Thursday, September 8

Dineo Seshee Bopape, with a vitrine of dying flowers beneath

a frosted glass cover perforated by a plug hole

Every year, the Paul Klee Museum in Bern runs a Sommerakademie in August for 12 young artists, selected from nominees around the world. Nominators are invited to Bern for the final wrap-up events of the 12 day session, and this year, I finally had a nominee selected as a fellow: Dineo Seshee Bopape.

Curator Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist chose as her theme, Juicy Contaminated Circle: from Art to Life and back, and the discussions of the first wrap up afternoon were followed by a performance which involved the fellows serving juicy contaminated cocktails to the assembly. You drank them at your own risk. Many took the risk. Several times over.

A selection of juicy contaminated cocktails

The evening finished with a buffet dinner in a marquee set up next to the swiftly flowing Aare. By this time, the rain was bucketing down, and I felt sorry for the catering team trying to get a braai going under umbrellas, but in true art world fashion, the party went on regardless …

Cooking in the rain

Tuesday 23rd August

Twelve days ago, I celebrated the end of my residency at Bellagio with a final swim in the invigorating waters of Lake Como.

And to answer a question many asked when I got back, no, I did not see George, either on his motorbike or on the lake or in a restaurant, but nonetheless, I had had an extraordinary time.

As I stepped off the plane in Cape Town, my phone rang. Shahena Wingate-Pearse, the daughter of Naz Ebrahim, a monumental figure in the dying days of District Six in the 70s and 80s, was in town. Shahena left the city more than thirty years ago because her marriage to a white man was illegal, then, and she was back now to launch Naz’s autobiography at the District Six Museum the following day.

My portrait of Naz Ebrahim, taken in 1981

The book is called The Truth is on the Walls, which is what Naz wrote on the walls of her Rochester Street home, Manley Villa, in 1981, when it was one of the last houses standing in the demolished District Six. Veteran journalist John Battersby has written the foreword.

Shahena Wingate-Pearse, John Battersby and Drizzie Ebrahim

For me, the book launch at the Museum with everyone remembering ‘those days’ was a sad pleasure. How much more authentic would this city be if District Six was still the energetic heart of the city, instead of a desolate, almost empty space.

Sunday, August 7, 2011

My time at Bellagio is coming to an end. In fact, I’m the last resident here, alone in the vastness of the Villa grounds. I thought I would feel a bit deserted when the last four residents (except for me) departed for Malpensa airport last Thursday, but in fact, as I drift around in silence, a not unpleasant mood of gentle melancholy and retrospection has set in.

It's been extraordinary being here. Imagine a country house party which goes on for weeks, except that each day you get to work at whatever you want to all day without the stress of your daily life back home. Occasionally there’s a spot of croquet or tennis in the late afternoon and three times a week a pre-dinner presentation from one of the other residents about their specific project, projects which have ranged from composing music for operas to discovering new black holes in space.

One evening, I ran a workshop rather in the style of the Other Voices series I have been working on, to be followed by a next-day shoot. The question to all the resident scholars was: What does in mean to be here at Bellagio? The response: WE”RE NOT REALLY HERE.

It’s definitely been almost too good to be true.

Monday, July 24, 2011

I’ve fallen in love again. With a city, as usual. This time, it’s Naples, a city of golden stone and black flagged streets, streets already old when they resounded to the tramp of the conquering Roman legions. It’s a chaotic, exciting sprawl, with steep climbing streets, filled with racing, swerving motor scooters, the preferred mode of transport for everyone from immaculately suited businessmen to families of four.

So when on my first evening, PAN curator Stefano Perno arrives to pick me up on his Vespa, I jump on. And if my eyes are closed for the first two minutes, once I open them, it’s an amazing sensation to be part of the city this way. And of course, we go for pizza. ‘My first Neapolitan pizza’, I sigh, breathing in the fragrance. ‘Your first pizza ever’, Stefano corrects me, explaining that it has to be prepared with buffalo milk mozzarella made fresh that day and baked in a stone oven with a wood fire.
I ask Stefano about the mountains of rubbish on the streets. He says that rubbish collection and landfill in Naples is controlled by Camorra, known as ‘the other Mafia’ of Italy. ‘If you really want to understand Naples, you have to read the book by Roberto Saviano, Gomorrah’.

