During our activities as public art researchers and commissioning agents for the Johannesburg Development Agency, we conducted numerous site visits, city walks, and scripto-visual mapping workshops, towards a better understanding of the manner in which public art can contribute to place making solutions in the inner city.

On one of our site inspections at the boundary between Braamfontein and Hillbrow, we were confronted by a Senegalese man, who recognizing our cameras must have presumed we were tourists. Speaking to us in French he advised us not to enter Hillbrow. Able to understand and respond we info rmed him that we were Joburger's and that we were very aware of the no-go aspects of Hillbrow.

From the perspective of our mapping activities, we thus received first hand evidence of the potentially charged divide between these two neighbourhoods and in addition a sense of strangeness following the realization that ‘others' from the continent might have a stronger foothold of areas of the city that we had previously traversed freely.

This sense of territoriality within the inner city, the evidence of a ‘new' African user and so on had become a reality even before the abolition of the Group Areas Act in 1990.

As an artist whose body of work to date is predominantly dedicated to investigating the transformations and visual discourses within Johannesburg , I have come to realise that Johannesburg holds remarkable value as a laboratory for studying and immersing oneself. It is also home to both myself and Marcus Neustetter and because we have chosen to remain in South Africa , we understand that our memories of home under apartheid for example are now radically challenged at all levels. For us, remaining here means embracing that change and using our skills as creative people to participate in, produce and influence perceptions.

Referring back to this idea of immersion in the city, we identify Johannesburg as perhaps the best example of a South African city's conversion from an apartheid identity to a multiple African identity. In this transformation process our sense is that the city itself is catching up to the rapid reclamation strategies adopted by the new city users be they local or from the continent. The high impact change within the urban fabric of Johannesburg leaves traces of human interaction, socio- economic and even cultural endeavour. As artists and curators there is so much opportunity to use the language of exhibition practice within public or private space to reflect on this transformation and what it means for creative interventions to play a role in reporting on this change or facilitating a seeing-ourselves approach to audience growth and development.

An example of our approach can best be described in our project (by invitation of the French Institute of South Africa ) for the Dakar Biennial in May 2006.

During the conceptual phase of the project, the first questions we asked ourselves were; what does Dakar / Senegal look like? How does it behave as a city? And are there comparisons we can draw between Dakar and Johannesburg 's newly formed African city?

An answer to these questions would require establishing a process that was born out of the encounter with the ‘Senegalese man'.

Our proposal acknowledges the following:

There is a Senegalese community in Joburg, migrant, legal and illegal, engaging with the City of Johannesburg in a particular way.

From a city comparison perspective we need to have an encounter with Dakar and this encounter should be relevant to our work in Johannesburg and other African cities.

The language of mapping through video, photography, drawing and found materials will form the key visual documentation processes.

The outcome of the project should have a form particular to the Dakar exhibition and a form particular to a return exhibition in Johannesburg .

Our concept proposes the following.

We establish a forum within which we can interview a small number of resident Senegalese immigrants. Through the interview dialogue we hope to extract info rmation about Dakar , hand drawn maps, photographs and other info rmation that we could use to navigate Dakar without reliance upon traditional maps or guide books. An added layer to this navigation process is that we offer to deliver something of importance to a friend or family member in Dakar .

This process is documented and forms the basis upon which we design our own route map, from the airport or main transport arteries to the city.

The culmination of documentary material is then processed in Dakar through a media lab that is partnering with us to produce an exhibition result.

Upon return to Johannesburg we will recontextualise the Dakar Exhibition in Hillbrow, with a view to engaging the resident Senegalese audience.

In both my own artistic practice and the collaborative partnership between myself and Marcus Neustetter, I think that our socially engaged processes began years ago out of notions of adding or extracting value within the set of relations accountable to the project or intervention. We realise today that our interventions are directly linked to issues of audience development, access and interpretation. That in a fragmented society like that of South Africa ; audience is site or context specific and that in this sense we purpose and condition our projects to this end.

