Landing

Ava Grauls' painting 'Landing' (2021) is a significant large-scale work created with oil and watercolor on Japanese shoji (障子) paper. It measures an impressive 4 x 2.3 meters (413 x 244cm).

The painting directly addresses themes of location, ownership, shifting land, and shifting borders. Grauls conceived 'Landing' after discussions with academics about the historical and geographical space between Britain and Europe, prompting her to explore the challenge of "How do you paint a forgotten landscape?"

A key characteristic of 'Landing' is its portability and adaptability. It was designed to travel and interact with different environments, and notably, it can be folded up and packed away into four boxes. This physical quality of the artwork itself echoes its thematic concerns of changing landscapes and the fluid nature of place and memory.

While specific visual details of the abstract composition are not extensively described in the search results, the title and its conceptual underpinnings suggest a work that explores the historical and geographical processes of claiming, losing, and defining territories, particularly in the context of Europe's "lost frontiers."

Ghostland

Invasion: part 1 Ghostland

Film Title: Obliterated 5’54

I had a lot of trouble trying to write this.

This work has two very different audiences. Those that live in the US and Europe who have watched South Africa on television, and those that live within the borders of South Africa. The former see South Africa as a Success Story. The story has been completed and that book has been closed. Those viewers will enjoy this the film Obliterated, it seems to echo the success of a kind of democracy they believe is being practiced in their own cultures and countries. However the film only hints at the present and the future, it is a reordering of thoughts from the past with hindsight.

Whilst I was undertaking my research for this part of the Invasion Project, I ordered a South African History textbook from 1971. Ten minutes after the order confirmation came through, I canceled the order. 

I have been searching for one of these textbooks for years, wondering where they had all disappeared to. I felt eager to prove how my history had been limited, censored, and repeatedly taught. These textbooks had disappeared at the end of the apartheid as if the past had never happened. Some people’s memories seemed to have done the same. I feared my memories were starting to become questionable. My past seemed more unbelievable the longer I lived in England.

I remember being taught the voortrekker journey towards the interior twice in my education and very little else.

Had I been taught this?

Or had I imagined it?

However, once I had finally found a history book from 1971, my hand froze over the ‘add to basket’ button. In order to possess the old history of South Africa textbook, with its distinctions between ‘white’, ‘coloured’, ‘bantu’ written without conscience. I felt the fear of being called a ‘racist’ once again. I was ractist because I came from South African to Britain at the time people were learning about apartheid in Europe. Once ‘racist’ has been uttered, the word sticks, it takes away all legitimacy from any proceeding thoughts you may speak of after the event. 

Being called a racist made me mute in England. 

Unable to speak about my past. 

Unable to say anything reliable.

Whatever I said would be ‘wrong’. 

(Google was not as widespread in 1998 to provide fact checking on-the-go.)

I reminded myself that times have changed. People have forgotten South Africa and South Africans. It has become a completed story, it is a success story, and it has disappeared into the pages of European and US history books.

The reality is murkier and nothing short of the continuation of people acting in avarice. 

The road my father drove me through 20 years ago was a barren land that was difficult to cultivate. 

It was the prehistory basin for a great river that thundered through the Southern Africa continent and left mineral deposits in its wake. 

It was the cattle grazing plains of the San people. 

It was Cecil Rhodes annexed land from the ‘Native Land Act in 1913’ removing any ownership from the local inhabitants into the hands of the colonisers. 

It was the secretive, giant diamond mining corporation, Anglo America or their subsidiary De Beers, disallowing men to live anywhere on the land

It was the creation of towns, solely for the purpose to feed the mines, and dislocating families miles away from each other.

It is at this point that the world stops looking at South Africa. 

However, time does not stop.

Once the underground monuments had been mined nearly into extinction, De Beers forewent their legal responsibility to refill the mines and restore the land. Instead, they sold their property to smaller, independent mine companies or left the mines completely. 

Empty land, empty towns, empty mines. 

Not quite empty mines - just not enough diamonds for the leviathan to turn its head back around once it had gone forward to Botswana.

In its wake, old mines were pilfered by opportunistic men who died when the tunnel collapsed. De Beers rescued those left alive by ‘paying for the rescue operation’ despite their lack of responsibility for failing to close the mine. Gamsberg mine, a smaller mine bought a pit from Anglo America (the largest shareholder of De Beers) and suffered a landslide in 2020, which went unreported. A dam collapsed near the Jagersfontein old mine due to structural failure of the land. De Beers denied responsibility, as they had sold the mine 50 years ago. 

