists and media artists from the Global South are, therefore, working at bringing into question and to the fore the ‘procedural’ affordances of the ‘subaltern’, or what can be described as the participatory methods of the South.”

It is at this moment that I invite you to consider constraints, the hidden partner of affordances in digital media. Affordances and constraints work together in media design: constraints are a silent contributor, an inhibitor at the right moments leading the user away from places or actions that may hinder the task at hand. A common design example is the spout of a tea-pot: the angle and circumference of the spout is a constraint that leads the hot liquid in a particular direction, towards the affordance of the end of the spout where the liquid can exit freely in the right direction.

Murray writes further that, “[t]he constraints on a design project can be limitations of any kind, even such as time, money, human resources, computational power, bandwidth, and skill. Specific needs, such as institutional values, can also constrain the range of acceptable design solutions.” She goes on to indicate that platforms are an important source of constraints, listing as an example a mobile application’s screen size.

In the example of Johannesburg as a knowledge system, we might be inclined to view infrastructure decline as the misalignment of an older constraint of colonial power or values. In the city, corruption and violence are born from a collapsed system and this inhibits affordances that might be available to the city; thereby further placing civil society in a position where constraints overshadow affordance, thereby reducing agency for its citizens.

In returning to knowledge and networks, how do knowledge communities and dissemination platforms like the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation lower the impact of societal constraints on knowledge development? And not only the constraints of historical knowledge regimes, but also those being faced by all communities (including knowledge producers and artists)? In effect, how can misaligned, exclusionary and destabilising procedural constraints be shifted towards affordances that bring value to the spatial, encyclopedic, participatory and procedural affordances of knowledge creation in the South?

Each breath drawn in this city can be seen as a gasping breath that nonetheless has the potential to be vibrant. For instance, we see musical rhythms born here weave across global tiktoks: a communal construction that destabilises a universal algorithm. The ability of the South to present defiance should be its procedural affordance, and can be used to teach its encyclopedic search engines.

MAXIMISING AFFORDANCES IN THE FACE OF CONSTRAINTS

Exploring digital network affordances allows us to speak directly to what can be influenced. If we maximise affordances, then we allow the creation of agency. But how aware are we of the constraints in this uncomfortable balance towards agency? In answering the question of how cultural and knowledge communities can maximise affordances, we ask in turn what those centres are willing to do to see creative and knowledge agency take shape (in terms of Murray’s four affordances):

Spatial affordances and location – providing agency in navigation in interactive information design is dependent on providing a clear indication of the current location of the interactor. In my analogy this includes the relational distance between knowledge producer and receiver, and the respective affordances and constraints available to and between each. Greater agency for Global South knowledge goes beyond Global South vs Western locations (both methodological and encyclopedic) but requires an understanding of relational producer vs receiver locations and their constraining distances within the Global South.

“Greater agency for Global South knowledge goes beyond Global South vs Western locations (both methodological and encyclopedic) but requires an understanding of relational producer vs receiver locations and their constraining distances within the Global South.”

Encyclopedic – the value of digitality is that we don’t have to choose a single method of semantic segmentation as older encyclopedic models require. This affords a level of appropriate granularity in knowledge offerings, which should further afford diversity in who contributes to your database and how. How diverse are the encyclopedias of the South both in terms of knowledge types and methods? We should ask how knowledge diversity contributes to our organising conventions?

Participatory – good interaction design, as Murray notes, should emulate good tool design, creating transparent participatory methods with a gentle learning curve. Yet when considering the extensive impact of constraints in cities like Johannesburg and the impact on participation, we understand that participatory models should be aimed at overcoming these constraints and little else. We then need to ask who our knowledge network is? And rather than asking how our participatory models offer agency, we should ask how our participatory models lessen constraints for knowledge participation in the Global South.

Procedural – procedures modify the way in which an action is performed in a system of feedback and interaction. A key task is to acknowledge that this can be performed by more than one algorithm, and that algorithms are usually in place following human selection, thereby reflecting cultural bias, selected methods and values.

Procedures of knowledge of the Global South, meaning its ability for it to exist and interact beyond being just a notion of knowledge (inter-generational, networked interactive, progressive, regressive, boundaried, etc.) can only move from being a constraint to an affordance when they are responsive to the spatial, encyclopedia and participatory affordances of knowledge in the Global South.

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