Programme
 Jane Alexander
Stephen Hobbs
William Kentridge
Brett Murray
Robyn Orlin
Rodney Place
All works were commissioned by and for RETREKS under the proposition 'How the other half...' and constitute the conceptual-artistic spine of the unSUNg CITY event: RETREKS unSUNg CITY was first shown as a 'nine story multimedia show' at Kings City Parkade, Johannesburg, September 30, 2000. Rodney Place is an artist, living and working in Johannesburg, South Africa
RETREKS - A metro allegory
Johannesburg as a city and associated sprawl of bourgeois suburbs and tin-can townships is a place of multiple and conflicting sensibilities. If there is a common thread to them all it is a characteristic defensiveness: upwardly mobile young denizens (both black and white) define themselves in terms of 'aheadness' - both against the rest of Africa's 'backwardness' and to underline their affinity to global urban capitals in Europe and the United States. The government must defend itself against accusations that it wants all whites cast into the sea whence they came, and down the feeding chain the accusing whites feel they must defend themselves against the black urban poor, the thieves and hijackers and would-be land-grabbers; those who would also drive luxury German cars. For these latter - the new rich, whose creed is conspicuous consumption - a perhaps realistic impulse to protect their wealth has expanded, like warmed yeast, to incorporate inchoate fears of a ubiquitous threat. They barricade themselves within barred and locked houses, within manufactured and sealed villages, within guard-patrolled suburbs; their children look over their shoulders as they ride their bicycles, wondering what it would look like if it followed, this frightening 'swart gevaar' (black danger).
For Rodney Place, whose epic installation-event and 'urban opera' unSUNg CITY opens this festival, this latter-day manifestation of that familiar defensive construction, the 'laager' (camp), is just one genetic strand of a somewhat fantastic urban and peri-urban hybrid - Johannesburg - caught between the old order and the new. In the vernacular of his ongoing and elaborate urban allegory RETREKS, Johannesburg's broader transformational space is one populated by 'Calvinist cowboys, Anglo-tribal aristocrats, Afro-immigrants and buppies/yuppies' - also 'modalities' which Place uses in order to register the wild momentum of a new kind of cosmopolitan life. For as the boldly Gucci-clad and prominently technologised New South African professionals forge further away from the city proper and into the suburban hinterland, building commercial and residential laagers as they go, Jo'burg city's soaring verticality observes a new, horizontal incursion of African locals and continental immigrants, a phenomenon Place refers to as 'the Second Great Trek'.
Of course, while the intellectual content of Place's urban observations has a certain theoretical gravitas, the tone of the RETREKS initiatives, if laced at times with acid irony, is overwhelmingly tongue-in-cheek. If, since his return to Johannesburg after an absence of 25 years, Place sees himself as a kind of avenging angel of popular sensibility; a righteous scourge on the sensibilities of the fleeing bourgeoisie, he has the sense to ground that grandiosity of purpose in work that interests, amuses, and entertains. RETREKS, as a plastic entity of variable parts, includes performance (The Washing of the Soaps); a set of postcards depicting mythical historical events; a pilot newspaper (unTITled blURB); an urban design proposal (African Bowl) and of course unSUNg CITY, originally an opera in three 'acts'. With the aim of making "spatial, as well as social, propositions about re-imagining the vertical," Place began unSUNg CITY's Johannesburg debut with a marching brass band (consisting of former criminals), accompanied by such vehicular Johannesburg icons as tow-trucks, taxis, a municipal bus and security tanks. Arriving at the 'theatre', a disused parking lot deep in the inner city, guests walked the spiralling nine stories upward through the spine of the event - an eery presentation of large-scale video projections by six South African artists. The evening concluded with performance and live music from genres as diverse as pop, hip hop, and pantsula.
Informed by his background in architectural production, through his artistic interventions and events Place sets out to attack what might be called the psycho-architectural tendencies that mark the built Johannesburg environment since 1994. Apparently a form of panacea for white suburban paranoia and outrage, these manifest in a postmodern architectural grammar in which neo-classical nostalgia run riot has led most recently to the appearance of what Place calls 'Stalinist and Disney' phenomenological modes. There is much of Jameson's Los Angeles to be found here, in the eclectic grotesquerie of massive hotels, and casinos in which even the star-studded sky which vaults the balconies is painted on.
While the slightly hysterical, remarkably delusional architecture of the frontier and the laager suffers from both aesthetic and practical failure, the classically Modernist infrastructure of the inner city suffers from imaginative failure in the face of the new, horizontal operational modes. Now inhabited by vibrant and potentially commercially viable populations, the city lacks, says Place, 'a civil and cultural space' in which to manifest that potential. Thus through a volley of counteracting concepts, Place attempts, however temporarily, to fill the city's empty urban space by staging these 'events into architecture'. By asking the artists on unSUNg CITY to visualize the vacuum of the vertical, he wanted to insert into the physical and imaginative void of an abandoned building a new way of thinking its return to life. A counter-life, as it were, one that would not look across towards the apricot shades of suburbia's pseudo-Tuscan walls without a degree of amused self-satisfaction. "Ah look," the inhabitants of this savvy city might say, "there goes the decline of our neighbours in Versailles."
– Brenda Atkinson
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The production of RETREKS unSUNg CITY was made possible through the generous support of South African Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology; Gauteng Department of Sport, Recreation, Arts and Culture; The Johannesburg Metropolitan Council; PROHELVETIA The Arts Council of Switzerland; The Royal Netherlands Embassy; The French Institute of South Africa; Business & Arts South Africa; Grinaker Property Development; JHI Property Services; Stallion Security; J. Gross Workwear;
Rodney Place ° 1952 Johannesburg, South Africa
Lives and works in Johannesburg
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