Dear all,

My name is Hilde de Bruijn, and I am a freelance curator based in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Recently I have organised Hidden Rhythms, a contemporary art project in which 15 artists participated. The project looked at the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion from the perspective or ritual and ritualizing. You can find more info on this project at www.expoplu.nl (under the archive button). At the moment a public programme of lectures, performances and screenings that I have organised for the MA Fine Art programme of the Piet Zwart Institute is taking place in Rotterdam, NL under the title Ritualizing (see http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/fama/programme2/current/ritualizing/).

When I started working on the Hidden Rhythms project it soon became clear that the terrain of Ritual Studies is a heavily contested one. There is no concensus on the definition of the term ritual, nor on its function or meaning. To me, this makes it an extremely interesting but also extremely difficult subject to speak about. Since from a curatorial perspective the artisitic quality of the Hidden Rhythms project was likely to benefit from a more open and exploratory attitude, works have been included that relate not only to ritual but also to ritual-like activities and ritualisation, and there has been no attempt to come up with an over-all definition of the term ritual - although I tend to agree with those who state that ritual becomes a term devoid of meaning if it can include everything. The content of Hidden Rhythms eventually got more focused because of a growing interest in deconstructing ritual as a static and authorless phenomenon that naturalises things and by an interest in exploring what ritual actually does, especially in relation to the performing of boundaries. Here, the notion of ritualisation played an important role.

In his lecture for the Ritualizing series in Rotterdam Dr. Nick Couldry efficiently summarised anthropologist Catherine Bell’s description of ritualisation in her publication Ritual – perpectives and dimensions (1997)as:

“the mass of processes across private and public life that, if you like, form the background, hinterland to the specific moments of ritual, as the processes that generate the terms around which rituals are organised, that prepare our bodies for ritual performance, that already, as it were, give us a sense of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’ in ritual action.”

In his lecture, Couldry then pointed at another aspect of Bell’s concept of ritualisation which links it to questions of power. He quoted:

“Fundamental to all strategies of ritualization . . . is the appeal to a more embracing authoritative order that lies beyond the immediate situation. Ritualization is a generally a way of engaging some wide consensus that those acting [in ritual] are doing so as a type of natural response to a world conceived and interpreted as affected by forces that transcend it” (Bell, p. 169).

He continued his lecture by asking how ritual performance then actually works, and drew on the French sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu who, returning to one of the founders of ritual theory, Emile Durkheim, emphasised how ritual is based on boundaries: “all rites tend to consecrate or legitimate an arbitrary boundary by fostering a misrecognition of the arbitrary nature of the limit [they involve].” (Pierre Bourdieu (1990) Language and Symbolic Power Cambridge: Polity, p 118).

I would understand ‘rituals of self-preservation’, and the ritualisation processes that enable their existence, as rituals in which these boundaries play a vital role as well. I would connect these rituals to the performing of those boundaries that establish or try to preserve (existing) perceptions of the self – always in relation to others, - understanding the ‘self’ not only in terms of individual identity but also in terms of collective identity.

Over the last couple of years the struggle with this sense of the (collective) self and the preservation of this has intensified in Dutch society (some have declared the multicultural society a failed project). Being able to deconstruct ritual, and being aware of ritual’s capacity to naturalise doesn’t make the boundaries less arbitrary but does allow using (or instrumentalising) ritual in a much more conscious manner in order to shift these boundaries. This way, one could consider ritual a potential dynamic and creative tool for change, as well as an even more effective political instrument then it already is and always has been.

In 2004 the Dutch Labour party (PvdA) seemed to have understood this really well when they altered the annual remembrance service for the commemoration of the victims of war on May 4th. That year, for the first time, (certain) groups of youth with a Moroccan background were involved in the commemoration – the same group that had heavily disturbed the service the year before. In 2004 one of their tasks was to read out the names of 64 Moroccans who had lost their lives in the Dutch province of Zeeland. In the run up to the remembrance service I guess what you could call a ‘ritualisation process’ had taken place: the youths and even some of their parents had been given a great deal of information about the Second World War (including a visit to the Anne Frank House) and what it means for the Netherlands. The now shifted boundary, between who is included or excluded from that ceremony, who is or is not part of a history that the Dutch identify with, served to bridge the gap between what has become the reality of the ‘collective’ self (heterogeneous groups that resist homogenising to a greater extend then expected) and the (ideal of) the collective self treasured by the Dutch Labour Party: a multicultural society.

