Art provides one of the most important avenues for self expression, self definition and the potential for nurturing collective understanding. South Africa’s democracy remains vibrant and exciting, and our artists have seized on the accompanying freedom of expression to create works that capture the potency of that freedom.

The South African exhibition, Desire: Ideal Narratives in Contemporary South African Art, is built around a theme that resonates strongly with South Africans young and old: for so long, we as have lived with a deep desire and yearning for freedom and democracy. Human nature being what it is, now that we have attained our political freedom, new desires have taken hold. It is to this yearning that the artists represented here speak with such urgency and eloquence.

The South African Department of Arts and Culture is pleased to provide our support to this historic exhibition. I would like to thank the artists for sharing their creative commitment and abilities, their insights and talents, with us and the world. South Africans are justly proud of their achievements in many fields during the relatively short time since we’ve established our constitutional democracy.

Desire, at the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, will go a long way towards cementing South Africa’s reputation as a freedom-loving nation, and one with an abundance of artistic talent.

It’s like all collecting really, save for a certain spin that flipping through records, like files, puts on it. This spin is pushed into full play by the artist Siemon Allen, whose installation for Desire, the three artist exhibition in the South African Pavilion of the 54th Venice Biennale, turns the imagery of record collecting into a lyrical form of archive building. His works take count of tracks and titles, performers and producers, labels and liner notes, scratches and grooves, design and color. And while there is a lot of information on display, we are also entreated to appreciate the structuring of the whole, as well as the readymade beauty of individual objects.

Strangely, the only thing of no account is the music itself. We may see that this is a collection of the music of South Africa, that it spans more than a century, sweeping from early format gramophone records to modern compact discs. We may also notice that it represents a vast range of styles, from white Afrikaans marching band to black Township Kwela, with myriad sounds in between, including sports commentary, dramatic readings, punk and jazz. Perhaps because of the acute silence, Allen’s work conveys loud and clear a vision of archive yet to be heard.

Allen’s installation presents two works. Records (2009-2010) is an edition of 12 digital prints, each depicting a vintage 78rpm record on a black background. They are very large as images, as prints; they make a big impression. Five are on view, and like all of the works in this series, what is immediately striking, given the scale and exquisite detail, is how scratchy they are. Like unforgivingly close-up portraits, these prints show every crack, every groove, every sign of wear, tear, aging, handling, use and even weather. One record looks like it has been left out in the rain, another in a sandstorm. All have been played to ruin. Worn down by countless drops of the needle, there appears to be almost nothing left to listen to. In a text about the series, Allen writes, “In direct contradiction to what a record collector might prefer to collect, I chose items that were particularly scratched or distressed.” He also notes of his criteria the desire to choose only one example of any label, to represent a diversity of styles of music, and to pick the greatest-looking objects. One “electrical recording” bears a slinking jaguar on the label, printed in red on an ivory ground.

So here, titled by label, is the Records line-up: Better, Zonophone, His Master’s Voice, Tempo, Rave. And here are some liner notes, based on the artist’s descriptions. The oldest, historically (as well as in Allen’s collection), is the Zonophone record Marching on Pretoria from circa 1901. As signaled by the word “on,” it is a British version of the popular Afrikaans tune, also sung during the Boer War, but which had soldiers marching “to” Pretoria.

A more recent record launched the whole print series. Allen, a serious record collector, says his attempt to decipher a label that was terribly abraded and torn gave him the idea of scanning and enlarging it. Like a digital-age David Hemming character in Blow-up, Allen solved the mystery: at 750%, he could make out that the tune was Vula No. 1, by Wilson Silgee and his Forces, on a Tempo recording. He subsequently dated it to the mid-1960s.

The revelation was two-fold, says Allen. In the process of showing its obscured identity, the badly beat up record also disclosed itself to him in a new light: “The damage seemed visually engaging, recalling expressionistic drawings or prints, while the single central, iconic image reminded me of Jasper Johns’ target paintings or Jeremy Wafer’s singular forms.” The big picture wasn’t only talismanic, it was also Talmudic: the fine print transmitted what struck Allen as powerful knowledge and inspired him to gather more. “Each record remains a portal into South African musical history, and I am drawn to the encoded information that is uncovered in the scans.”

