HOMELANDMARKS

Garb, Tamar, editor. HOMELANDMARKS. Haunch of Venison, 2008.

• “There is no intelligible present in a democratic South Africa that is not always and already haunted by its past.”6

• “While landmarks are important cultural signposts, historically and geographically specific, ‘Land Marks’ suggests the tracks and traces of people and presences, both inadvertent and deliberate, on territories and cartographies, places and representations.” 6

• Home Land Marks is an exhibition

• “The designation ‘Homelands’, in the South African context, points to the deliberate historic strategies of the apartheid state to disenfranchise people and deport population groups to designated regions.” 6

• “South Africa is a country where exile, dispossession and house arrest form part of a national consciousness, yet the essentials of housing and shelter remain burning and topical political issues.” 6

• “How does art negotiate the relationship of the people to place, of testimony to territory, of personal suffering to collective experience in the putative ‘post’ of this moment: the ‘post apartheid’, the ‘post colonial’, the ‘post euphoric’?” 7

• The next page in the book explains that signs became part of the landscape, the signs separating and forbidding the races to be in the same physical space.

• “Terror and territory went hand in hand in Apartheid South Africa.” 9

• “But now ‘legislated apartheid is dead’. The signs that separated subjects and circumscribed social life for more than 40 years have been removed. They, and the recordings of them, have become part of the material culture of South Africa’s history” 9

• “Colonialism had, long before the institutionalisation of apartheid, established the terms for a racially divided settlement, with the early Dutch occupation in the seventeenth century supplemented just over a century later by British incursions and resultant migrations, internecine conflicts and wars, the effects of which are still with us today.” 10

• “at the time that their rich cultural heritage as well as the ownership of the land and its resources have, at last, been acknowledged, the indigenous people face a new threat to life” 16 (AIDS)

• “the protea, national flower of South Africa” 16

• “the springbok, national animal of South Africa” 17

• This book is great to explain how physical land can hold so much culture and history for a place and the people who live there.

• “Everything known to the world as South Africa was defined by the simple Manichaean scheme of the emblematic division wall, the cut line of irreconcilable apartness, separateness and radical difference.” 29

• “Johannesburg is a microcosm of South Africa as a fortress society. Though apartheid is officially over, social segregation is just as deeply resilient. This is revealed in Johannesburg as a city framed by palpable fear of violence.” 34

• “downtown Johannesburg is marked by its large deficits of social and economic amenities. In the heyday of apartheid, this part of the city was a bustling cosmopolitan hub of activities for white inhabitants.” 34

• “Given the history of strife in South Africa, a great deal of the nation’s art traffics in the examination of the pathos surrounding the immediate historical experience. Some critics would even claim that the artists wallow in it.” 38

• Artist: Nicholas Hlobo

• Artist: Berni Searle