In this anonymity they are able to be themselves, shadows and all, even if only for a few minutes in the day.
The Cape Peninsula carries secrets known only to the wind, the fynbos, and the creatures that live there. Six teenage boys are found raped, murdered, and dumped down the side of its mountains.
It is two years since the discovery of the first body and Detective Junaid Japtha is no closer to cracking the case. With pressure mounting, and without any tangible evidence, he can only rely on his experience and instinct to track down the killer.
Fifteen-year-old Tyrone May from Macassar spends his days in limbo. He has no one to talk to. No one listens. He is curious and confused about his feelings. Like most boys, he has yet to develop a sense of his own mortality. It allows for a daring that will dissipate as he grows older, but, for now, Tyrone will accept the friend request a handsome stranger sends him.
Elton Baatjies is the newly appointed teacher at a local high school. These are his people, and he is soon embraced by the close-knit community. But he is tied to the six dead boys in ways no one could have predicted, and the secrets among them threaten to tear the sleepy mountain town apart.
Publication date: September 2022
ISBN: 978-1-7764064-7-0
LESTER WALBRUGH is the author of the short story collection, Let It Fall Where It Will(Karavan Press, 2020). Elton Baatjies is his first novel. He lives in Grabouw.
“I travelled to five cities on the African continent at intervals during 2018 and 2019 to visit an independent art space in each. Panya Routes is an invitation to join this journey and discover how such spaces work, think and navigate conditions of constant flux. These independent art spaces form part of a larger family of small-scale platforms, often artist-led or with artistic thinking at heart, whose numbers have flourished in recent years although their existence can also be short-lived. This book focuses upon five case studies of such spaces that have all been active for more than a decade, thus offering compelling tales about sustaining non-profit and innovative practice in an increasingly commodified world. My visits, conducted as part of the African Centre for Cities research project Platform / Plotform, were timed to coincide with emblematic programming, predominant art in public spaces. And, where possible, other independently curated events and spaces from a street art festival to an “off-biennial” were considered in parallel in order to glean another reading on art in each city …” (Panya Routes, p. 9)
Thank you, Nancy Richards and Natalie Becker, for the photographs!
Dawn Garisch will be the featured poet at The Red Wheelbarrow next week.
Dawn Garisch is an award-winning author and poet, a medical doctor and founding member of the Life Righting Collective. As an LRC facilitator, she teaches writing and poetry as a route to self-discovery, self-recovery and community building. Her second collection, Disturbance, (Karavan Press) came out in 2020.
Broken
A toy horse falls from the shelf, breaks a leg. The small boy, tearful, shows an uncle who gives him a tube of glue: The boy tries hard like he always does, not knowing how to fix his parent’s domestic mess.
The horse leg sets, stuck back skew, now it’s lame, he’s made things worse. His father’s long gone, but he’s to blame, the glue of family rendered useless.
The boy wanders out of the house, climbs the tree, sits by himself, sick with crying. Wanting his father joined to his mother, wanting the father to come home to help him.
What he wants is impossible, so he prays for the leg to be restored like magic, so he can ride away.
— Dawn Garisch
As always, the reading by the featured poet will be followed by an open mic session for poets from the audience. Poets are welcome to read from their own work as well as from the work of a favourite poet.
This month, Avbob Poetry is celebrating women poets: “Melissa Sussens is a debut poet, writing strong and tender work about women’s reality – their love, mercy at work, and the relentless struggle against gender-based violence.”
Sean Davison (assisted suicide), Joy Watson (GBV) and Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon (urban housing) speak to Bronwyn Pithey about using the courts as tools for transforming our society.
Last week, Joy Watson, Cathy Park Kelly and Melissa A. Volker spoke to Karina M. Szczurek about love and relationships in their lives and writing at the beautiful Stonehaven, the home of the Union of Jewish Women (UJW). Thank you to the UJW for hosting, thank you to the authors for their insights and laughter, and to everyone who attended with such generosity of spirit. A beautiful evening!
Thank you, Bernie Shelly, for being there and for sharing a few photographs with us!
IT GIVES US GREAT PLEASURE TO ANNOUNCE THAT, TOGETHER WITH PROTEA DISTRIBUTION, KARAVAN PRESS IS THE SOUTH AFRICAN DISTRIBUTION PARTNER FOR KIM GURNEY’S PANYA ROUTES (2022) & AUGUST HOUSE IS DEAD, LONG LIVE AUGUST HOUSE (2017).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kim Gurney writes in multiple genres, and is the author of three non-fiction books: The Art of Public Space: Curating and Re-imagining the Ephemeral City (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), August House is Dead, Long Live August House! The Story of a Johannesburg Atelier (Fourthwall, 2017), and Panya Routes: Independent art spaces in Africa (Motto Books, 2022). Kim first worked as a journalist; she was News Editor of a weekly newspaper (FT Business Group) while in her twenties. She then pivoted into the artworld where she collaborates on public space interventions and makes slow art from a Salt River studio. Another foot is in academia: Kim is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, and a Research Associate at African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town which supported the research behind Panya Routes. She holds advanced degrees in Journalism and Fine Art, both awarded with Distinction, a Masters in International Journalism, and a PhD exploring art as a vector of value. Kim lives in Cape Town, South Africa, working on her next creative non-fiction book Flipside.