Allen’s process of collecting, scanning and displaying South Africa’s recorded past continues with his other work on view in Desire. It is a new installation created especially for the site of the Pavilion, an old tower building on the canal behind the Arsenale. When he visited in January and saw for the first time the soaring interior space and massive open staircase, Allen knew the challenge as an artist would be to mute the architecture “in order to be heard.” Hence, this monumental curtain: a cascade of 2500 labels, printed at 5 by 5 inches each and slipped into transparent sleeves on one seamless clear backing. They appear to be raining down, or pouring off an assembly line, in this regimented grid that floats 50 feet high before us. Visitors to the last Biennale may recall the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui’s gorgeous trash tapestry, made of scraps of printed metal tins and bottle caps, draped over the façade of the Villa Fortuny.

While Records highlights one aspect of Allen’s collection — scratchy 78s — Labels surfs the entire archive. The arrangement is chronological — although at the time of this writing, Allen was just working out the exact sequence structure. Moving left to right has the conceptual appeal of putting the past at a distance, like a vanishing point: viewers on the ground would stand in front of the work, faced by the very present. On the other hand, arranging the labels in rows from top to bottom, the past and present would become woven together. Each approach would seem to determine its own pictorial outcome. Will the curtain fall in gradually shifting gradations or take on an overall fish-scale pattern? This remains to be seen.
It’s interesting to consider this notion of history seen at a distance, in view of the fact that Siemon Allen’s archival project began to take shape only after he moved away from South Africa. Since 1997, he has lived in the United States, where he teaches in the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond. He studied sculpture at Technikon Natal (now DUT), in Durban, South Africa (where Allen was born in 1971). When as a student Allen started to weave and construct objects from VHS videotape, his instructor Jeremy Wafer pointed out to him the artist Christian Marclay. Allen says the affinity he felt for Marclay’s use of sound and music’s material culture — he once crocheted magnetic audiotape into a sculpture in the form of a pillow titled The Beatles (1989) — was immediate and enduring. Though it would be another decade, at least, until Allen had the opportunity to see actual works by Marclay.

Aside from magazines, there was little access to international contemporary art in South Africa in the early 1990s (when the internet was still fledgling). Perhaps this in part explains the formative role of music in Allen’s art. Despite regulated and limited distribution, music was still a relatively accessible form of cultural currency. Allen’s predilection for avant-garde, experimental and noise music has played parallel with his interest in visual art. Over the years, he has so keenly listened to the work of Steve Reich, with its shimmering repetition of small units of sound building into larger patterns of Minimalist music, that it may be heard as a prelude to (or in concert with) Allen’s Labels curtain of South African sounds.

Music and art are also the crucible elements of the FLAT gallery, which Allen co-founded with Ledelle Moe and Thomas Barry after finishing art school. Of its short but storied existence, the Durban-based critic Alexander Sudheim wrote: “From 1993 to 1995, an unknowable energy catalyzed a group of young art students in Durban to crystallize into a mysteriously coherent entity. They pooled their meager reserves, rented a flat, moved into it and embarked upon a journey of exhibitions, performances, installations, happenings and all other manner of spontaneity that characterized the turbulent two years of the FLAT gallery’s brief but incendiary lifespan.” [The Activist Archivist, Art South Africa, 2009 p. 76] Indeed, the gallery opened eight months prior to the general election that marked the end of apartheid and closed eight months later, when a candle someone left burning one night set fire to the space. And though the program was not explicitly political, FLAT Gallery was part of a seismic national push against a parochial culture and its racial boundaries. One day, Sudheim recounts, Allen and his cohorts Barry, Jay Horsburgh, Aliza Levy, and Samkelo Matori drove into the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands just to record the coordinates 33 longitude/33 latitude with their collective presence. Although no longer a physical space, FLAT continues as a conceptual enterprise.

When asked about his own musical aptitudes, Allen confides an aversion to performance. But his talents lie elsewhere: he is an avid listener, collector, reader of liner notes, trawler of record shops and, more recently, addicted to e-Bay.