Buying the book was the first thing I did next day, and reading it was a revelation.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

This morning I was the only passenger on the 8 a.m. ferry from Bellagio to Varenna, to get the train to Naples via Milan. The morning was cool, and too grey to tempt the tourists from their breakfasts.

The letters which I made in New York and used again in Krakow are with me, still packaged in two plastic carrier bags bought in Harlem.

Now I am writing this on the Frecciarossa, the fast train which is at this moment snaking its way through the Tuscan hills south of Florence, and no, the hill towns with their distinctive architecture do not remind me of certain wannabe areas of Johannesburg.

I am leaving behind the peaceful haven of Bellagio with its ritual of working days and the long, conversational evenings which begin with drinks before dinner and end hours later. But I will only be away for six days.

In Naples I will do a Neapolitan version of the Other Voices, Other Cities series. Through the extraordinary help of Laura Bardier, a Neopolitan now living in New York, a group of more than 15 artists, curators and other people have agreed to meet at PAN, the Palazzo della Arti Napoli on Tuesday night, to try to arrive by discussion at a statement which describes what it means to live in Naples.

I can’t wait.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

I have given up being a conceptual artist on my Bellagio residency. This beautiful little town clinging to the banks of Lake Como is too far removed from reality, a ferry ride to the nearest train station. Lake Como was once the highway of northern Italy, carrying traders, silk merchants, diplomats and scurrilous adventurers from one end of the lake to the other, but today the travelers are nearly all tourists, bent on buying a beautiful Missoni scarf before tucking into lunch at a waterfront café.

Yesterday I heard a loud English voice under my studio window, and opened the shutters to find a group of tourists gazing up at me.

So I climb up instead to the hill below the Villa, spreading a cloth to sit on, and setting out my watercolours. Ahead lies the difficult decision of wondering whether to attempt to paint the rapidly changing patterns of the ferry trails on the water, or whether to settle for the obligingly stationary olive and cypress trees.

The cicadas have struck up their summer song, the scent of wild thyme has been released as I settle myself, and I try to position my water jar so that not too many ants drown themselves today.

Later, I will lunch off the delicious saturnine peaches that have the shape of squashed doughnuts, and go swimming at the edge of the lake.

Thursday, June 30, 2011

I’m back in Bellagio, Italy after a week in New York for a colloquium organized by Judy Hecker, prints curator at MoMA around the ‘Impressions: Prints from South Africa’ show currently up on the second floor of the museum. Co organizers were the Clark Institute, with Natasha Becker, ex of Cape Town, taking a leading role

Judy Hecker gives a walkabout of ‘Impressions’

With the topic on the table the curating of contemporary African art, a number of interesting issues came up, including the ongoing debate about the pigeonholing of artists into national contexts. Alisa LeGamma of the Metropolitan Museum talked of the need to skew African artists out of the context of African art into more of a global context, and American artist Willie Cole responded by asking what museum departments would do when all the regional departments were blurred into one.

MoMA director Glenn Lowry suggested that perhaps the term ‘global’ is no longer really useful, and maybe what is needed is to uncouple ‘global’ from ‘modernism’ and ‘modernity’.

A post colloquium dinner at Il Gattopardo: Bradley McCallum, Riason Naidoo,

Natasha Becker and Alisa leGamma

In between sessions, it was great to wander round MoMA, but the really incredible museum experience this week, was the Alexander McQueen show at the Met, Every artist could learn from studying his complete mastery of technique, materials and concept, and the way in which he could turn a historical reference into something new and brilliant. It was simply astonishing.

An Alexander McQueen jacket