Anthea Garman experienced the !Xoe Site Specific exhibition around Nieu Bethesda in the Karoo
`Do you have a believable sense of place?” is the simple, cheeky, and only bit of written information about the first installation we stop to see outside Nieu Bethesda. This is artwork number five by Marco Cianfanelli and we’ve chosen to view it first for our travelling convenience. We’ve estimated it will take three hours to see all 13 of the installations scattered around this kleinest of Karoo dorpies.
It’s now 10.30am. We drive a rutted road to a windy plain. The road on to the site becomes too bad; we have to stop and walk. There in the distance are pegs. We tramp through the very dusty veld buffeted by the wind to look. Inside a ring of pegs is a concrete slab – a grave? a commemoration? Puzzled, I look at the guide book. It says only “Do you have a believable sense of place?” I take it personally, instantly. I look around for clues and am gobsmacked. Hectares of veld, sweeps of waving grass, blue, blue mountains whose names I don’t even know.
I am chastened, and cross with Cianfanelli. Suddenly the city I live in is wiped out of my upper consciousness. The urgency to see and do according to a timetable seems very silly indeed. I sit on a rock. I feel my brain slow down. I think. I feel this place assert itself as a place to be reckoned with. I realise: this is the majority of this country – isolated, rural, at the mercy of the elements.
After a while we drive back into town to the Ibis Art Centre. I’m still in search of clues for quite what this site-specific art is trying to say. Cianfanelli is silent. Unlike the other artists involved he has refused to put up explanatory material in the gallery. So, on to installation number one at the abandoned and vandalised Bethesda Road station. Mustafa Maluka has sought permission from Spoornet to splatter the buildings with graffiti. They responded warmly but pointed out that they would like him to respect that fact that Spoornet is conscious of its bad past and is trying very hard to be a “corporate citizen” in the new South Africa.
Again the wind howls and whips. The words Bethesda Road (in concrete on the ground) are broken. There’s no urgency to fix something that will never be needed again as a signpost. The graffiti is bright, fantastic against the rust and decay. Here, where the dirt track meets the N9, city slick has plastered its up-yours attitude. This is the boundary. The cross-over between us and them. We, the mobile and free and they, the quaint, living in the time warp with Helen Martins and her Owl House.
On the way back to town we look at Mark Haywood’s Life on the Farm: Our Barn Is Empty. Patrysfontein’s harvest failed (forcing Haywood to rethink his original plans). The barn is full of empty sacks. Each sack carries a platitude: “Here’s a farmer that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty”; “The harvest is past, the summer is ended and we are not saved”; “Your harvest is still in the blade”. Words to comfort and mock. Words in the face of powerful forces that undo the best plans.
By the time we stop for Elaine Matthews’s Quest: A Journey into Sacred Space we’ve made the shift this entire exhibition set out to create. We’ve stopped looking with intellectual distance; we’ve started treasure-hunting, exploring like children again, embracing things immediately, emotionally. She forces you to walk through a yoni constructed of animal heads and bones. This is religious; this is deeply sacramental. We do it. Against the backdrop of the dramatic mountain we just let this thing be without asking why.
Back in town we have missed lunch without noticing it. We can’t stop now. We can’t leave. Must stay another night so that we can finish this quest. After hurried plans and another stop at the gallery to get our bearings we’re off – down a street, into a barn, around a corner. We pass the same farmer with his bakkie- load of sheep at least three times. We’re beginning to recognise people.They certainly recognise us.
In town we encounter installations that deal directly with colonisation, the theft of land, with real people’s lives and stories. In the township Mustafa Maluka has laid out six doors, and a pit with a sheepskin pinned over it. A 19-year-old boy was sent out by the farmer to find a lost sheep in the snow. He never returned. The installation is located in the young man’s community.
The biblical echoes are strong. In the abandoned NGK mission church Richard Kilpert, Jacobus Kloppers, Niel Jonker and Giselle Baillie reactivate the story of Beth Cheseda, the pool of healing, and the story that gave rise to the name of the town. In the New Testament an angel would stir the pool with its wing and the first person to reach the pool and touch the water would be healed. Kilpert has undone a wind pump and reset its blades as the feathers of a wing. Instead of rattling in the air the wing comes down and gently brushes the surface of the dam. But there is no one here to be healed, the “non-whites” were removed to Pienaarsig (over there, the dusty, dirty part beyond the river) and the church has stood empty ever since.
On the township soccer field, which is viewed from a high point on the road, Bonita Alice has created an illusion: a piece of corrugated iron hovering above the pitch and its shadow. To launch the exhibition the township teams played a soccer match, acting out actual gaining and losing of territory, possession and point-scoring. These are not easy messages to live with. Underneath the fun of discovery, the thrill of suddenly getting it, is this harsh vision of where we’ve come from and how much the past bears down on us. Place weighs heavily.
Across town in the old mill (again, abandoned, Nieu Bethesda has a curious relationship of peace with its abandoned buildings) Maanda Daswa has put in a generous, soothing installation. Led up the path by scattered mielies, you enter the small building to find it overflowing with seeds and ground-up grains. There is a traditional mortar and pestle and nine wire baskets that can’t possibly contain this abundance. This is Fragment + Fragment = Whole. Gathering, preserving, storing. We have to do these things. And doing them is healthy and healing. Even now. Even here.
Back at the gallery the sun is going down. We have drinks with Mark Wilby and Noelle Ober, the gallery owners and originators of !Xoe Site Specific. We talk about our full day in Nieu Bethesda and they’re gratified that it did exactly what they had planned. “People do two things in Nieu Bethesda: whiz through, see the Owl House and leave, or they cruise the streets looking for cheap property. We wanted them to come and engage with the place,” Wilby said.
The process of getting !Xoe (“homeplace” in the language of the !Xam, who once inhabited the area) to happen also meant having the 15 artists spend a lot of time thinking about Nieu Bethesda. They visited, held meetings with the townsfolk, stomped around the farms looking for sites. Wilby had to negotiate permission to use houses, church property, farmland. He had to explain again and again what the artists were trying to do. “I’m so tired of discussing art with the locals,” he says wearily, but acutely conscious that this is exactly what he wanted to happen.
By the time we visited on July 15 !Xoe had had 608 visitors. People who stayed over visited town, township and farms and talked to the people who live in Nieu Bethesda. Despite the wind and theeir general vulnerability, the artworks were still in good condition. “Doors are highly sought after and one of the installations involves hundreds of bundles of firewood, but they haven’t been touched,” Wilby said. That night I get the map out. That impressively sharp mountain is the Compass Berg and those hills are the Sneeuberge, and this is the Great Karoo. I am oriented now. I have a powerful sense of place.
The Ibis Art Centre holds exhibitions in the summer, autumn and winter holidays to catch those travelling. A publication on !Xoe Site Specific will be released shortly. Contact Box 8 Nieu Bethesda 6286. Phone/fax 04923-623 or e-mail [email protected]