Art trip to Johannesburg
13–17 November 2007
Old Mutual had kindly given us a grant of R2,000 towards the trip to deliver the textiles they had commissioned, but I decided to seize the opportunity and expand my plans to include as many as I could from the project. I decided to take the three printmakers, Naasley, Beatrice, and James, Sandra and Julia from the textile group, and two others. These selected themselves as Milly (with her baby Adriano) and Yvonne. My little car has three rows of seats but no boot. Eight people plus baby and luggage and the three quilts was a huge squash, but just manageable. We had planned to stay three nights, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, but I was too exhausted to face the twelve hour drive back on Friday, so we stayed a fourth night. This meant moving accommodation for the last night, but was another good learning experience.
The journey north was full of good cheer. Loud singing, competing with each other to recognise and learn the names of things – dual-carriageway, yield, no passing, speed-limit – and lots of laughter. The arrival at the Zoo Lodge Backpackers was a combination of excitement and fear.
The first day we were due to meet Kim Berman at the Artists Proof Studio at twelve. I fetched the group at ten, and heard lots of stories about nightmares, shock at sharing rooms with strangers, difficulty of managing bunk beds, delight at the garden and swimming pool and pool room and TV lounge, and general excitement. We managed the scary traffic into town, and found parking at the Market Theatre. I introduced myself to the drama intern, who gave us a short and enlightening tour of the Market Theatre. We reminisced about Barney Simon, its founder and an early friend of mine, and the group enjoyed photographs of early productions, especially of Athol Fugard and John Kani plays. We saw the small theatre where I had seen the earliest production of The Island, and myself done a poetry reading during the apartheid days.
The walk from the Market Theatre to the Bus Factory was through a walkway of busts on pillars, and the group laughed a lot naming them as people they knew. At the Artists Proof Studio, we were greeted as old friends. Third year students showed us their portfolios, explaining their work in detail. This was for most of our group the highlight of their visit. Then Kim arrived, and we were invited to show our quilts to the students and staff at the Studio. They set up chairs in the reception, and one by one the two Old Mutual quilts, and then Sun and Moon, were hung over the balcony for the thirty or so Studio people to see. Sandra and Julia explained the work, as Naasley, Beatrice and James suspended it over the balcony. For each quilt there was a roar of applause, which made the group feel valued and special. Names and numbers were exchanged, invitations and promises to visit flew.
However I noticed, to my horror, that the Web of Love was not square. It is so big that it hadn’t been noticeable while lying on the floor of the studio. Before delivery to Old Mutual the following day, we would have to unpick the bottom and re-do it.
After the Artists Proof Studio, we went to the Court, where we were due to meet Justice Albie Sachs at 3pm. We were warmly greeted by him, and photographed with the quilts. It was deeply satisfying to see the work proudly hanging in that amazing space. We were then given a tour of the court by Albie’s clerk Frank, who talked inspiringly about the transformative nature of our constitution, the transparency of the building reflecting the transparency of the law process as practiced in the new constitutional process, the many art works, the library as a transitional space between the wider world and the inner workings of the court, the openness of the building and court proceedings to the public, and his passion for the richness of his working environment. Our group played at being judges in the open court, and also in the innermost debating chamber of the judges, which Frank told us is seldom entered by anyone except the judges themselves. We were given this special privilege so that we could see the San embroidery pieces commemorating the first marks made by mankind.
We sat around the huge round table, cut from a slice of an enormous tree, (the logo of the court), and talked about the meaning of sitting round a table. We also saw the South African flag, made of beadwork, in the public court. Frank told us about the case being heard the following day, about someone who had been wrongfully held in prison for five years. This greatly interested the group, many of whom have, or have had, relatives in prison.
After the Court we went in search of a sewing machine to borrow, and a place to lay out the quilt to correct it. Sandra cut and pinned and tacked, helped by Julia and Yvonne, while the others cooked dinner at the backpackers. But the sewing machine we had been leant couldn’t get through the thickness of cloth. So the following morning, after dropping the group at the Zoo Lake, Sandra and I went back to the Artists Proof Studio where she completed the task on their studio sewing machine.
We picked up the group from the Zoo Lake at about 1.15pm. Naasley was beaming, having had his first experience of rowing a boat. But we were late and exhausted, and everyone was hot and hungry. We got hopelessly lost on the way to Sandton. It had been my intention to introduce the group to map-reading, and I made Julia my first navigator. I was surprised by how impossible she found the task. This was not wholly unexpected, as the only map most of the group had seen was the map we’d made of our village during a Family Literacy group. But the massive flow of high-speed aggressive traffic, and poor signing, almost defeated us. Finally I stopped a kindly driver who led us to the street we needed to find.
We arrived at Old Mutual spinning, and were given a warm welcome and some much needed refreshment. The professional art installer took over, and we waited around all afternoon while she hung the first quilt. Various problems kept confronting us – we needed an iron to iron the quilt before it went up, people wanted air-time for their phones, Millie needed Panado syprup for her baby who was too hot, and the three mothers who had left behind babies they were breastfeeding, were having problems with pain in their breasts. Naasley and I ventured out into the scrum to buy air-time for the group, and in the shop my phone was stolen. Should we face the nightmarish traffic again to look for breast-pumps? At last the first quilt was up. It was a huge moment for us, to see our work in the main reception of that impressive building.
The hanger decided to postpone hanging the second quilt to the next day. It was evening, and we had to battle through the unknown sign-less streets, now in the grip of rush-hour fury, to find our way back to the Backpackers. En route, I found a supermarket mercifully open till eight, and for a celebration bought the group lots of meat to make a Braai.