Independent art spaces on the African continent have flourished, particularly over the past twenty years in tandem with a youthful population in fast-urbanising cities. This book takes the reader on a journey to discover their DIY-DIT working principles: horizontality, second chance, elasticity, performativity and convergence. The itinerary begins at an empty plinth in Cape Town to closely track the performative and artistic afterlife of a colonialist statue whose toppling turned public space into common space. Next stop: Nairobi, Accra, Cairo, Addis Ababa and Dar es Salaam — all rapidly changing cities of flux. The author visits five non-profit platforms that build narratives in public space by stitching together art and everyday life. They create their own panya routes, or backroad infrastructures of divergent kinds, in response to prevailing uncertainty. Working largely in collaborative economies and solidarity networks through refusal and reimagination, these “off-spaces” demonstrate institution building as artistic practice. By thinking and dreaming beyond the status quo, they fast-forward to creatively inhabit city futures that have already arrived in the global South. The key platforms featured in the book’s research are: The GoDown Arts Centre, ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge, Townhouse Gallery, Zoma Museum and Nafasi Art Space.
PRAISE FOR PANYA ROUTES
“This beautifully crafted book represents a new generation of scholarship, bringing together the fields of urban studies and art history. While cities and urbanization are themselves formal manifestations of the intersections across economy, politics and aesthetics that define modern life, the role of creative practice as a form of sociality is under theorized. Kim Gurney explores that role in the making of new urban societies in the Global South. She shows how Panya Routes or ‘backroad infrastructures’ that define Southern cities are neither temporary nor epiphenomenal but rather major forms for the formation of collective solidarities. A much-needed volume, it explores the emergence of new institutions as themselves a genre of art. This book is a tour de force of creative research and writing and should inform and serve the next generation of urban scholars with a new vision of how contemporary forms of art making and creative performance have become an integral part of the infrastructure of social and political life in the twenty-first century.”
— Vyjayanthi Rao, Senior Editor of the journal Public Culture, and Visiting Professor at Yale School of Architecture
“In an engaging analysis of five African independent art spaces, Kim Gurney convincingly highlights the powerful artistic and political potential of such autonomous art initiatives: to formulate novel propositions that creatively engage with the continent’s varied social realities; to redesign its material realities; to innovate the contents of what constitutes its public spheres; and to generate imaginings of alternative futures that bypass the tired discourses and practices of institutionalized political levels in order to embrace more inclusive and collective modes of living together. Panya Routes is an original, hopeful and timely reflection on the role of public art to rethink urban worlds in Africa and beyond.” — Filip De Boeck, co-author of Suturing the City: Living Together in Congo’s Urban Worlds (Autograph, 2016)
“Gurney’s book deserves conversations with works on independent art spaces in Asian cities, where they have also been an important development in the last two decades. Gurney’s documentation and analysis are pioneering, and should inspire colleagues in Asia, because they are crucial in furthering the critical role of arts in contemporary dramatic transformation of their cities.”
— Marco Kusumawijaya, architect and urbanist, Director of RUJAK Center for Urban Studies in Jakarta
“Evocatively written, Panya Routes juxtaposes five stories about the creation of independent art spaces on the African continent. At a time of heightened capitalist co-option and the concomitant fetishization of ‘African art’, these stories about agential capacity, abilities to shapeshift, and ways of ‘doing art’, importantly position African creatives at the forefront of our contemporary moment of thinking in excess of the artworld status quo.”
— Ruth Simbao, National Research Foundation SARChI Chair in Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa, and Head of the Arts of Africa and Global Souths Research Programme at Rhodes UniversityBottom of Form
PANYA ROUTES: INDEPENDENT ART SPACES IN AFRICA
Publisher: Motto Books, Berlin
Editor: Mika Hayashi Ebbesen
Designer: Márcia Novais
Publication date: August 2022
ISBN: 9782940672394
ABOUT THE BOOK
In the east end of the inner city of Johannesburg, a former textiles factory undergoes a dramatic transformation to become, over the next several years, one of the city’s foremost artists’ studios. When the sale of the building seems imminent, not only must the artists face the daunting prospect of relocation, but a remarkable chapter in the complex narrative of contemporary South African art seems about to close. Sensing the importance of this moment, Kim Gurney, herself a former tenant of the atelier, follows the stories of several of the August House denizens through some of the artworks that came to life in their studios. The result is a fascinating study of the role of the atelier and its artists in South Africa’s fractious art world, and a consideration of the relationship between art and the ever-changing city of Johannesburg.
PRAISE for August House is Dead, Long Live August House! The Story of a Johannesburg Atelier
With the eye of an urbanist, artist and resident, Kim Gurney [constructs] a compelling assemblage of individual, visual and urban narratives brilliantly illuminates the complex life of a building, August House, located in inner city Johannesburg. Her cast of characters – artists, workers, neighbours, August House and the city – lend poignant contours to the ebbs and flows of daily life, the pressures of gentrification, the ruthlessness of poverty, the radicality of the imagination and the ghosts of history.
—Mabel O. Wilson, Columbia University
Kim Gurney’s biography of August House weaves together a diversity of … narratives that capture an intimate, layered view of a city in flux and the precarity of artists’ spaces in Johannesburg. August House is Dead, Long Live August House! sensitively explores the tensions between competing impulses in the city, and who ultimately gets to shape what Joburg is and who it is for.
—Mpho Matsipa, University of the Witwatersrand
August House is Dead, Long Live August House! The Story of a Johannesburg Atelier
If you are a bookseller, please contact Protea Distribution to order copies of Panya Routes and/or August House is Dead, Long Live August House!. If you are a reader, please ask your local bookshop to order the book for you via Protea Distribution.
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