It was in a Richmond thrift store, eight years ago, that he found the record that launched what would turn into the massive archival project that all of Allen’s subsequent work, including the pieces in this exhibition, are a part of. The record was an LP recording titled An evening with Belafonte/Makeba, from 1965, and more than the music, it was the jacket that struck Allen with the force of an epiphany. Growing up, he had always taken Miriam Makeba as something of a given: she was Mama Africa, the 1960s folk singer and civil rights activist, a powerful though (to a young man in the 1990s) dated cultural icon. But here she was in Richmond, appearing on the album cover, as the completely radical international operative for human rights, whose every song was a call for the end of apartheid in South Africa. And there was Allen, who, through the mere circumstances of living abroad, was finding himself increasingly self-conscious of something else he had long taken for granted: his identity as a South African. Did living in the American South, where race is also implicitly an everyday tension, amplify this awareness? And to what degree does anyone who lives abroad find himself speaking and acting as a foreign delegate, however unwitting or unwantingly? Or maybe it was the simple recognition of home that Makeba triggered. In any case, and for whatever reasons, Allen bought the record.

Then he acquired more. For over three years, Allen dedicated himself to tracking down as complete a record as he could compose of Mama Africa’s global presence. Completed in 2009, and exhibited at the BANK Gallery in Durban, Makeba! is an installation/portrait, an archive of music in all its forms, from 78s to MP3s. Along the way, it’s easy to see how Allen’s collecting for Makeba! expanded into the current body of work, as well as how it came to be encompassed by a much larger project. It too is a portrait in the form of an archive: Imaging South Africa is Allen’s on-going accumulation of mass-produced, printed matter. Drawn from afar, and largely outside of the place of its depiction, this archive includes postage stamps, newspapers and, of course, audio recordings, each systematically catalogued by Allen in a computer data base. And while it stands as a discrete archive and work, it is also the overarching framework (conceptual and material) for a whole series of subsidiary projects. In 1993, he showed a small collection of his own effects as a modest self-portrait of a South African boyhood. More recently, he has been working in tandem on two serial bodies of work: Stamp Collection and Newspapers, both of which have evolved over the years in scale and structure, from wall-bound “pictures” to architectural installations, immersive environments that the viewer may enter.

Made of information, Allen’s archival art fits into a vast cultural enterprise. This includes the pioneering social research project Mass Observation, which put the daily lives of postwar Brits under constant surveillance, as well as the works of contemporary West African artist Georges Adéagbo, whose installations appear as streams of media and artifacts that might be seen to pinpoint, more or less obliquely, the artist’s own coordinates within the global artworld at any given moment. Allen himself considers his project as something that falls in between independent artwork and public resource. He speculates that he could imagine sending all the material in Imaging South Africa to South Africa, where it would be an open source for scholars, researchers or whoever is curious to see the country as it represented itself (through stamps), or was seen (through the press), or was identified (through music), in the years following Apartheid.

Allen’s open-ended view of what he may be building nicely dovetails a space that already exists. The Prelinger Library & Archives describes itself as “an appropriation-friendly, browsable collection of approximately 40,000 books, periodicals, printed ephemera and government documents located in San Francisco, California, USA.” Anyone may drop by and peruse the stacks, which are organized “iconoclastically” by themes that thread their way through the universe.

Simultaneously, along with making his art and building an archive of material culture (that may or may not be art), Siemon Allen has also been creating a digital archive. Housed at flatinternational.org is the South African Audio Archive, where you may find, for instance, the very disk that Allen scanned to make the Rave print in the Records series. That is the one with a blob of white plaster repair-work carefully applied around the center hole. Click on the image, and you go to the complete track listing with notes, links to the artist and additional information. From noodling around a bit, one quickly learns that this is a recording by Spokes Mashiyane, who is credited with having popularized pennywhistle jive or “kwela” (commonly translated as “step-up”) style music, which is associated with apartheid-era police raids: those who were arrested were ordered to “step-up” into the vehicle. As Mashiyane’s first sax recording, this “Rave” recording also paradoxically marks the end of kwela and the start of a new craze for Sax-Jive later called “mbaqanga” that would dominate South African urban music for the next 20 years. The record was made in 1958; go to the Web site chronology for some further history on Mashiyane, who left Trutone (and Rave) and signed on with Gallo to become the first black musician to receive royalties from his recordings. Here’s another tidbit: in 1958, the all-female group The Dark City Sisters was formed and recorded with EMI.

