For the record: Conceptual artist Dada Khanyisa rebuilt a record player for the installation Summer Flowers by Cape Town architect and artist Ilze Wolff, which is on at the 15th Dakar Biennale in Senegal. (Supplied)
Thanks to her debut novel, an African woman was able to have a house built — a house named Rainclouds — which would become a national monument. This happened in late Sixties Botswana.
The South African-born novelist Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather was published in 1968. The following year, thanks to this novel, Head (1937 – 1986) got an advance payment of a thousand pounds and could build her own, unique house in the town of Serowe.
This house, Rainclouds, has fascinated Cape Town architect and artist Ilze Wolff since her first encounter with it in 2006 in the form of a plan drawing she found on a website accompanying its application to be declared a national heritage site. (The house was made a national monument in 2012.)
“I was really intrigued by the fact that this house is a consequence of a novel,” Wolff tells me on a recent Zoom call from Cape Town, where she runs the Wolff Design Studio with her partner Heinrich.
Their work has been included in various prestigious international exhibitions, the latest being Summer Flowers, which is representing South Africa at the 15th Dakar Biennale in Senegal, and runs until 7 December.
She is explaining the roots of the video and sound exhibition, which is installed as a sitting room with select publications and a collection of pressed flowers.
This domestic area is an homage to Head’s house, in which she wrote her landmark novel A Question of Power — its initial title was Summer Flowers.
The gathering-space and flower archive is an essential part of the connection to the author, who spent much of her time working with other volunteers in Serowe as a gardener and as part of Boiteko, a communal gardening project.
“As an architect, I understand how difficult it is to make a structure, make any structure, right?” Wolff continues about Head’s house.
“You need resources, you need a patron, you need a client, you need all kinds of stuff. And this project … was really got to because of a novel.”
Summer Flowers is a long-term project honouring the work of the formidable Head, who went into exile from apartheid in 1964.
It started five years ago with a film about the author’s home and her work within the context of colonial and apartheid land theft and destruction of black people’s homes.
“I was intrigued by this three-room house, the dwelling where Head spent the evenings writing her novels and many letters to friends (and foes),” Wolff wrote in a 2020 article for Architectural Review.
While the house appeared similar in style to the government-issue NE 51/9 (short for non-European, 1951, drawing number 9) township house that Wolff was familiar with growing up in apartheid South Africa, there was a marked departure in the arrangement of the rooms.
“The typical NE 51/9 house — one of which my grandparents received in 1969 after being forcibly moved from their rental row-house in Stellenbosch — is arranged around a reception room, a central hallway with bedrooms, a bathroom and the kitchen,” the architect wrote.
There were two entrances to Wolff’s grandparents’ house — the front door into the formal sitting room and a second around the back through the kitchen.
“Strangers and clergymen entered through the front door and family and friends came in through the kitchen,” she says.
However, Head made no such distinctions.
With her house, one enters through the front door into the kitchen. It is economical in its planning and perhaps her budget did not allow for indulgences such as two entrances, Wolff writes, “but the plan remains a departure from what its appearance from the outside might suggest”.
“In making a home that suited her own individual requirements, Head structurally adjusted our expectations of the anonymous NE 51/9 government-issued house: a quiet yet powerful act of subversion.”
Head planted an elaborate garden with seeds which she collected and experimented with. There were two rows of gooseberry bushes at the entrance to the yard and also pawpaw trees.
Researching Rainclouds had a profound impact on Wolff.
“I really started thinking about the garden and the house as a practice of freedom, a practice of liberation,” Wolff tells me.
“So, how do we make architecture that is not just about continuing unfreedom, continuing being at the behest of the state, being at the behest of institutions or being at the behest of developers and capital?”
While Head’s house was being built, massive destruction of homes and forced removals of black people was happening in South Africa under the brutal Group Areas Act —for example the Cape Town suburb she lived in when she worked for the Golden City Post, District Six, was being destroyed at the time.
“These things were sitting together,” Wolff says. “But yet there was somebody still building, right? Somebody constructing … it is an inspiration, you know?
“So, yes, I needed to just have that as my own way of practising, you know? Like, can I still be an architect in this horrible world?
“Of course you can — if your projects are around highlighting liberation and freedom, you know? So, she’s a huge inspiration for that [sort of] practice.”
Summer Flowers is a project that started with the Chicago Architecture Biennale in 2019 and evolved into the elaborate, multi-layered installation which is exhibited in Dakar.
It is designed like a welcoming living room with two big couch-like pieces by a Senegalese designer called Bibi Seck and some cushions scattered around. The space also has a library section containing the major works of Bessie Head. It also includes Sol Plaatje’s major work Native Life —Head wrote the foreword for its 1982 republication.
The centrepiece of the space is a sideboard with a TV set on it on which one can watch a film, edited by Khalid Shamis about Head’s Serowe home and her work, with a soundtrack by the respected composer Cara Stacey.
As the title suggests, flowers were central in Head’s life, activism and her writing. Therefore, Wolff and her collaborators have been collecting plant material from sites the author visited or stayed in, such as Serowe and District Six.
Wolff noticed that in many photos Head was wearing florals.
“I worked with the landscape architect that was in our office at the time and she helped me identify the various plants from her clothing.”
And in that wonderful way when one disappears down rabbit holes, Wolff gathered these plant materials too. They even held an open call at Wolff Architects, where they had “a discussion around the plants’ ecology, literature, Bessie Head in general, and trying to bring these various aspects together”.
On the sideboard, next to the TV set is a glass display case with the flowers they have been pressing for the past five years.
There are also vinyl pressings of Stacey’s soundtrack and, to play them on, a fascinating new addition — a custom-built turntable, adding a new chapter to the project.
“I found in readings of Bessie Head’s work that she wrote letters asking people to send her vinyl records to Serowe,” Wolff tells me.
“And she particularly was interested in love songs — Bessie requested a list of love songs to be sent to her, songs that ‘warm her heart and thoughts’.
“So, I imagined, you know, having a specially made record player that plays all the Bessie Head records, that she asked people to send.”
Before we get into the turntable, I ask Wolff, which records she had asked for.
“She asked for stuff like Billie Holiday. So, the first one was The Man I Love. And then Happiness is a Thing Called Joe [by Peggy Lee].”
Wolff giggles. “She wanted What’s New Pussycat?, sung by Tom Jones. Then it’s Please Send me Someone to Love [by Percy Mayfield] — it’s about the world going up in flames, the bomb and everything.
“Then she also wanted any Oscar Peterson LPs. And there was a song by Ella Fitzgerald, When the Sun Comes Out.”
Conceptual artist Dada Khanyisa was commissioned to rebuild a state-of-the-art Linn record player.
“I eventually got some money to commission it, about two years ago. And then, just this year, it was completed.”
Wolff’s Dakar curator Kara Blackmore agreed that the turntable, exquisitely rebuilt with walnut, beechwood and purple-heart wood, should be part of the installation.
“It’s a beautiful, beautiful object that Dada made, you know, it’s really, really special.”
The installation also has high-end speakers and, Wolff says, “it sounds incredible”.
After Dakar, Summer Flowers will head to London, with a similar set-up. They will hopefully, thanks to the Bessie Head Heritage Trust, take the exhibition to Gaborone then, after which it will come back permanently to Wolff’s design space in Cape Town.