Many of the mines have golf clubs. A leisure sport for the wealthy but also a demonstration of the power to cultivate a lawn in the desert. The land cannot be farmed and yet green lanes can be built for a golf match once a week. 

The Mandela myth invested so much hope towards the future but structural geological damage in the land echoed in the structural damage taking seed in the government. At the mouth of the Orange River is Alexander Bay, a state-owned diamond mine. A failure of a mine due to government corruption. Further along the river is an Eskom substation, another state-owned energy entity, corrupted by state officials, cutting off power for hours at a time because of pilfered funds. The words ‘State Capture’ were coined after the 9-year rule of President Zuma. He stands trial for selling and personally profiting a great deal of state property and resources. 

Further down the coast from Alexander Bay is Honderklip Bay, a fishing village, left with unemployed fishermen who drink and watch the sea. They are forbidden to fish. Their fishing rights were sold to the big trawler companies by the Mbeki government. Next to the village are the deserted diamond pits of de Beers. 

A forbidden warning sign is posted on the beach. 

However, no one can stop you from entering a deserted mine.

And no one can stop you from falling into the pits of the past

...here we enter the Ghostland.

Invasion

Invasion to the immigrant
What is the right way to invade?

Gunkunjima, is a forgotten coal mining island on the Nagasaki sea. At one point the most densely populated place in the world - now it’s deserted.

This research and development project started out with the title ‘Rural invasion’, looking at ways to repopulate the deserted countryside left behind. Over time, however, another issue became more prominent, one of ‘managing memories’. When researching different areas and how immigrants can integrate, how to make a city thrive, and how to make a society tolerant, something more insidious seemed to be bumping up time and time again in my reading and travels.

Mining. A society built up in rural areas for mining. The reason for the mining, the health and environmental issues for mining, and the global standard of living that relies on mining, make it both the thing we are addicted to and the thing we cannot morally exclude from our lives.

Athazagoraphobia is the fear of being forgotten.

Athazagoraphobia is a human concern. One where we feel the need for legacy and the attachment that we came from something bigger than ourselves. In Becker’s ‘Denial of Death,’ it is the nation or religion that gives the sense of living past our death, our memories remaining in the world, and athazagoraphobia is managed for a short time. However, these processes create structures that manage memories. Our memories are colonised by different agencies and influence our thinking despite a set of values or the memory appearing false.

“The Invasion Project” looks at ways of occupying, both good and bad, and towards unearthing the real history behind the memories that have been manufactured and propagated in nation-states.

Gunkanjima on the artists visit in 2019

Immigration and Emmigration

Carla Grauls wrote the play Occupied in 2012 after a journalist internship in Romania. At that time, Bulgaria and Romania were entering the European Union and nationalist fears were flaring up in Britain.

The tabloids became her inspiration as absurd news stories surfaced of Romanian’s occupying the vacant spaces. A home left by a British family on holiday, an empty garden shed and a public toilet became prime property for the invasion. Britain was at risk of being ‘used by someone else’. The fear was validated in these news stories but with an absurd twist; as one family returned from holiday, the new occupants offered them tea; or the man in the shed offered a coca cola to his landlady on his discovery. These human interactions sparked Carla’s curiosity into what occupation actually meant between the two cultures.

The play is about two Romanian’s who kidnap an Englishman to learn how to be ‘English‘, whilst living in a dilapidated public toilet. British values are confronted by Alex, the Romanian character. He wants to live the British dream.

He relishes the coverage of Romania on the front page in the daily tabloids (despite the news being negative). Alex’s joy of being noticed, part of the national conversation and his congenial manners towards his hostage contradict the Englishman’s idea of what is proper.

But what is the right way to occupy?

Is there any right way to occupy?

When you invite a guest over, there is a general consensus is that you receive them with the hospitality in accordance to how long you want them to stay – a value system.

When inviting immigrants, a host country considers what is the exchange. Is it cheap labour? Is it access to factories in their home country? Will these exchanges provide limited rights of citizenship, thus protecting home citizens and their culture? Perhaps all the above.

The transaction is based on what each country wants. To maintain a position of power, the occupied country fabricates the ever-present threat of invasion and risk cultural dilution.

Someone who doesn’t know our culture.

Someone who doesn’t abide by our laws.

Occupying spaces come up against two sets of obvious conflict, one is territory/ownership the other is questioning the relevance of culture and heritage. Neither conflict is easy to resolve.

