\u2018Welcome to\nFrontier Country\u2019 says a sign on the side of the road as you navigate the\npotholed route to Makhanda. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2018Frontier\nCountry\u2019, like the formerly-named Grahamstown and its colossal 1820 Settler\u2019s\nMonument (where the NAF has its headquarters), is a stubborn bit of settler\nhistory that still characterises much of the Eastern Cape. This year\u2019s vNAF\nexhibition Sounding the Land <\/em>attempts to mine a sliver of that history to\nbetter make sense of the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a vast and\nmulti-faceted body of work that zeroes in on the history (and enduring\nfaultlines) of the 1820 Settler colonial project through an ongoing,\nmulti-media project between UCKAR, Fort Hare, the NAF and more.\nVisual artists, journalists, musicians, and academics all lend their modes of\ninterpretation to the body of work. This is particularly exciting to see as, in\naddition to researchers and academics, it is the work of writers, artists, and\ninterdisciplinary outfits that\u2019re being used to puzzle out and interpret the\ncomplex and cryptic recesses of South African history in alternative ways. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In \u2018Button Without a Hole\u2019, a 30-minute film that\nformed part of artist Simon Gush\u2019s 2019 exhibition Welcome to Frontier\nCountry<\/em>, an intricate history of the small town of Salem is told by way of\nGush\u2019s own ancestry \u2013 Richard Gush was an original settler of Salem \u2013 as well\nas the insights of lifelong resident Mongezi Madinda. Two churches and what\nclaims to be the oldest cricket ground in South Africa are the main built-up\nfeatures of the town and play significant roles in the complicated issue of\nland restitution in Salem. The 1820 Settler\u2019s Monument in Makhanda, and a brief\nhistory of the mythology built up around Richard Gush by scholars and writers\nsuch as Guy Butler, also feature in the film. Through narration by Gush,\ninterviews with Madinda, and strong, considered visuals, the film puts forward\na brief, but well-articulated navigation of the area\u2019s history and its ongoing\nland restitution claims, with asides on the nature of labour and land ownership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Button Without a Hole\u2019 is beautifully scored by\nAndrei van Wyk aka Healer Oran who, through the 40-minute work \u2018Pine and\nWillow\u2019 unpacks his use of sound in Gush\u2019s work, as well as his own exploration\nof his family\u2019s dispossession and forced removal from their land in 1970s Port\nElizabeth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018Ubuyile uNxele\u2019 is a short, sharp and engaging\nspoken word piece detailing the life and death of amaXhosa prophet and struggle\nicon Makhanda Nxele, while \u2018Confinement \/ Containment \/ Contagion\u2019 attempts to\ndraw interesting parallels between the history of disease and confinement in the\narea, and the current health crisis. There\u2019s also an essay by journalist Niren\nTolsi that contextualises the past and present of Salem and engages with the\narea as something of a microcosm of greater South Africa. <\/p>\n\n\n\n While Sounding the Land <\/em>was intended to be\nshowcased in person at this year\u2019s NAF, I can\u2019t help but think that the general\npace and atmosphere that so often characterises the NAF would have all but\ndrowned out any meaningful or sustained engagement with the works that make up\nthis project. Having Sounding the Land <\/em>available to view online, then, is\na useful format through which to engage, at one\u2019s own pace and over a number of\ndays, the complex and fascinating passages of history being excavated in these various\nworks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n View Sounding the Land <\/em>here<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2018Welcome to Frontier Country\u2019 says a sign on the side of the road as you navigate the potholed route to Makhanda. \u2018Frontier Country\u2019, like the formerly-named Grahamstown and its colossal … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":4267,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[14],"tags":[1112,1002],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4266"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4266"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4268,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4266\/revisions\/4268"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecritter.co.za\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}