HILTON JUDIN is a young architect who has set out to undermine the foundations of his profession. What drives him is the knowledge he was obliged to confront when doing research into low-cost housing in South Africa. What he saw as he worked his way through the archives of the locations and townships was the complex guilt of technical minds which took the dark fantasies and designs of racial power and materialised them in the spatial hierarchies of South African cities. His purpose is to make that process not just viable but
The design of his work is austere and simple. He produces exhibitions of the documents which carried out the actual work. The first installation was in Johannesburg last year. The present one is in the Cape Town Castle; others will follow in Durban, Kimberley and Pietersburg. Each will be unique to the city of its presentation, but all will follow the same basic form.
It would be difficult to imagine a stronger interpretation of the idea of an installation. In the long room in the Castle are eight double-sided glass screens ranged in sequence down its length. Behind the glass is Judin’s selection from the archives designed to chart the flows of power which have produced the strange and distorted form of the city. The impression on the viewer is of a large, quiet laboratory. The material reads like a brain scan of South African power and madness. It is exhilaratingly exact that this should be mounted inside the original power-space of the colony. It is as though we are on the inside of the mind of power itself.
Judin’s documented Cape Town is the dark side of the European idyll in which white Capetonians so like to lose themselves. The papers show a narrow, mean, brutal, colonial place. In them are the detailed procedures through which black people were turned into objects of disgust and dread, and expelled, again and again, out beyond the limits of the city. Uitvlugt, Ndabeni, Langa, Nyanga, Khayelitsha — always going in one direction only — out, out, out.
The specific rationale for exclusion changes over the century but the result never varies: first, around 1901, blacks are medically identified as carriers of the plague; next it is ”overcrowding” at the location on the docks; then, later, the bulwarks are thrown up against ”invasion”, as the surge towards the city begins in the 1930s and 1940s in response to the wartime demand for labour; but the deep logic of the process fulfils itself in the self-congratulatory pronuciamentos of the Group Areas Board ”determinations”.
The great ”master plan” of the city planner of the time, Dr Solly Morris, stalwart of the Jewish community and respected member of the University of Cape Town Council, is there behind the glass screen for all to see that Wasps and Jews were happy to join in planning the denial of blacks. And it wasn’t only whites — there are letters from coloured people requesting the board for protection against ”black encroachment”.
But the most devastating papers of all come in colour. They are neighbourhood diagrams in which the buildings of a particular area are colour-coded to show the ”race” of the persons who own, inhabit, use or even visit a particular house or shop. Dr Morris ruefully notes that some of these might not be completely accurate as the identifications were made while ”driving past” the houses.
And the colour charts do not come from officials only. Some of them are the productions of careful citizens who have spent their hours spying on their own neighbours with the express intention of betraying them into the hands of an enemy.
That viewers choke and shudder under the impact of these papers is no surprise. What can one do with this knowledge? I do not know whether it is worse if you are black or white or coloured. It is not that something wholly new has been revealed. There are no facts in the exhibition which no one ever knew about — they were always there for us to see.
But what is made present beneath the quiet, impersonal, austere, glass screens that Judin has used to present the record of the city, is the terrible way in which a deep and destructive evil told itself, and its servants in office, that it was part of a rational, sensible, enlightened, purposeful, progressive and, above all, planned vision of the good of all.
Setting Apart is on view at the Castle in Cape Town until June 17