Entering into a highly populated city like London, not only shows that a disused Victorian toilet is still the host’s territory, but that their makeshift shelter is liable to eviction from others whilst remaining a neglected site. A claim of ownership over something unwanted.

The Romanian characters also exist in a mental state that is incomprehensible to the publicly perceived civility of the host. The violence in Ceausescu’s Romania translates to the violence living on the London streets, which transfers to the violence they bestow on their kidnapped victim. Their reasoning is based on prolonged violent treatment, and their solution for change comes in the same form. Their trauma becomes a form of their resolution to survive in hostile territory.

But when has a revolution ever been easy?

Britain has avoided the trauma caused by the revolution, unlike many of its European counterparts, namely because they negotiate a compromise.

However, can compromise always repair faults in the status quo? Any suffering caused by government policy can be repackaged as the responsibility of the invaders, outsourcing blame. When all the rights of immigrants are gone, along with those seeking opportunities, Britain will be left for the British.

 Who will be to blame if these long-term social issues remain unresolved? Will culture revert to a ‘stiff upper lip’: the concept to accept hardship without question as a duty for your country?

Is suffering for good citizenry more palatable than suffering because people have the same needs as you?

In delegitimizing the voice of “invading hordes”, uncomfortable introspection was neatly avoided.

Perhaps it would have been wiser to engage directly in the difficult task of untangling territory and cultural issues that came into question. In retrospect, the EU immigrant issues were minimal to their collective contribution.

In these times of fast law revisions on this island, I feel perhaps putting one’s culture and nationality aside and engaging with people as people may have been better, than succumbing to the fear ‘of being used by someone else.’

You purchase the published play here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Occupied-Modern-Plays-Carla-Grauls/dp/1472587928

The speed of motors and the speed of change

Jaime Lerner is an architect and the ex-mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. He has an innate understanding of how cities work. He is also a member of the board at the World Resource Institute, something I never heard of until 2021 and it has been around for 39 years trying to figure out ‘resources’. 

I first heard of Lerner when he gave a talk about his time as Mayor of Curitiba at the British Film Institute, London. He discussed his methods of reinvigorating his city with a number of fast policies, too quick for complaints and efficient enough for the benefits to be felt immediately. He emphasised speed in change. Incidentally, speed is how most invasions are successful.

Curitiba, like most organically built-up cities, had a traffic problem. Lerner’s team worked over a weekend to turn roads into pavements in the centre. A huge project that required speed, 24-hour continuous labour, and good planning. When Monday came around, shops saw a greater influx of customers on foot. There was no opportunity to complain about the vanishing roads because the benefits were immediate.

Curitiba’s introduction of a ‘speedy bus’ system, and elongating the centre from the usual circular nucleus to a line of centres revitalised Curitiba by reaching the wider community.

Cars and roads used to be a bridge for commerce. However, the more cars in built-up areas, the more this mode of transport becomes a blockage, either creating a barrier for pedestrians or slowing down and isolating each individual that sits alone in their car. Cars have become the regressive element in flourishing cities.

But what of those areas that are losing their population altogether?

The problem is not occupied spaces for Lerner but unoccupied spaces. In ‘Urban Acupuncture’ an empty building threatens to break the continuity of city life. The break in this continuity can become much more troublesome to restore if it’s left abandoned and neglected. Lerner argues these spaces should be filled immediately with temporary markets, and pop-up stores to continue the life of the city.

I think about this when I live in Dundee. I am aware of the empty buildings and the damage they are doing to this city every day they are left vacant. I think about the H&S issues stopping any action to make these buildings part of society again. Bureaucracy is money, health and safety become paperwork and someone, somewhere is getting paid. If they don’t get money, nothing happens and a hole appears in the neighbourhood, leeching outward.

To keep a community’s vitality is to keep buildings occupied, using different methods to promote social interaction. A colleague commented on a local marketplace in Dundee that had been shut down years ago, as we drove past the complex with a roof caving in. He felt saddened by the loss of community he felt in that market.

The Tay River is the most breathtaking site in Dundee. Building works have begun to create spaces for people to spend time at the waterfront. The introduction of the V&A museum and a larger garden and cafe layout provides the space for people, not just in the pursuit of consumerism (as a busy shopping street might provide) but just to be with each other.

However, the 4-lane motorway offramp cuts off direct pedestrian access to the water. The large body of water is further dissected by a stone wall, with no pier or effort to engage dynamically the Tay. These become invisible barriers, creating a feeling of being locked off and contained. Despite this criticism, the gardens have come a long way from the derelict vacant plots that were keeping pedestrians away from the sight of water altogether.