Best regards,
Hilde

Transcription from live event at the Drill Hall, Johannesburg, 4 February 2006.

Thanks, what I really want to focus on in my presentation is to look at crime, violence, space and place. It comes very much from a sociological perspective rather than an art perspective so it's a different set of jargon and ideas I think to what most people in the room would be familiar with. And I think in a way, to pick up on Achilles point, how does one make the personal political, I think it goes back to in some ways, what I want to close with, to go back to the old feminist slogan of how the personal is political. And I'd like to illustrate that in some of the research findings I'm going to present, about how women look at keeping themselves safe from rape and domestic violence in a city like Johannesburg.

At the very minimum, what we need for violence to happen is a victim, a perpetrator, a place and a space. And I want to explore some of these ideas a little bit further, looking particularly at space and place as a way of looking at how fear danger and safety are negotiated by women in inner city Johannesburg. In relation to this I want to draw from three different pieces of research that we have conducted here. The one was an analysis of gang rapes reported at 6 inner city police stations. The other was a series of interviews with women living in some of the squats in town or some of the homeless shelters. As well as the series of focus groups with women sex workers, waste management workers, homeless women, security guards, women living in the city, about their experience of safety and danger and how they negotiate that on a day to day basis.

The point about I think why it's useful to look at place and space as not just abstract concepts, its that I think one finds power and politics being expressed in time and space. And I think ‘place'is a means of ordering relationships in many different ways between people in the world both on a gender dimension between men and women, but I think being in South Africa, also across racial lines and of course the numerous other divisions that I think has divided us as a society. So place is a way of capturing where we fit into South African society and violence is in some ways a means of keeping people in their place, putting people back into their place and reminding people of what their place is. So I think in a very concrete way you can see something quite political being expressed. One can also see just I think from the way people respond, to use a very obvious example, how you behave in a church. It's very clear that we understand, perhaps at an unspoken level that some rules apply in some spaces that do not apply in other spaces. And that particular spaces make some behaviour legitimate and in other areas illegitimate. To give another example drawing from some of the women we spoke to, is for example to be a women, to walk on particular streets in Hillbrow at a particular time of night is to make perhaps a particular statement about a sort of occupation you might be engaged in. And it is I think very often, for particularly men, for those of us who have had that experience of being ‘curb-called', it's for people to draw particular conclusions about who you are because you occupy that particular space in time. So I think that's why space and place can be useful in terms of understanding how it is that they can play a role in shaping how violence comes to take place.

Just as a last dimension in terms of gender relations is that again, going back to the idea of place, I think both culture, religion and politics have created a distinction between the public and the private. What is women's realm and what is men's realm. Women's realm is usually the private while that of men is usually the public. And I think one can find that very clearly expressed, and its a theme I want to pick up at the end of the speech, when we look at what happens to women when they get raped in public places. And what the reaction is to that. Just to begin with, I'll start with some of the findings from the women we spoke to, which tell us a little bit about how they read safety and danger in situations and places and what are the strategies that they use to deal with those particular sets of experiences. I think for a lot of women, time, for them is important. There are some places you avoid at a particular time of day. Early in the morning, once dusk happens and as it progressively becomes darker. That is a cue for you to start avoiding particular places. In terms of spaces here one finds particular individuals signifying safety or danger. So for example for quite a few women, the sight of a woman who could be classified as a sex-worker or who looks like she might be homeless was for them an indication that a particular place was unsafe. Yet in talking to homeless woman and sex-workers, they had a very different ways of reading a lack of safety. I mean for a sex-worker, particularly those who worked on the streets it was how much time did you have before you got into a car with somebody, how could you guage in that moment whether or not they were safe. If they took you home, who else might be waiting…who might also be expecting free the sex, having been paid for one, the assumption is made that those particular women should now provide sex for all.

