Mari-Mira: Playing with Life opened at the Johannesburg Art Gallery on March 19 amid the usual discussion and disdain characteristic of the way new ideas are received in the city. Older members of the art set, those who had survived the Eighties, remembered with fondness shopping trips to Diagonal Street to buy the kitsch items now on show as fine art. All this made up the naive African eating-house look of an age swiftly passing by.
In the show there’s a reworking of the familiar. There are rose-patterned plastic tablecloths made into bar lights; there are rows of flowers made of tin cans and carpets woven from plastic bags. The landscape created in the gallery is delightfully provocative. The project calls itself ‘an international, transportable and evolving artistic village made out of discarded and disregarded objects. An art of recycling.”
The ‘fancy shacks”, as they are called, on show in Johannesburg this month are the result of collaborations by French and largely unknown South African artists whose histories are chronicled along with the displays. It all began with two Frenchmen: Guy-André Lagesse (a Mauritian born in Durban, now living in Marseilles) and writer Jean-Paul Curnier.
Project coordinator Dorine Julien says the project began in Mauritius in 1994, when Lagesse and Curnier erected a house in the town of Saint Paul ‘the way one would set up a garden. Everyone from the town could pop in to see what was inside. It was a case of each artist doing a piece and putting it all together. It was really another sort of collaboration.”
In 2002, after exhibiting in Paris and Marseille, a shack was constructed in Durban to coincide with the World Summit for Sustainable Development. The current Johannesburg show is a retrospective of 10 years of Mari-Mira, taken from a Creole word meaning ‘enormously fancy” or ‘eccentric”. Later this year a book will be published, written by French critic Bruce Matthieussent. Forthcoming destinations include Fiji Island and the south Pacific.
Jean-Paul Curnier was interviewed this week in Johannesburg.
What is the purpose of transporting your idea into a formal space like the Johannesburg Art Gallery, when the gallery is situated in a park?
First, let’s take the idea of a house. The project was to explore the possibility to crossing over from fine-art schools et cetera. The story of art, which is our story, is about people who went from fine art, from university. The other way is what Claude Levi-Strauss called ‘magic thinking”, which means something that is scientific. When you encounter colour, first you don’t see the concept, the project. Later you will look for knowledge around the material, but first you see the green, second you see the red. First you see form, then colour. Only then the object becomes something — this ‘something” is what we call the luxury of the poor man, of poor people. Luxury is not the idea of a rich way of life, but it is something which precedes the artistic state of mind, and this artistic state of mind is natural to people who are not too genteel, who are not artists. This is something that is natural in every part of the world. We think it is possible to carry Mari-Mira into every part of the world. It is not special in Madagascar, South Africa or Mauritius to find people like this. We can find these people everywhere — simply everywhere. It is another way of thinking, of living in a poetical way.
Isn’t the whole thing merely a fantasy, intended to encourage people to be creative in their shack existence? To show there is something that can be achieved creatively? Or is this just a satire of poor existence?
It is poetical, but it is also very serious. The humour between us, between the people working on Mari-Mira, is very serious. The idea, in the last century, was to bring the art to people and to bring education to people — how to live when you are poor, et cetera. Our way of thinking is not very new. In the 1930s you got surrealists doing this, or very close to this. In every culture there is this way of poetical living — what we give is the material and not the knowledge, because everyone can get it. But we give the possibility that it exists — and it exists.
There is always a complication when viewing this area of artistic production from the outside. People accused a local book called Shack Chic of making poverty aesthetic.
There is another way to answer. The art is not the finality of this work. The object is not the exhibition. These are just moments of processes and visible signs, tangible signs of processes. What is most important is what we live with as people. What is important is not the moment of production. We are living in this state of mind — this political and artistic state of mind — with people who are not artists.
In the previous century, the idea was to bring art to people. Our process is not this. Our idea is to realise an artistic way of mind. For example, when we get together to cook, when we go to the fridge and we ask what is inside, the state of mind is not to say let’s make great meals. It is just a happiness to do — even if we have just one orange and two lemons.
It is about ownership and sharing ownership. It is a way of being in a collective with people who have an individual way of expressing themselves. It is the property of no one — it is not the art of someone.
The work seems to be a response to mass production and consumerism?
This is true on two levels. The first level is to say it is possible to create an environment of common production that is poetical. The famous phrase of the poet Friedrich Hölderlin tells us to ‘Live poetically” — this is the first answer to mass production. The second is the fact that we use things we find on garbage dumps. It is very important, poetically and philosophically. What is in this garbage? It is full of knowledge, full of sensibility. In the street, you can find human sensibility, human desire, human pain, human everything.
Mari-Mira: Playing with Life runs at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in Joubert park until May 28. For information visit www.marimira.com
Waste not, want not
Waste-to-Art in Wineburg is turning rubbish into treasures, and creating job opportunities. The project has a wide range of products: there are cars, handbags, aeroplanes and picture frames made from cans, cards made from coloured paper, gift bags made from magazine covers and pieces of rope, and mosaics made from pieces of glass, tiles, shells, marbles and magnets. ‘We try to show people that there are alternatives uses to waste,” says Michelle Sholto-Douglas, who started Waste-to-Art two years ago. ‘There is some real added value to products that people throw out.”
Waste-to-Art also makes jewellery out of computer hardware. ‘We make lovely earrings, bracelets and necklaces,” says Sholto-Douglas. ‘You will be amazed at what you can find inside an old computer. The copper wire especially is very useful.”
One particularly interesting piece of art was produced by Gerry Newson, one of the volunteers who runs the recycling project. ‘I make clocks out of computer hardware and sell them as corporate gifts,” says Newson. He set up Recycle IT (above) five years ago in order to prevent old computers from ending up in landfills. ‘I use waste, add about R30 worth of other stuff and sell it for R200. It just shows you that waste is a market-able product.”
Waste-to-Art is part of a larger recycling project called Footprints, which started out as a drop-off centre for household waste. Footprints collects recyclable items and separates them. Collected waste is then either turned into compost or sold on to conventional recycling companies such as Mondi and Sappi.
Early on, however, Sholto-Douglas realised that collected waste was more valuable if it was reused on location. ‘The money we make from selling to the conventional recycling people is nothing,” says Sholto-Douglas. They receive 4c per kilogramme of coloured paper, for instance. ‘With this one kilogram we can maybe make 50 cards, which is a lot more profitable.” The Waste-to-Art project is Footprints’ most profitable venture.
Footprints has two full-time staff who generate their own salaries by selling waste to the conventional recycling companies. They also derive some income from a second-hand bookshop and the compost Footprints sells.
In addition, there are 14 people working at Waste-to-Art, two of whom are volunteers. ‘I have six people working here, in the workshop, and four people working in the local township,” says Luvuyo Nyathi, who runs the recycling of cans project. All those involved in the Art-to-waste project derive their income from sales. — Riekje Pelgrim