Zoned for perpetual shape-shifting
New Doornfontein and its history are a source of constant inspiration for artist Dorothee Kreutzfeldt, writes
ON a quiet Sunday morning a few collaborators, artists and curious admirers gathered at the ROOM gallery’s new premises in New Doornfontein, for a walkabout of the Johannesburg neighbourhood with artist Dorothee Kreutzfeldt.
A mostly industrial area bounded by the Ellis Park complex and Troyeville, the area has become home to a small group of artists including Nandipha Mntambo, Wayne Barker, Ayana Jackson and the experimental rock group Blk Jks. All have studios in Ellis House, where the gallery is situated.
Today it is quiet and almost suburban, except for the noise from at least six different church services in various warehouse buildings along Voorhout Street. It is this transitional and fluctuating nature of space in globalised, panAfrican Johannesburg that Kreutzfeldt has often explored in recent collaborative works.
In the past two months she has produced several paintings, installations and a video piece as part of Here We, a continuously changing exhibition at the gallery that, like the area it explores, is never static but responds to the world around it.
Born in Namibia, Kreutzfeldt grew up in Germany and studied at the Michaelis School of Art at the University of Cape Town before moving to Johannesburg in 2000.
She now lectures at the University of the Witwatersrand School of Arts.
Over the past few years she has been involved in collaborations around the inner city. These include working on the book Not No Place with fellow artist and academic Bettina Malcomess, which led her to research some of the history of Ellis Park in relation to the upgrades made ahead of the 2010 Soccer World Cup.
Today though, she’s particularly interested in the trees as we walk towards the railway line and down to the stadium. Kreutzfeldt points out pepper trees, the palms outside the swimming pool and her personal favourite — a fever tree.
While working on her paintings, she says, she began wondering how long she could look at the corner of Voorhout and Dawe streets before becoming tired of it. “Tired of all the stuff that is part of this place, of nothing really ‘happening’.
“At night the area is fairly dark, the gallery lit brightly at the corner — the streets are quiet then. I haven’t grown tired of looking at the large pine tree opposite the gallery, host to many birds; or watching the passers-by, particularly on a Sunday.”
Those passers-by cast curious glances at the group as Kreutzfeldt leads us towards Bertrams and one of the sources of the Jukskei River. She says her interest in the source was sparked by a photograph of “Ellis Park Lake” she found while working on the book with Malcomess.
“[It is] a very peculiar image that seems incongruous and yet so much part of the city,” she says. “You have a small ‘lake’, really a reservoir, with a couple of scattered rowing boats. There are ‘rolling hills’ in the distance [Yeoville Ridge], what looks like pine trees and small suburban houses — a romantic postcard image, really, of a place by a lake with some leisurely rowing, at odds with the segregated labour and industrial history of the city, its hard capitalist survival narrative.”
In the early history of the city, most of the suburbs from Yeoville through Bezuidenhout Valley, Bertrams and up to Troyeville were parcelled off from the farm Doornfontein and the names reflect the people who bought the land. Ellis Park was named after the city councillor JD Ellis, who made about 5ha of land available for the building of the stadium in 1928.
The surrounding areas have always been associated with Johannesburg’s working classes, from the Jews in the late 19th century through to the poor white residents of the early 20th century. Today, as we walk past dilapidated row houses with dogs barking in small yards and signs reading “Trespassers will be eaten”, it retains many of those associations.
An hour and a half later we have completed a small journey through the rich history of an area that seems to be poised on the edge of yet another transformation. This is reflect- ed in Kreutzfeldt’s title, Here We, which is borrowed from the slogan on the back of a jacket purchased at the nearby China Mall.
“Who is ‘we’?” she wonders. “What do we bring to the ‘here’, in alignment with whom? What is the ontological ‘we’, the sociological ‘here’ . . . the constructed ‘here’ of a gallery space on the corner of two streets, in a semi-industrial complex?”
It is a complicated question to which there are no easy answers. New Doornfontein is on the cusp of possible gentrification. But for now, this corner is a good place to start thinking about the many fascinating histories of the city.
Here We closes at ROOM on Saturday with a screening of the video installation “At the End of August” at 6pm. The gallery is at 23 Voorhout Street, New Doornfontein. Visit roomgallery.co.za
What is the ontological ‘we’, the sociological ‘here’?