One could keep going of course, following the grooves of this particular history deeper and deeper into Allen’s archive, which links to other sites and cites other sources. Or, in Venice, one could follow the pattern of the completed curtain, smart phone in hand, going cover by cover, through a thoroughly annotated look at South Africa’s music. Are we now back at the beginning, standing in front of those bins that collect people who collect records? Yes and no. However tied it is to the archive he has created, Allen’s art ultimately appears at a remove from it — his records signal that there is more to know, and plenty to hear, but this is, after all, just a look.

Mary Sibande’s contribution to the exhibition Desire at the 2011 South African Pavilion in Venice consists of two new works: …of Prosperity (2011) is a single sculpture of a black woman dressed in a blue and orange costume; the other, Lovers in Tango (2011), is an army of 26 life-size sculptures lined up in three squadrons, each two rows of four figures, with the remaining two facing each other at one end of the formation.

Sibande is a young woman born in 1982 in Barberton, a gold mining town in the north-east of South Africa, raised there and, later, in Johannesburg. She has lived, for most of her life, in a ‘post-apartheid’ democratic republic. Part of a younger generation of artists shaped by a climate of forgiveness, democracy, multi-culturalism and equality, her work explores issues that arise from South Africa’s colonial past and its coming to terms with the consequences of a society scarred by exploitation and apartheid. Sibande’s deliberate focus on what constructs and signifies identity in the complex society from which she stems evolves from a specifically personal, even domestic, context.

Her work evokes an older generation of artists who question identity using the specific human figure and how it is significantly represented in a ‘post-liberation’ situation. Think of Tracey Rose inserting an Africanised form of feminism into her work, challenging South African history and the masculine voices of history. Or, consider Kara Walker’s large confrontational tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes; Cindy Sherman’s extensive series of photographic impersonations of a wide variety of women; and the reading Yinka Shonibare takes on the post-colonial relationship between Europe and Africa through his headless dummies in ‘Africanised’ clothing.

It is, however, Sibande’s thorough exploration of her personal history — of where she comes from — and her consequent use of a character named ‘Sophie’ as her protagonist, that renders the work especially accurate and intense. It also contains the optimism of this younger generation of South African artists, or as Sibande states: “My choice of neutral background is testament to a desire to choose my own future and yet reflect on my personal history.”

The works presented in Venice are a continuation of these explorations and of the pivotal character elaborated throughout Sibande’s practice: Sophie. Sophie is a persona conceived as a domestic worker, a maid. However, rather than bluntly emphasizing a negative image of the domestic worker or the black woman under colonial rule, Sophie is a complex and multifaceted figure who emerged out of the artist’s family’s linear inheritance of servitude (her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother were all domestic workers). Simultaneously, she embodies all black domestic workers at once, carrying the weight of the long years of South Africa’s colonial history. Sophie features in Sibande’s work as the character through which the artist delves into history, psychology and contemporary South African society.

Sophie emerged for the first time, as an idea, an imagination or fantasy of a maid. Sibande, who grew up in an all female family, remembers her mother and grandmother speaking about the things they wished they could have, but didn’t. She made a series of paintings in cameo-shaped and sized frames, entitled My Madam’s Things (2006), depicting “what the maid would like: the possible objects of desire.” She later elaborated the series on larger canvasses, retaining the oval shape of the cameo to include shoe portraits or densely textured affluent dresses. An encounter with The Last Conversation Piece (1994-95), a work by self-proclaimed ‘storyteller’ and artist Juan Munoz, then inspired Sibande to physically create Sophie and her dresses, and to mould her after her own physical appearance. She painted Sophie entirely in bold black, “representing the shadow that follows me throughout life — neither positive nor negative, but a simple fact of my life and evidence of the impossible life that I may have lead.”

Through Sophie’s manifold ‘impersonations’ — of a variety of historical figures, including the artist’s female ancestors — Sibande questions and challenges assumptions concerning belonging, class, race, gender, sexuality and religion specifically with regards to the position of women, black women, the context from which she stems and refers to first and foremost. This opens up the possibility for a whole range of references to the (dis-) empowerment of black women, the power of fantasy and imagination.

Sophie first appeared, physically, in a series of life-size sculptures and photographic prints, Long Live The Dead Queen (2009), of which the artist says: “It’s a collection of fantasies and imagined narratives evolving around a maid, Sophie. My interest is in the humanity and commonalities of people despite the boxes we find ourselves in.” The figure is cast off the artist’s own body in fibreglass and silicone — the same material used to make shop window mannequins. She wears decisively brightly coloured and extravagant Victorian costumes handmade mainly out of the blue fabric typical of domestic workers’ uniforms and workmen’s overalls in South Africa.

