Dark art

When I finally manage to catch up with filmmaker Dumisani Phakathi, it is on the set of SABC drama Mtunzini.com.

He is going over the details of a scene being shot inside a mechanic’s yard in the decrepit Julies Street, in the heart of a Johannesburg’s used-car sales district.

He is wearing his hat as a ‘director for hire”, he tells me, and is eager to talk about his recent move into the world of fine art.

‘I stopped doing my own TV production because it was difficult dealing with the SABC,” he says. ‘For me this is a new way of communicating because you don’t have to deal with bureaucracy, which is unfortunate because you need younger filmmakers like myself to have access to the SABC.”

Nocturnal Fragments is a collaborative work with painter Pat Mautloa that debuts at Jo’burg’s new Resolution Gallery of Digital Art on Saturday.

It consists of video footage and stills shots at night by Phakathi that incorporate additional pastel work from veteran artist Mautloa.

The images are taken from various parts of Soweto and Alexandra, where Phakathi and Mautloa live respectively. ‘I travel at night most of the time, just driving,” he says, perching himself on a wall fencing a dilapidated house across from the set. ‘I find it very peaceful [in the township] at that time and it gives me time to think and appreciate things like architecture, its mood and — without sounding pretentious — its soul.

‘Our lives are both physical and metaphysical. That is why when people die [in many African cultures], you literally have to go fetch their souls from the accident scene and take them home,” he says. ‘I’m not talking about ghosts, but a lot has happened here that cannot be recreated — and it’s at night that you feel a sense of that history … During the day you’re just going to get cute kids pushing a tyre and that’s very touristy.”

Indeed, the images, some of which were digitally rescanned and worked over with pastel several times — in accordance with curator Ricardo Fornoni’s penchant for digital art — do convey a sense of eeriness and ethereality. In the video art work that accompanies the stills there are shots of the distant glow of a police vehicle, a lone taxi moving through a deserted township street, the hum of a nearby generator, all sights and sounds that could instil a sense of foreboding for the bravest township resident.

‘On some level there is some type of risk involved,” Phakathi says, reliving the process of amassing the images. ‘In those situations the people you mostly have to watch out for are the cops. They tend to act strange around those hours. When I was shooting in Alex, I was driving this old BMW 325i, which always threatened to get stuck. It’s risky enough shooting people’s houses at that hour. How do you explain yourself, dressed in overalls, in [what is considered] a thug’s ride, claiming you’re making art at 3am? But those are the risks I had to take as a young artist. So I went to his [Moutloa’s] ‘hood while he slept and took the pictures; he then painted on them.”

For Mautloa the process was both ideologically and technically a reversal of techniques and approaches to which he is accustomed. At a certain point in his career he worked as a set designer for television dramas, often painting backdrops.

In addition, he has often painted landscapes and cityscapes, but his preoccupation has largely been the cumulative effect that the influx of people wields on this space.

‘Most of the township scapes that I was doing depict the daytime, homing in on colours and the bright sun. Here it was mostly one colour and just sparks of light here and there,” he said.

Mautloa’s tinkering with the images adds a tinge of wistfulness to the proceedings and, in Phakathi’s words, a sense of history. Phakathi says of Mautloa: ‘He’s an artist who has been working for years and he shows that you can be an artist and have a life.

‘One artist said the work feels like Rembrandt,” Phakathi says, alluding to Dutch master Rembrandt.

One wonders what Rembrandt would have made of the township.

Nocturnal Fragments opens at the Resolution Gallery of Digital Art on February 9 and runs until March 11