The pulling power of pictures PAGE 17
amid turbulent protest: sites of play incidentally colliding with those of fierce and volatile struggle.
Darkness can also awaken the imagination, offering atmosphere for transgression, abandon and fantasy.
Social anthropologist Julia Hornberger said of Joburg dusk: The night is a time for dreaming, for graffiti artists, for activists, lovers and dancers.
Paradoxically, darkness is often the necessary backdrop for glistening electric illumination, with all exploitable, policeable, profitable and beautiful.
Curated lighting is so much a part of the night-time infrastructure – designating areas of safety, enchantment and surveillance, and then disappearing as day breaks.
Braamfontein’s af t er- dark nightscape is marked by the multicoloured spectacle of the Nelson Mandela Bridge overhead, abrasive car lights, flash billboards and flickering neon.
Again in New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 18501950, Sharpe tells us: “Like a city, night has a history. And the two come together explosively with the spread of artificial light.”
A recent event, “Alight”, saw artists and designers launch audiences into a series of encounters with electric light in the night.
There was a maze of illuminated blocks that responded to touch. Also, a net of sparkle strung to the ceiling.
Lasers sketched silhouettes across a cement wall. There were glowing balloons and networks of interactive video technology.
On the darker side of the Juta Street intersection, it connected audiences to Joburg’s nocturnal city and promoted a sense of place through play, light and music.
But what “Alight” also achieved, in my mind, was to make explicit the infrastructure of our night lives, which rather than being assembled from bricks and mortar, is more tangibly a composite of sound, darkness, illumination and moving bodies.
Ever been to a nightclub during the day, without the darkness, the music, the ambient lighting or the intimacy of the crowd? It feels like a non-place.
So much of our attachment to nightclub spaces is made from bodies in motion, set to carefully curated sound and lightscapes, all of which disappear at dawn.
In urbanist AbdouMaliq Simone’s words, we might begin to see “people as infrastructure”.
Human practices, the absence or presence of others, in the city gives places particular contours, creates obstruction or permissiveness, and alters the look and feel of a place.
Moving through Joburg’s night city, particularly as a young woman, has meant adopting particular protective sensibilities.
But it has also opened up alternate ways of knowing and encountering the city and its practices.
In the realm of the urban night, artists are exposing the dearth of
Night has a different feel and aesthetic
academic language and imagery, prompting us to research and collaborate outside our conventional bounds.
They are showing us how much of human life goes unnoticed, while most of the world sleeps.
Vale is post-doctoral fellow, National Research Foundation chair: Local Histories, Present Realities, Wits University