Sibande locates the construction of identity — whether enforced or chosen, real or desired — in what covers the body: “The modern fabric I used for Sophie’s dresses has been moulded into many forms that are combined with Victorian references, making the pieces completely ‘foreign’ but definitively Sophie’s own,” Sibande says. Sibande considers the body, skin and clothing the site where history may be contested, where identity is expressed or enforced, and where fantasies are played out. “By subverting and complicating the simple maid’s uniform into the creation of Sophie’s hybrid dress she/it becomes the canvas for storytelling.” It was both the high fashion she encountered in magazines and the stiff ‘uniforms’ (of the same fabric as the domestic workers’ dresses) worn by Zionist churchgoers that informed the artist’s sensibility towards the relationship between identity, ethnic and cultural history, and, desire and fantasy.

“Sophie is always in a state of transforming herself in that she can go beyond the ordinary and what is expected of being a maid,” Sibande explains. “The atmosphere in which Sophie is represented is always one that she aspires to and seeks for, with her eyes closed, refusing the limitations of her reality and venturing into another realm in which her fantasies materialise.”

In Venice we encounter a Sophie slightly different than her predecessors (…of Prosperity, 2011). Standing firmly on her two feet, her back straightened and her arms hanging loosely by her side, she wears an enormous billowing blue and orange coloured dress consisting of over 100 hexagonal shapes tiled together; a giant deflated beehive from which Sophie solely stands out. The artist’s grandmother, who as the matriarch of the family is often sought for advice and guidance, inspired the work, with the beehive dress immediately evoking the protagonist as the queen bee — perhaps fantasizing about what it would be like to have created a large colony of workers around her? It was in fact the behaviour of queen bees that Sibande was drawn to: as the singular figure and largest of all bees in a swarm, the queen bee keeps the community together by emitting ‘pheromones’, a bee perfume that all bees in the hive can sense. Notably, the bee colony consists mainly of females, the queen and the workers; the drone male bees don’t work, but hang around for a while to mate and are then evicted, playing no part in the swarm’s life, but for reproduction. Both the beehive, gender situation and the colour orange, complementing the blue hexagons, point to aspects of South African colonial history. Dutch merchants often included ‘orange’ when naming places and areas in South Africa. The merchants account for yet another long history, that of fatherless families: men were taken away by the colonizers to work as slave labourers.

Lovers in Tango (2011), Sibande’s other work in Venice, follows through on this argument. It takes both Sophie’s character and the artist’s explorations to another level in terms of scale and content. The cluster of 26 sculptures neatly organised with military precision points to the (non-) relationship between the artist’s parents. It focuses on how her own identity was shaped by it, or rather influenced by her own imagination of the relationship. All the figures are rendered from the same cast as Sophie, thus bearing the artist’s face and gender; all are black, too, and almost appear as shadows.

Sibande’s father, a member of the South African National Defence Force, wasn’t around when she was growing up; she met him for the first time when she was 16. He existed only in five photographs she had of him, as an image of a figure posed in uniform with a heavy machine gun. Hence the toy-soldier motif in the work, especially evident with the soldiers in their typical pose – yet they are without weapons, lacking in power. In fact it is only the soldier element in the work that represents Sibande’s father; the rest is informed by the stories and ideas of the women in her family, which is why ‘he’ takes on a female form. His presence, however, makes the figure of Sophie more androgynous and adds a certain masculinity that was previously absent in her character.

The soldiers’ uniforms recall aspects touched upon in Sibande’s older works, those of religion and fashion. Rather than reproducing the image in the photographs, the artist designed new uniforms to dress the toy soldiers, enforcing her idea of the work of art as a space for ‘fantasy’. She also chose a different green for the soldiers’ clothes: the shade associated with the hybrid Zionist Church, where Christianity and African ancestor-worship go hand in hand. The churchgoers call themselves ‘soldiers of God’, wearing starched uniform-like dresses made of the same blue-collar fabric.

