“Out of Sight. Uitsig. Walking with Ashley Walters”, article in Uitsig by Ashley Walters, Sanlam Press, Cape Town.
Ashley Walters Artist: https://ashleywaltersstudio.com/uitsig-2013
On Thursday 18th May 2015 I joined Ashley Walters for a short walk to retrace some of the routes he walked as a child growing up in Uitsig. Starting off at his family home, Walters planned on showing me the local swimming pool in nearby Ravensmead and to retrace the routes he walked to school and back every day. Entering Uitsig, we feel the multiple ways that spaces of incarceration become inscribed into spaces and into our bodies, through intersecting regimes of control and surveillance. Uitsig – like many other spaces we call “townships” – in many ways were constructed to facilitate forms of incarceration, with easy control over entry and exit as well as movement of people. People are kept in poverty with limited prospects of finding dignified work or meaningful education. Unemployment is extremely high despite being surrounded by large industry, the airport and by tertiary institutions touting excellence. Vacant shops stand as monuments to disinvestment, as investment patterns are skewed away from the Cape Flats and towards glitzy malls and more affluent areas.
Arriving in Uitsig, it is hard not to notice the postcard-perfect view of Table Mountain that frames the skyline. Rather than conjuring up thoughts of leisure or pleasure of the outdoors, for the people living in Uitsig the mountain view serves as a reminder of distance. The distance from former homes in the city. The distance to work. The distance from mattering. Heidi Grünebaum writes that Cape Town’s daily embodied rhythms of movement rehearse a spatial violence, when we consider the way in which the lives of those who were displaced from the central city and who are the descendants of the displaced, are in multiple ways divorced from the lives of those who live, work and derive pleasure from the central city. These scripted routes in which one moves in and out of the city as well as within it, recalls a past that we’d rather quickly forget.
Despite the overwhelming challenges of life in a township, people take immense pride in their homes and gardens. People in the community clean and beautify their streets despite the limited municipal services. In Uitsig, like in other areas around the Cape Flats, some residents have been paying rent for more than fifty years without possibility of title deed. Living close to the airport, the sounds of aircraft taking off regularly pierce the air. The aircraft sounds serve as a constant reminder of the gulf that exists between access to real and meaningful mobility of a few and the very real inhibitions on mobility of many caused by apartheid spatial planning and the free hand of the market economy. In Uitsig, the policies of apartheid continue to mark a deep inscription of violence onto lands and into lives of people who live here. Fear, paranoia and surveillance are embedded in consciousness as part and parcel of everyday life. As we start off on our walk from his childhood home, Walters arms himself with some cash (because it is better to give something) and remarked that he has spent time in almost every home in the area. Surviving is about knowing your neighbors and about being street smart. It is about performing a particular kind of body/space/time relationship and about being observant. It is about knowing when to make eye contact and when not to. These strategies are learned with experience and are negotiated in the moment – making walking a daily practice of negotiation. You cannot walk wherever you please and need to plan your routes carefully and with purpose, as spaces are enmeshed in the complex social world of gang violence and the multiple devastating social effects of displacement and erasure.
On our way to Ravensmead swimming pool we pass by a small cluster of family-owned businesses that have been operating in the area for decades. Walters recalled childhood memories of being sent to the shops by his grandparents to buy needed ingredients. Shopping opportunities are highly limited in Uitsig. For the most part, convenience items are sold informally from homes. People advertise everything from fish heads to chillies for sale. Mobile fruit and vegetable sellers are also common throughout the day. We soon reach the swimming pool. It is winter and the pool is undergoing seasonal maintenance. We are met by the caretaker who proudly tells us that the swimming pool is one of the best in the city. It is an Olympic-size pool, which boasts several training programs and hosts swimming clubs and sporting events. We learn that some of the best swimmers in the city emerge from here. The swimming pool also acts as an important social space. Walters recalls the swimming pool as a busy place, where families would congregate to enjoy picnics and where you would typically meet your friends, family and classmates. Across the way from the pool, the local community center and clinic form the major social development facilities in the area. Like the swimming pool, the clinic is an important social space and is always packed. People queue from early in the morning and wait all day for treatment.
We leave the small cluster of social facilities and walk towards the primary school Walters attended as a child. As we reach the school, we are greeted by the happy sound of children playing behind barricaded playgrounds. The extra security has been put into place as a result of vandalism and theft. We continue walking passed the school gates and reach a row of trees at the back of the school where Walters spent lots of time as a child climbing the trees. Standing under those trees, we reflected on the routes and spaces that brought us here, and the moments that these spaces bear witness to. The landscape and structures of the built environment exist as archives, and they tell stories. The streets speak, the trees speak, as do buildings and walls. Some of these are the stories that Walters takes responsibility for telling, through his own photographic oeuvre. Telling stories for Walters is not merely about documentation. Rather, the very landscape and built environment exist as archives in which lives and experiences are inscribed in complex ways that reflect the layeredness of time. In other words, stories and experiences form part of a more long-standing logic of apartheid that we have yet to unravel. Walters’ work, along with the spatial and living archives in which his work is situated, grapple with spaces, experiences and lives and how they have become dislocated in the present. What is striking about Walters’ works is the way in which they exist not only as a testament to everyday experiences, but how they provoke a profound intervention on notions of visibility and invisibility. Walters’ work asks us to think about what it means to live invisible lives – and how this complex and nuanced reality can open questions around what Judith Butler calls an uneven field of precarity that defines modernity. Walters’ photographic work engages profound questions, asking us to take the act of looking seriously – as the visible and invisible are not simple binaries but speak to ways in which regimes of seeing and being seen are embedded into the mundane and the everyday, becoming entirely unquestioned. This work asks for a grappling with the meanings of apartheid in the present, and with an unfinished project of thinking, analyzing and engaging with apartheid spatial planning and its meanings, wounds and presences in the present.