A place of passage: that is what the newly opened Origins Centre at Wits University could well be called. It’s a place where urbanites go to understand how our ancestors empowered themselves — not through work but through religious trance.
But this site, directly above the M1 highway and across the road from Johannesburg’s historically significant Braamfontein cemetery, has been a place of passage for some decades.
In fact, thousands of students used it as a place where they would take the first tentative steps into adulthood when the fine art department created its studios there and called it The Wedge.
Over decades the place was regularly used for student bashes and will remain in graduates’ memories as a place where they first took drugs, explored sex and listened to unbearably loud, rebellious music.
As an art studio this place has served as a platform where some key practitioners first tested their artistic prowess.
What has not changed is the broader theme that forms the core product of the Origins Centre: its exhibit devoted to creativity, trance and human rite of passage.
The halls are intentionally dark, organically curvaceous, and the walls are a metre thick. The displays are evocatively lit, strategically placed major items of the wealth of rock art found in the subcontinent.
Architect Craig McClenaghan of Mashabane Rose and Associates, responsible for the design, says his company had to look at “the story of rock art. You find them in mountains, in caves where eagles are crying — it’s an incredibly silent power. You realise you are not the first person there.
“There have been people there over hundreds of thousands of years. Here is something so sacred, so powerful, so quiet, so heavy, done by people who are deeply spiritual.”
That’s no lie. The workings of the ancient African trance dance — the reasons for this unique form of religious experience — are on display in a way that makes the crossover comprehensible.
Even in busy Braamfontein on a working day.
The architects have created spaces obviously reminiscent of the caves our ancestors dwelled in.
Art installations show the bigger picture. Master wire weaver Walter Oltman has presented an entirely woven map of the Earth with a copper thread showing the routes out of Africa that humans took in their meanderings.
But, says Origins Centre manager Mike Pheiffer, “the copper route also represents the thin red line that we see in all San rock art. This is the thread of light that links us to the spirit world. It runs then disappears out of a crack then reappears again.”
This, then, is the journey humans took out of Africa, out of their waking state and into a state of spiritual fervour. The Origins Centre — while not supplying actual hallucinogenics and drumming — does give one a full picture of the way ancient Khoi and San societies organised their religious experience.
In the potted version a San shaman enters a trance for one of four reasons.
Firstly to heal the sick, after which he will lay his hands on the unwell subject; to access the spirit world in order to retrieve the souls of deceased children; to visit departed friends and relatives in “distant places”; and to find a rain animal that may be captured and brought forth to make — you guessed it — rain.
In the Origins Centre there is a virtual rain animal projection that literally responds to the movement of humans in its environment. This is going to be a big hit with the kids.
“We set out to achieve a subtle building that allows ancient, silent, precious objects to speak with their own voice rather than have a building speak for them,” says architect Jeremy Rose.
Not all the displays are ancient, as the sculpture by Oltman indicates. There is also a major work by popular conceptual artist Willem Boshoff called Signs of People. In an aerial space are suspended hundreds of transparent rectangles; on them are etched names and terms used to identify and label the country’s different people.
Popular mythology now has it that the idea for the Origins Centre came to President Thabo Mbeki while he was strolling in the mountains on a guided tour of the country’s rock art repository.
The architects of the project prefer to think of their design not as a presidential pipe dream, but as “a presence on a hill” — a space waiting to be filled with fragile ancient treasures in need of preservation.