disquieting domesticities/vestiges of violence (or, the ghost in the house)

Precarious and frangible yet strangely resilient, my “impressions” of domestic objects hover in a liminal space of constant becoming. Slipping in between life and death; visibility and invisibility; materiality and immateriality; human and more-than-human; presence and absence; actuality and imagination; being and nonbeing; real and unreal; form and formlessness; (semi)living and non/living; they oscillate, restlessly, in a state of in-betweenness.

The impressions are made from a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast which grow to form a gelatinous, cellulose-based fiber. They create a semblance of presence, of immediacy, of touch, yet their delineation of absence ironically defines what they are. They reside in the liminal interface between nature and culture, breathing life into both. Materially corporeal yet simultaneously ethereal and ephemeral, they are in varying states of atrophy, and as such, may act as affective carriers of memory, and evoke associations with trauma, absence, complicity, and loss.

The cast objects range in design, period and surface patterning. They include items taken from Chinese porcelain and English bone china—dinner and side plates, teacups and saucers, bowls and glassware—which reference traditional English styling and patterning found in Royal Doulton, Royal Albert, and Royal Worcester ranges. Some feature ubiquitous blue-and-white patterns of Chinese origin, such as the willow pattern, which the British copied in their production of blue-and-white, eighteenth-century porcelain, and the Dutch reproduced in their Delft blue porcelain. Reproductions of the original designs of the cast objects, and the originals themselves that are still in existence, have become domestic “classics” in many post-colonies; in referencing upper-class tastes and values, they also signify settler middle-class consumption and status, and often act as markers of gentility or respectability. As such, the objects and their impressions resonate as spectral traces of colonial legacies that haunt domestic interiors and broader individual and collective imaginations in postcolonial contexts.

The impressions carry resonances of British and Dutch imperialism and colonialism—the very mechanisms that drove the enculturation of capital, set against a historical backdrop of slavery, genocide, dispossession, apartheid, exploitation, displacement, and precarity. Here, notions of presence merge with the spectral to convey invisible-yet-present traces of a troubled past. In tracing the stages of capitalism in South Africa from its mercantile phases with the establishment of the Cape of Good Hope, through Dutch and British settler colonialism, and apartheid, the impressions may be seen as uncanny specters of disquietude that speak to the demise of settler colonial culture, and the ways in which the ghosts of South Africa’s colonial and apartheid pasts continue to inhabit the present. As Verne Harris,¹ speaking in relation to the archive notes, “What is present speaks loudly of absences, and what is absent presents itself insistently. Presence and absence unfolding out of one another. The experience of being haunted.”

 

 

 

All images are installation views of intimate presences/affective absences (or, the snake within) (2020) and the disquieting domesticities/vestiges of violence (or, the ghost in the house) (2021) installations. Cellulose fiber made from bacteria and yeast, dimensions variable (photographs by Anthea Pokroy and Michael Hall, provided by the artist).