Pockets of wildness in Joburg’s sprawl inspires artist’s towering work
When I asked my children if they wanted to come with me to see a new sculpture at the Firestation in Rosebank, I was hoping the trip would be a boon to them.
My eight-year-old daughter is a budding artist who naively thinks her dad’s part-time job as an arts writer is quite glamorous. And my son, like any four-year-old, is enthused by sirens and fire engines and firefighters sliding down a pole.
We were 50% successful – which, as any parent can confirm, is about the best one can hope for in a family excursion. There were no sirens, no fire engines, no firefighters, no poles; at first glance, all that remains of the old fire station in Rosebank, Johannesburg are the big wooden doors of the front facade. Instead, there is the Firestation at 16 Baker Street: one of many new property developments in the area meeting the need for high-rise office space.
We did, however, find the statue. Standing in the building’s foyer is Samantha ,a3m-high installation by Hannelie Coetzee constructed out of reclaimed wood — a Jenga-type composition of parquet flooring tiles, pallets, fragments of beams and other woody detritus.
Much of it comes from the Rissik Street Post Office that was destroyed in a fire, and some of the pieces are blackened and charred.
The material is thus apposite to the sculpture’s setting, and it sits atop an old wooden desk that evokes the back office of a fire station.
However, the sculpture responds to the element that complements and opposes fire, earth and air: the artist’s chief preoccupation is water.
Samantha is named from Samantha Mamiled, a woman Coetzee met on the banks of Ferndale stream — one of Joburg’s many watercourses that are largely unknown and ignored. For Mamiled, however, it is a place to bathe, to meet friends and socialise.
One might assume that Mamiled is “homeless”, yet her response to the fragile ecology of Johannesburg makes the city no less “homely” to her than it is to any other resident.
Coetzee recalls that her conversation with Mamiled was about “reconnecting with nature within urban areas”, a theme she explored in the 2016 exhibition Watermense/Water People, in which the work
Samantha first appeared. It is an ongoing project; the artist is conducting inner-city walkabouts in August and September, giving Joburgers the chance to discover the hidden reaches of the Jukskei River. Before the summer rains come, we are reminded that Johannesburg teeters on the edge of water scarcity. Wastage and pollution, at both the individual and the industrial level, is horrifying.
In this, SA’s major city is no different to smaller urban centres, towns and even rural villages across the country — but the scale of the problem, and the attendant risks to its millions of inhabitants, is that much greater.
My kids and I only had to walk a few blocks from the Firestation through Rosebank to encounter a handful of examples of how negligent Joburgers can be when it comes to water.
As you can imagine, I was ready to drive the lesson home. However, my young companions were not interested in my lectures and wanted to talk about Samantha.
Children’s curiosity is directly connected to their natural creativity — an impulse to build and draw, to play and imagine, and indeed to respond to works of art as the products of others’ creativity — that is easily nurtured but that is, too often, discouraged by their schools, parents and peers.
Yet, this is also a key component of what we might call (to adapt a phrase from Robert Coles) the “moral intelligence of children”. If there is an earnestness to kids’ and teenagers’ creativity, it is often accompanied by a seriousness in their sense of the world’s problems – particularly ecological ones.
One hopes, then, that this combination results in some inventive responses to the inaugural Envisionit Prize, with up to R1m on offer for grade 9 and 10 pupils to design “costeffective and sustainable waterharvesting solutions”.
Send your waterwise young people to www.eprize.africa to find out more.
WASTAGE AND POLLUTION — AT BOTH THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE INDUSTRIAL LEVEL — IS HORRIFYING