Tag: land

Land and Erasure curated film screenings

As part of the public program of the LAND public art festival and symposium, Sarmiento and Ismail Farouk curated a set of site-sensitive film screenings of films by Kim Munsamy, Sebástian Porras, Heidi Grunebaum and Mark Kaplan. The films were screened in historic buildings in Cape Town’s Central Business District, which carry within them histories of erasure and palimpsests of pasts that continue to press upon the present, demanding activation and memory work in the present.

In this series of screenings of audiovisual works by local artists and filmmakers, we are invited to consider the way in which land, labour and livelihoods are intertwined – whether in Guatemala, Occupied Palestine, or in the mines of the Northwest. Following Judith Butler’s formulation, these films touch on the unequal distribution of vulnerability, as well as how acts of dispossession and erasure are inscribed in the present, in bodies, landscapes and the built environment. The audience is invited to discussions with the filmmakers following the screenings.

Donde el tiempo se detiene / Where time stands still (Kim Munsamy & Sebástian Porras) 33 minutes

An old military base, a ceremony on top of a mountain, a court hearing, a family in Quiché, thousands of peasants entering Guatemala City. They all get together where time stands still. Four characters lead us through their searches. Places, images, rituals and voices come together in this documentary in an attempt to present the blurred intersection between memory, pervasive conflicts, stories of oppression and resistance.

Give me back that moment (Kim Munsamy & Sebástian Porras) 5 minutes

In 2005 a bombing alert led to the discovery of more than 80 million documents that register 100 years of the now defunct National Police in Guatemala. This documentary follows the life of one of these documents in the Historical Archive of the National Police, which has open access to these records.

Bones don’t lie and don’t forget (Kim Munsamy & Sebástian Porras) 3 minutes

After 2 decades the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG) remains dedicated to the work of listening to bones that “don’t lie and don’t forget”. FAFG’s work demands us to not only revisit history, but to interrogate it, to reopen chapters perhaps deemed closed or “resolved”, and to name, one by one, the thousands who were detained and disappeared during the internal armed conflict in Guatemala. 

The village under the forest (Heidi Grünebaum & Mark Kaplan) 67 minutes. Where greening is an act of obliteration.

Unfolding as a personal meditation from the Jewish Diaspora, The Village Under The Forest explores the hidden remains of the destroyed Palestinian village of Lubya, which lies under a purposefully cultivated forest plantation called South Africa Forest.
 Using the forest and the village ruins as metaphors, the documentary explores themes related to the erasure and persistence of memory and dares to imagine a future in which dignity, acknowledgement and co-habitation become shared possibilities in Israel/Palestine.

Directed by Emmy-winner Mark J Kaplan, The Village Under The Forest is written and narrated by scholar and author Heidi Grünebaum.

Land and Erasure I and II

This collaborative walk and spatial intervention through performance, sound, poetry and alternative forms of collective mapping took place under the rubric of a public art festival put together to commemorate the centenary of the 1913 Land Act. The LAND festival, put together by the Gordon Institute of Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA), now known as the Institute of Creative Arts, in collaboration with the African Center for Cities at the University of Cape Town and the District Six Museum.

This work was a collaborative effort put together by the following artists: Nicole Sarmiento, Ismail Farouk, Nadine Cloete, Lucy Campbell, Toni Stuart, Shelley Barry, Ferdinand Van Tura, Sabelo Mcinziba, Kim Munsamy, Sebástian Porras and Colin Meyer.

To think about land in the present moment is necessarily to think beyond fixed categories, binaries and notions of private property, land tenure or sedimented mappings. Questions of land are imbricated in bodies, movement, memory, migration, forced displacement and removals, and therefore deeply historical. At the same time, commemorating the 1913 Land Act calls for taking on the legacies and logics that continue in the present, and manifest in forms of social injustice, institutionalized violence and historical effacement.

In this walk, more ceremonial than focused on the gaze, we take the liminal and itinerant, memory and displacement, the silenced and buried, the living and the dead, as starting points for opening the spatial literacies of the cities we inhabit.

Land and Erasure I Bonteheuwel

Bonteheuwel, as part of the Cape Flats, was conceived as a township for the relocation of people who were forcibly removed from places such as Sea Point, District Six and Diep Rivier. Today, Bonteheuwel, like most of the Cape Flats, continues to exhibit the spatial and social legacies of the Group Areas Act, as disinvestment and municipal neglect fail to address the basic needs of residents. It is also an important site of resistance. We visit this space considering the layering of time, the idea of landscape as archive, and dialogue with silenced histories in the making of the present.

Land and Erasure II Central City

In the central city land comes at a premium. It is a scarce resource and foundational to questions such as who can live in the city, whose desires are accommodated in the city, and the city for whom. These elements manifest in the built environment, in modes of visibility and invisibility, as well as in the quiet dynamics of movement, networks, connections, formality and informality. In this walk we visit ongoing processes of “regeneration” in the name of culture and design that is taking place, in the context of the deep inscriptions of time that often are effaced.

Collaborating artists: Nadine Cloete, Colin ‘Boesman’ Meyer, Lucy Campbell, Toni Stuart, Ferdinand Van Tura, Nicole Sarmiento, Ismail Farouk and Sabelo Mcinziba