Doves of peace or just pigeons? Get lost in the city of ambiguities

The blurring of the physical and the digital has defined everyday life for billions of people over the past year. It is confounding because intuitively we understand these as two distinct categories of experience. We resolve the confusion by retreating into binaries: the digital is “safe”, the physical is “unsafe” (in epidemiological terms anyway). But the Covid-19 era has also reinscribed the ways in which the digital often feels dystopian, characterised by alienation.  

Artists cannot live on the digital alone. They need physical spaces, to see and to be seen. This week, the Fugard Theatre — by common consensus the standout performing arts venue in SA over the past decade — announced it would be closing its doors permanently. There will be no post-Covid-19 revival. The news has left artists and audiences alike bereft.

I wrote last week that SA’s artists would not throw in the towel, capitulating either to Covid-19’s socioeconomic consequences or to the mighty force of state ineptitude. And indeed, this week the artists leading the sit-in at the National Arts Council’s offices persevered; they insisted, with their bodies occupying space, that they would not disappear into the ether, becoming digital voices of dissent that can be ignored.

Yet without digital media platforms, their physical protest would not have drawn the attention that it has. Without the digital, the Fugard could not have become the thriving creative place that it was. And without the digital, over the past year, there would have been only the silence of dark and empty stages; what performing artists have salvaged under Covid-19, they have done with digital tools.

This physical-digital conundrum is, of course, not new. But whereas previous experiments with digital technologies have been enabling for artists, the Covid-19 environment is one of constraint rather than of opportunity. Being forced into digital innovation, especially with limited likely revenue, is not the context in which artists would like to see “creativity and 4IR [fourth industrial revolution] meet”, to quote the tagline of the Futures and Beyond Forum hosted this week by Andani.Africa and the University of Johannesburg’s Arts & Culture division.

The organisers faced the challenge of widespread fourth industrial revolution fatigue, but those who participated had the opportunity to learn from pioneers in this sector. Most significantly, the forum was a transcontinental one, with speakers and presentations from arts organisations in Senegal, Ghana and Uganda. If SA’s artists want to thrive on the other side of Covid-19 — and even before that distant promised future — they would do well to seek out pan-African partnerships, collaborations and solidarity.

University of Johannesburg’s Arts & Culture has been ahead of the digital curve since March last year; its visual arts initiative, the “Moving Cube” (a virtual iteration of the UJ Art Gallery), has a strong programme lined up for 2021. The first exhibition, which can also be viewed in-person in the gallery, is Lwandiso Njara’s Engineering the New Jerusalem III — The Digital City.

Reading Njara’s statement about his work, I couldn’t help but keep chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng’s reckless tub-thumping for Israel in mind. Njara, whose art is generated by his interpretation of the clash between African cosmology and Christian theology, does not shy away from biblical literalism. Descriptions of the “holy city” of Jerusalem “transforming into the digital city”, with hints of a utopian vision, might set alarm bells ringing for anyone who is attuned to the politics of that place.

The images that Njara has produced, however, present a much more ambiguous response to “what future cities and people could look like”. In the Drones of Jerusalem series, for example, Njara employs pen, charcoal and graphite to create a vivid sense of birds in flight — are they doves of peace, or just regular ugly urban pigeons? They are neither, for the first avian creature in this series is part bird, part machine (a fusion common in Njara’s work). It is a drone: soldier of commerce, weapon of war. 

Closer to home, the Pretoria City Junkyard series places religious iconography on the ash heap of history. Or perhaps these cathedrals, pietas and crucified Christs will be recycled. Njara’s scenes place us firmly in the domain of the physical, but the supernatural — digital? — realm is ever-present.