I think other examples that women gave as to how they negotiated their safety was also for instance for some women the fact that there was a disco nearby. These particular women would ask the bus driver for the stop (the stop used to be where the disco was) to please move the stop so they didn't have to get off there because they associated the drinking, the people, what was happening there as being a source of a lack of safety. The presence of men, whether alone or in groups is also associated with danger. So for example one woman's comment:

When you get in there to use the toilets you find a man standing on a hill near the bridge. He is just waiting there so that if you get inside the toilet he will jump you. Rape you and finish with you. If you are unlucky he will also stab you.

So I think her comment is also a graphic indication of how a public facility like a toilet can become very dangerous for women. And I think what came through quite often in the research as well was how public toilets, because they are obvious places of where women will go to at some point, become a place where you will find potential rapists or voyeurs hanging out. Another example:

Where I live I don't use the train station in front of my flat. I don't use it because it is usually deserted and quiet and most of the people who walk there are men. Women are very few. Most of the time if you go there, you are alone.

But at the same time women also specified that men also offered a sense of protection and so when they walked home at night they assured that they were accompanied by men. Another example: I mean, most of the women we spoke to all identified Court Street in Hillbrow as being a place of particular danger. Again because sex-workers were said to work there:

You are afraid because you do not know what could happen to you when these people are high…

[This is talking about drug dealers]

…because not only do they sell drugs, they also use them. The radio blares the whole night. When it is dark, they would not leave you alone, they could grab you. There is no safety also because there are prostitutes who live in the area.

But then looking at how fear was created all came about as a result of social processes. Women became afraid not only of particular places because of something that had happened to them there, but because of hearing about things that had happened. One example:

Sometimes it is gossip. Most of us haven't experienced rape. When people mention that something happened in Hillbrow, in your mind the whole of Hillbrow becomes unsafe.

And then possessing local knowledge of what has happened in particular spaces was also identified as important:

In the toilets on President and Delvers, a girl who had been raped was found inside the public toilets. There is also a street at the corner of Market and Delvers where there are public toilets. A girl was raped in that place and she was killed. So a woman who does not know may walk into that place not knowing that it is unsafe, but there are taxis and a disco in that area and so the place is not safe.

And then there were other methods that women used to protect themselves and some of these were about myths or misconceptions about who is raped, how rape happens and how you prevent rape. There is one particular example of this woman; this is how she decided this is what happened to women who got raped and if she didn't engage in these particular activities or doings, she would then be kept safe:

It is women who drink that get raped. They drink so much and in the end they do not even know where they are. The way I see it, a person who sits at the disco until 10 at night, she is dancing and has to go home around 11. At that time it is late for a woman to be outside. We also do not take care of ourselves. Like the woman who was found raped and dead at the toilets, she looked like she was a prostitute. They sit at the discos, drink with the men and then when they are drunk, they leave the disco these men rape them. It is alcohol, a lot of women drink too much. A woman should look after herself.

Or the other example:

Rape happens when you walk in a place where it is very quiet. You meet a person in that place and he overpowers you and takes you to another place where he rapes you. I think that to avoid that from happening, women should not walk where there are no people, they should walk where there are a lot of people to be safe.

So through starting to construct some of these ideas around who gets raped and what it is that contributes to rape this is a means that some women practice in order to try and keep safe. Some of the other women pointed out:

But rape doesn't only happen in quiet places, sometimes even people you know, or a colleague could rape you. So it can be anywhere, so you must be careful about everyone. If you have been raped by someone you know, the police won't believe you. If it is someone who you know who rapes you it is also dangerous because he could rape you and threaten you and let you go or he could rape you and kill you so that you do not tell anyone. People will also say, we saw her walking with a person who is known to her.

There are some women who realise that trying to localise and contain danger in particular individuals or in particular spaces or in particular sets of events doesn't always work. That rape was a risk they ran on a constant level.

Then in terms of looking at some of the strategies that some of the women employed, they spoke about asking drivers to drop them off in different places, consciously going to different bus stops, train stops where they could get picked up, changing where they walked, asking men to walk with them, walking in groups, these were some of the strategies that they employed. Waste management workers before hand if they knew that had to work in a place that was unsafe they would file a report before hand so that in the event that anything happened to them it would have been registered that they had expressed fear or concern working in that particular area. And this was quite closely tied with some of the streets in Hillbrow which are used as part of the drug trade.