The two solitary figures at the top of the regiment represent Sibande’s parents; their gestures and stances refer to tango movements. However, romance, passion or movement is deliberately denied in the work through the exaggerated spacing between them: the two lovers are too far apart to tango, they remain still, blocked in their dramatically intentional poses. Furthermore, in the tango dance the male should be in the lead, a concept that is subverted by the reappearance of Sophie representing the figure of the artist’s mother, who is actually orchestrating the entire performance.
Lovers in Tango is the temporary culmination of a young but impressive body of work, where Sophie’s character matures and develops with the artist’s growing investigations of her ‘self’ and of what she (had) imagined. She addresses significant (often marginalised) themes of identity, gender, race, sexuality and religion, which are elaborated through the figure of Sophie embodying domesticity, intimacy, desire and the power of imagination. Sibande eloquently interweaves layer after layer of autobiographical references, personal memory and significant historical detail into splendour of reality.

It is exactly through this complex methodology that the artist manages to circumnavigate clichés and stereotypical representations: her characters are all true — to themselves, and to the artist as she is working to come to grips with the fundamental questions of her own time.
“Art demands dialogue,” Sibande says. She intends to share that dialogue with her audience when inquiring: “What shapes us, what do we allow to shape us and where are we in this process? Are we born of situations or do we shape our circumstances by our focus, our chosen myths and stories?”
“The work is also a fantasy space.” Yes, and isn’t fantasy, longing and desire, as humanly real as anything else?

Is it a sea monster, reminiscent of earlier work by the artist, Lyndi Sales, caught in a net and brought from South Africa as an exotic curiosity that still manages to retain its own geometric dignity?

Or is it a knot in the nets themselves, empty nets that caught nothing, yet project an illusion of the thing itself – that object of our curiosity and desire, our thirst for the foreign and the unknown that in the end proves to be a mere product of our own imagination?

Or is it, in yet another turn of the screw of interpretation, a discolored symbol of how impossible it is to distinguish or draw a boundary between the net and the catch, the space alien and the bugbear, Venice and South Africa?

As we come closer and read the work’s title – Satellite Telescope – we discover that the whole notion of a monster was most probably a projection of our stereotypes about its place of origin. Indeed, one of our problematic stereotypes is that, Africa is not commonly associated with technology or self-reflective perception; it is something that can be seen, not something seeing.

Throughout her career, Sales has been preoccupied with invisible visions. Sales links her work to an x-ray satellite telescope launched from Kenya in 1970, and to the astronomy of southern skies that has been explored in Cape Town, where she lives. Yet she also merges celestial maps with the images of her own retinas and uses the peculiarities of her astigmatic eyesight to connect the macrocosm with the microcosm. Sales would seem to understand modernity as a plethora of incomplete, lost yet meaningful opportunities (Iain Chambers, Citizenship, Language and Modernity, 2002), and this randomness is reflected by the structure of the telescope, in its combination of incoherent form and multiple internal connections.

Organic imagery returns as we recognize Sales’ very conscious effort to provoke a corporeal response from viewers: by moving past the work’s reflective surfaces, the skies are connected not just with the artist’s own retina but with the eye and body of the viewer in the fleeting temporality of perception.

This connection is necessarily two-way: linking the technological vision with one’s body humanizes the machine. The telescope once again becomes a body, a cocoon. In a more conventional vision of modernity, it would have been given a clear shape, a pregnant body promising the birth of a cyborg. In Sales’ cocoon, by contrast, the outer and inner surfaces are irrevocably mixed up, the future and the present connected by myriad convoluted strings – and yet the modernist feeling of the promise, of the new birth, is somehow retained.

Yet again, who is this viewer “supposed to know”, to read this artwork by endowing it with a sense of their own corporeality, and where is he or she located on the map, astronomical or otherwise? This localization is not easy, as Sales’ work has uncanny, ghost-like quality: it comes from the impossible world where the eye can see itself seeing. Jean-Paul Sartre observed that when actively looking, the subject cannot be conscious of his or her eyes as visible objects – and, inversely, being conscious of them precludes one from seeing. One can never see one’s own gaze.

With Satellite Telescope, though, one can. Sales invites us to overcome Sartre’s impossibility: in her work, viewers do see while being conscious of the apparatus of their sight, including the knots in their corneas.
Thus, Satellite Telescope is brought back to the terrestrial map. South Africa, like other countries caught in the uneasy transition to technological modernity, is the place where one’s own gaze can be registered, if only by peripheral, astigmatic, blurred and double vision.