There is hope that post-pandemic will make these areas so socially buzzing spaces that the old market had been. Since Covid, people have become starved of each other’s company. Perhaps when lockdown ends people will find more attraction in spending time with each other, outside, instead of jumping in their cars to reach some far off ‘business park’ to buy endless things.

‘Urban Acupuncture” Jaime Lerner https://www.amazon.co.uk/Urban-Acupuncture-Jaime-Lerner/dp/1610917278

Clean space

When Covid was first upon us, Britain locked down into a frenzied habit of deep cleaning. During that time I was stacking shelves in a supermarket. Right at the beginning of the pandemic, the shelves were being decimated by desperate shoppers buying toilet paper, hand sanitizer, pasta, and flour. 

Flour? Were they going to bake themselves out of a pandemic?

My university shut down and had a ‘deep clean’. I understand from my upbringing, through my travels, and from my previous employment that ‘clean’, like ‘art’, is highly subjective. Clean is not something you are born with – it is taught and therefore very closely linked to the ideals in your cultural heritage. 

The word ‘Clean’ comes from old German / Dutch, meaning ‘to get rid of impurities’ (both in the soul and in the world of dirt). The Dutch heritage considered cleaning a part of their religion, and when the religion disappeared from their culture, cleanliness remained very much a part of their identity. My partner is from Limburg, Belgium, and attests to ‘Cleaning Sundays’ a day when everyone would clean their house.

In South Africa the unsavoury practice of keeping a ‘Maid’ during apartheid meant the house was always spotless. Most white families had a maid. My mother felt uncomfortable with someone in the house that ‘was family’ but was not ‘family’ a weird double standard that racist societies have. She decided to clean the house herself. She trained my sister and me to clean the house from top to bottom, on a Sunday (no relation to the Dutch practice).

So when Covid started and ‘deep clean’ was bandied about on the media, I expected a step up from our household chores. I expected fumigation and the white-suited figures I had seen on the Chinese news. I expected every last bit of dirt lifted and scraped clean.

This was not the case. A ‘deep clean’ was the same clean we had practiced as children. Scrubbing and wiping down with a sanitizer was the norm, there was nothing ‘deep’ about it. The other day my housemate (from India) asked if I was ‘deep cleaning’ the flat when I was performing my bi-weekly house cleaning. 

There is definitely a very notable difference each culture has in relation to cleaning. Why is this important?

“In terms of its ability to signal enemy invasions, or alternative illicit activities, or cultural transgression, litter can be associated with danger. The phrase ‘dangerous pathway’ is more usually associated with coastal paths which are being undetermined by erosion and it could be argued that a different form of erosion is taking place here, the erosion and it could be argued that a different form of erosion is taking place here, the erosion of accepted forms of ownership.”

Shirley Keeping Britain Tidy: Litter and Anxiety pg 38

Simply because it not only performs a relatable function in different cultures that have the same preferences, it also creates anxiety and outsiderness. Those that ‘litter’ in a park become those outsiders, not part of the system, a threat. 

During my interview with the founder of Studio Kura, Hirofumi said the biggest issue with the local residents in the Japanese rural town was the garbage disposal. Japan is extremely strict with how you dispose of your garbage and there are very few public bins. You are expected to be responsible for yourself and your belongings. It also relates to this culture’s lack of waste and disinterest in clutter. Everyone thought Kondo was a craze, she is merely the cultural norm of a society that has difficulty keeping clutter because of lack of space and strict social compliance.

This is not to say Japan is the greenest country because of their waste disposal system, they still burn everything, just at different temperatures.

Each culture considers its way of cleanliness the right way. However, the real challenge comes when you try and build common values around cleanliness. 

If Covid has done anything, it has created a global standard of cleanliness. The bottom line is to stop the spreading of diseases.

But cultural cleanliness remains a very important topic because it allows us to be empathetic to each other’s spaces. Compatible cultural cleanliness builds trust and enables integration. As far as political and gender politics go, it doesn’t matter who you share the bathroom with, everyone needs to respect the cleanliness of themselves and others.

When I started this year I came into my new shared studio and scrubbed the sink. Gradually, I noticed others would also keep the sink tidy.

Afterthought:

“Why clean? It will only get dirty again.” This is more regularly said, I’m afraid to say, by the young men I work with. But cleaning is a constant chore and one that everyone in society should be consistently doing. Things get dirty and it’s our responsibility to make it good for the next person, for the next group, for the next generation. It is a social responsibility to look after the spaces we share with others.

Building Cities!

