Converting Eviction
Johannesburg, 2020 – A local television station is besieged by drastic events. First, white blotches etch their way into the archive materials and then a fire reduces the facility to ashes and ruins. In addition, at the celebration to mark solidarity with efforts to rebuild the station, an eerie phenomenon begins to spread: parts of the society are beginning to suffer from selective blurry vision…
«Converting Eviction» has been created as a collaboration between two groups: Sello Pesa’s Ntsoana, Johannesburg, and Tim Zulauf’s KMUProduktionen, Zurich. The project deals with global and Swiss involvement in the South African apartheid era, its consequences today, and the struggle for reparation and debt relief. What is invented is a kaleidoscopic performance form that sets pieces of texts, durational performances, music, and contemporary documents into relationship with each other.
Background:
Thematically, the work begins with the loaded relationship between Switzerland and apartheid South Africa. Official attempts to critically examine this history culminated in a research report of the «Relations between Switzerland and South Africa» (NRP 42+, 2001–2004) National Research Program of the Swiss National Science Foundation. This historical reappraisal was found to be unsatisfactory by anti-apartheid activists. Particularly disturbing was the statutory closure by the Swiss Federal Council–which was, after all, the commissioner of the study–of respective archive dossiers, thereby obstructing the work of historians. The ban was lifted in 2014, the exact year in which a class-action lawsuit filed since 1999 by apartheid victims in New York was irrevocably rejected. The past seems defused.
«Converting Eviction» wants to trace a sweeping arc back to the depths of this past and investigate the blind spots. Since the 1950s, much «not wanting to know» has been construed strategically and with great effort, rendering clarity impossible, whether concerning, e.g., in relation to Swiss capital or arms exports to the racist regime, the collaboration with intelligence service or bioweapons programs, as in the Peter Regli / Wouter Basson affair or in the Craig Williamson agents affair. Last but not least, the giants among commodity traders, such as the Zug-based Glencore, a corporate group that was involved in the 2012 Marikana massacre of miners who worked for the platinum mining company Lonmin–from which Glencore then split in 2015–, have laid the foundations of their corporations’ power through sanction-breaking oil deals with apartheid.
The past, however, cannot be simply shaken off. This is all the more striking as inequality in South Africa has been maintained along the arbitrary demarcation of skin color: the rich country of South Africa is considered to be one of the nations with the most unevenly distributed wealth in the world, even after twenty-five years of an African National Congress government. Large parts of the black population continue to not have any secure housing. Mining and urban development projects lead to large-scale displacement. Notorious is the Red Ants group, a paramilitary private enterprise that clears residents from buildings, also under government commissions. The resulting violence is part of company policy.
«Converting Eviction» takes place against the background of such complex interdependencies. The transnational constellation of the artistic team brings these relationships in focus to create a kaleidoscopic view.
Credits