Thursday morning I arrived to pick up the group to take them to their new accommodation, and to go back to Old Mutual to see the second quilt hung. Nine people, with their belongings on their laps, squashed into my Avansa in burning heat. But as we were about to drive off, Sandra told me that the group was sad, as Millie’s phone was lost. I got out of the car, and informed the owner of the Backpackers that I wanted the police called. Huge consternation all round. He had never had a theft in three years, etc. My blood was up, as Millie, who doesn’t have a penny, had bought the stupidly expensive phone on credit over two years, paying R2000 for it. I refused to budge. Eventually the phone was found – sim-card missing, hidden under a pile of blankets on top of a cupboard.
Our second backpackers was posh and impressive, but very unfriendly, and huge – full of German hippies with rings through their noses, and big expensive backpacks. Our first problem was that I had forgotten to mention Millie’s baby. Sorry, no babies in the dormitory. Luckily they had a single room she must take. It was a blessing as everyone could lock their possessions in it, and Sandra, who always has nightmares in strange beds, could share Millie’s large bed. The others had to make do with bunk beds in a dorm for twelve people, no sheets, scratchy blankets (one blood-stained), and two mixed shared showers. But the stunning garden and swimming pool offered promise for the evening.
At last we were ready to set off for our second venture into Sandton City, where Old Mutual have their head offices. The high walls all around, electric fences, armed guards at the gates, oversized ostentatious buildings, and relentless roaring and hooting cars like a river in flood, took all my determination to confront. Even for a life-time Londoner, Sandton is not for sissies.
The navigation lessons with the group were not going well. This time I had studied the map and worked out the route in advance. Julia was in front as my navigator. I showed her exactly where we were going, and how to follow the streets on the map, but the more she got it wrong, the more bossy became her instructions. The psychoanalyst in me said “compensation” but the driver was being driven crazy. Eventually, when she told me which gate to go into and how to sign the visitor’s book, I blew up and told her to shut up. Tears, sulks, hurt feelings – “I am never going to say anything again”. It was lunch time by now, but this time there were no goodies laid on by Old Mutual for us.
Hot and exhausted, we all trooped out to see the second quilt “The Web of Love” hanging in place. It was in the Umnotho building, in the main reception. Three metres by four, in deep blues and silver, it dominated the very grand space. But a concerned Zandi, (Old Mutual’s interior designer) told us that she had had three calls complaining that it was crooked. Was it our fault or the hangers? I didn’t know. I desperately hoped it was the latter, and promised to contact the hanger as soon as I could. Even so, it looked very fine. But everyone in the group was by then too subdued to comment.
It was three o’clock on our last day. We decided to go to the Goodman to see a William Kentridge exhibition, and also to pop into the Kim Sacks gallery of tribal art and craft, which was next door. Again we were greeted as old friends with cups of tea, and promises to consider selling our work. But the Goodman gallery got the vote of popularity, which pleased me enormously. The work was challenging, funny, disturbing. The group took to it with ease, responding as sophisticated art lovers. I thought, this group will never cease to amaze me. In spite of the difficulties, people were absorbing the art work they saw around them with discrimination and understanding, and quietly internalising the many different ways there are to be an artist.
As we were leaving the gallery, a sudden massive thunder storm struck. Lightning and thunder exploding around us, hail-stones as big golf balls, pounding the roof of the car. The din was terrifying. Struck trees fell across the road, yet the traffic we were in crawled on and there was no option but to keep driving, as we huddled, nine terrified beings, in our moving tin can. Millie chose that moment to whisper to Sandra, so she would inform me, that she needed me to stop somewhere to buy nappies for Adriano. All the shops were closed. We were in the thick of traffic, and rain and hail pounded down.
By grace we arrived safely. Naasley’s parting words were: “Miss Jen forgot to buy us cooldrink.” I couldn’t think of a reply.
The group looked utterly exhausted when I arrived to pick them up at seven thirty the next day. They had had an uncomfortable night sleeping in all their clothes (no pyjamas), afraid of being raped or stolen from by the strangers in the dorm, some half falling from their high bunks, others disturbed by the snoring. Even Sandra and Millie in their single room had had a bad night, as the baby wouldn’t go to sleep. But Naasley and James had done lots of drawing on their new sketch pads, and thought the place was excellent.
The drive home was a lot easier than the drive north. As we entered our own mountainous Karoo, Naasley talked about his five years working for a farmer, catching wild animals in those mountains, and Yvonne competed with tales of visiting her boyfriend when he was a labourer on one of the farms. The group started talking eagerly about making a quilt depicting our amazing Spitzkop, Witkoppen, Plattberg, and Klein Spitzkop around Bethesda. There was a new pride and ownership of the landscape, the clean air, and wide open sky. Everyone was singing at the top of their voices. It felt that something very precious lost had been regained.
The group learned many things on this visit, not all of them measurable, or even describable in terms of general growth of confidence and experience. As Centre director, I have learned that the task of freeing myself and the participants from an enforced passivity and dependence on these trips must now become my priority. I think I know enough of the real costs to be able to make budgets, and I think they collectively know enough now to manage them in unknown territory with some success.
I learned something else, which is equally self-evident when you think about it. Those in the group best able to cope with the demanding challenges of the trip were those from the least damaged backgrounds. Millie had lost both parents as a child, and brought herself and her siblings up alone. I thought of those wealthy and privileged young people touring the world with their expensive equipment and low budgets, unphased by bunk beds and the snoring of strangers. I thought how deep and invisible privilege is, and how it is an exponential factor that divides people in a way that could never be measured.
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