Conquerer comes from old French, the remnants of when Britain was last invaded. The fear of being reinvaded and a self-defensive belief in the ‘strength’ British culture is somewhat an oxymoron when the very etymology of the word comes from a conqueror.

Culture is the way a society adapts to change. Once a successful adaption takes root, those ideas become a ‘way of living’, a ‘new normal’ we have bandied about so often during Covid times. British heritage has developed over centuries of winning (after losing badly to the Normans). It is that winning that has made the cultural ‘way of life’ seem like the ‘right’ choice, and subsequently there has been somewhat less raping and pillaging. 

British culture is easily hijacked by these fancies of historical Imperialism, by ‘Greatness’ which was the label attached to foreign cultural initiatives in those far-flung countries once ruled by Empire. To win a battle you need the confidence to know you are right and that confidence comes from a cultural identity that considers itself superior. This would be fine if Britain continued to subjugate foreign lands, however, it doesn’t seem to play out quite as well on home soil. The locals are baffled at seeing these slogans from the British past placed in their backyards.

How does this relate to the ‘rural invasion’? Because right now I’m looking at empty buildings in the middle of London. Something I find unfathomable in such a densely populated area and something that is happening precisely because of the changing meaning of words in this culture. 

London is building at a fantastic rate. When I first saw the high-rises, soaring above the normal 3 to 4-story buildings, I was happy. Now was a time when the people that run London can get a home closer to work. They won’t have to complete a 60-hour week and still face delays and transport issues, traveling to a home they can barely afford. Central London was becoming a place where people could not just work, but live as well… because, well, just look at the size of those buildings. Look at the number of flats, there are so many, they must be knocking a dent in the housing crisis… Right?

“One Crown Place Challenges the Perception of what a City stands for. “

If the ‘Crown’ – the very leadership fabric of this country says so, it must be true! A very exciting way of making communal living seem the ‘new normal’. The last time Britain had communal living like this, they were called workhouses. It gave families shelters to keep them working 6 days a week. 

Park Central West boasts, without a hint of irony towards the workhouse days. It offers a studio apartment for 1,774 a month. And after a series of reference checks, you must be found to earn over 30 times that in your annual salary to live there. A single person must earn around 54k to buy a room with a kitchen in it.

“An exclusive Zone 1 development, in close proximity to key transport links, and the best of the creative, cultural and social experiences London has to offer, The Boulevard has been designed to reflect and enhance the unique character and iconic heritage of the area.”

Bla bla bla ‘culture’ ‘heritage’ bla bla bla.

After a few months of living in Elephant and Castle, I noticed these flats were becoming the new wasteland. There are 3 reasons I considered why. The obvious one is the price, they are too high for any local that has been vacated from this area. They may be bought by an overseas investor hoping to park their money, or as a second home. Or the occupants are simply working too many hours to pay for the flat they can barely exist in. 

With more living space, more flats and more room came less opportunities for people with lower income and the removal of the previous locals. I don’t blame the council, they have been systematically underfunded for years. However, the jump between social housing and private rent shows just how unsustainable the current living culture has become. And this culture has not changed. There is no ‘new normal’, just the same capitalist trajectory that started in the early 90’s accelerated in the 00s, and continues under a new bunch of words that we have been culturally conditioned to obey.

Nobody mentions the ‘B’ word anymore. Brexit has become a thing of the media’s past. Lack of petrol, lack of deliveries, lack of building materials for these incessantly feeding beasts of construction are “because of the pandemic”, because there are no HV-whatever truckdrivers, we are accepting and adjusting. The stiff upper lip has clicked into place and we don’t dare mention the idiocy that got us here in the first place. Because we have to be right, we simply cannot be wrong. Britain is and has always been, a winner.

These fortresses built will be full of immigrants half the population voted to keep out. Except these will be the rich immigrants that the government loves so much, those who have the funds to lobby laws and occupy spaces where the cleaners, and ground workers in the city once lived on. 

But we cannot simply be wrong. 

Brexit was staged on a battle of words, ‘to take back control’ is a particularly good war cry if I ever heard one. One particular political member who was all up for taking back control was Nigel Farage, who now owns a finance company that calls for investors to “fight for their financial freedom.” Brexit was a collision of war-mongering words harking back to a time of winning, but do we really need to revert back to the wealthy demanding more autonomy?

The culture of this society has long outlived this type of rule, yet because of historical references to British heritage, society was manipulated. Now is the unwelcome lesson of learning how to lose, but let’s not make it any more painful than it has to be.