Frontiers under the spotlight
THE notion of “psycho-geography” where people instinctively know that they are crossing invisible frontiers or boundaries in Grahamstown was superbly explored at the Francois Knoetze’s Virtual Frontiers exhibition at the National Arts Festival.
This was a visual arts exhibition without art on the walls. The art lay within the perception of the “VR” (virtual reality) experienced by exhibition visitors.
Viewers were faced with six machines, six different videos, each 13 minutes long, made from digitally edited 360-degree camera footage of people and places all around Grahamstown and with interviews with people.
The assertion is that all about Grahamstown east and west, an imaginary line is severely felt.
It is intangible as there is no fence or wall but it is there, said exhibition manager Thabiso Mafana.
He says the line is felt as soon as people travelling down Beaufort Street in town cross the bridge and the road becomes Jacob Zuma Drive and heads through the old township.
He said people knew where they were. “The boundary is physical. Intangible but visible,” he said.
The frontier is in the mind too. Watching the projected video which was not part of the VR machine explained it all, and created new questions.
Thabiso told visitors during a “walkabout” about an instinctive knowledge between himself and Grahamstown-raised artist Francois Knoetze, that in town Francois was the voice, and in Grahamstown east Thabiso naturally took over – language and “the other” come into play.
It was all about power and place. “There were spaces I could enter and Francois couldn’t, and vice versa.
They call it psycho-geography.”
It is a weird sensation. There is is an unsettling series of VR visuals and one is immersed in it. You feel as if you are there. How you interpret it, what you take from it, what you find funny, what makes you uncomfortable all depends on which side of the frontier you come from. And it begs the question of how you respond when you’re in the real scene.
Mafana said it was horrible to find, during their research, that a community had migrated to living on the municipal dump in Grahamstown west because it was “safer” than living in Vukani in Grahamstown East.
“It’s the biggest mall in Grahamstown, they say.”
● Sarah Robeson is an arts critic for TheCritter.co.za and served on the National Arts Festival’s Ovation Awards panel of judges.