I think in terms of sex-workers they also use quite particular strategies. Many of them try to work from hotels rather than from the streets. Because at least from within a hotel you could force your client to pay upfront. You also had security guards who could protect you in the case of a client becoming difficult. Otherwise they also try to warn each other about difficult customers and try to ensure they always carry enough money for taxi fare so that if a client refused to pay for services, they wouldn't have to hitch or walk but could rather catch a taxi. As many women highlighted, the daily travel to and from work often exposed them to danger. Walking between work places transport terminuses and homes often after darkness had fallen, presented a number of opportunities that assailants took full advantage of.

This is something I want to pick up specifically in looking at some of the gang rape research. Because there are some quite interesting differences between rape perpetrated by two or more men, and rape perpetrated by single rapists. Just to give you some sense of that because it talks again to the important differences between place and space. The greatest proportion of women who were gang raped, which was 41%, were walking at the time of the attack. One in ten cases they were socialising, and in another 10% of cases waiting for transport. And in 4% of cases they were sleeping or at home. Where as if we look at the victims of single perpetrator rapes only 21%, that's half the number, were walking at the time that they were raped. By contrast very many more of them were either at home or socialising. In terms of looking where the location of the rape occurred again important differences between single and multiple perpetrator rapes. If we look at the multiple rapes, 36%, that's just over one in 3 occurred in a private space like a residence or less commonly a work place. Where as with the single rape, 66%, that's almost 2 out of three occurred in a private place. And further 16% of women that were raped by single perpetrators were attacked in their homes, were as only 7% of women attacked by multiple perpetrators were attacked in their homes. So one can see there's quite a close relationship between public space and gang rape which is very different to single perpetrator rape and private rapes. And then looking at where the greatest proportion of gang rapes happen these were in public places with 31% taking place in open spaces like parks, stretches of veld (open field)and parking areas. The gang rapes that took place in parks, 11 of these were situated within the 2 km radius in which we sit, bounded from the end by the park up at Harrow Road to the park a little bit further down. So one could actually find a localisation in some ways for some forms of gang rape.

What was also particularly striking about gang rapes in contrast to single perpetrator rape, this why we ultimately entitled our study “Urban Predators”, is the greater number of rapists involved the more likely one is to find a gun being used as well as a car. So seeing a situation where a woman is abducted off a street at gun point and taken somewhere where rape occurs. This is considerably more common with the gang rapes than with the single perpetrator rapes.

And then just to return to some of my initial points about space and place, when we released some of this data about gang rape in inner city Johannesburg the immediate response was ‘women stay off the street between the following hours, don't catch transport, don't go here, don't go there'. And I think that communicated a number of very problematic messages. Firstly what it was saying was that public spaces were not for women. And if women wanted to use public spaces and public amenities like parks like public transport, like public toilets, they need to restrict and alter their behaviour. And that in a sense women who disregard those injunctions to keep safe in public spaces are to some degree, asking for it or getting what they deserve because they didn't take proper precautions to keep safe. That where again, this division of the public and private space, women who occupy public spaces or behave in public spaces in ways that they shouldn't are in a sense contributing to their own misfortune.

The other problem with the contradiction that one runs dealing with place and space and the division between public and the private, is that by warning women to stay out and away from public spaces it again reinforces the notion that women are safest at home in private space. But I think once one starts looking at the statistics for domestic violence and rape that it would appear actually it is private spaces that pose the very much greater danger to woman than public spaces. So I think those messages about the public and the private and who may use what space and who must constrain their behaviour in what space, only tends to reinforce and perhaps add to that political dimension, a situation where women are not safe in public and sent right back into the private where they are even less safe.

So those are just some thoughts I want to leave with you about public and private and how personal attempts to keep oneself safe in public spaces are in a sense diminishing women's use and occupation of the public and driving them back into the private where they continue to face increased risks to their safety.

Thank you.

Biography