Dear C—,

It is 10 years since my last solo exhibition in my hometown, where I presented Sticky-Tape Transfers for the first time. It has been 20 years since I was an art school student photographing in Pollsmoor Prison, making cramped panoramas on the inside in order to start the process of looking out. It is 30 years since our first democratic election of 1994 and 224 years since Lady Anne Barnard completed her panorama from the roof of her residence at the Castle of Good Hope which, among other things, was our first colonial prison. In thinking about a return to Cape Town, it occurred to me to reprise the stitched photographic panorama from the exact same spot on her roof, and then mix the two images using my sticky-tape process. Fragments of these scopic gazes will waver in the draught of passing viewers in the gallery and then form again, as we collectively surveille A Cape Town Landscape.

All of which is to say, there is water under the bridge, and other stuff too. Not the sweet waters of the Camissa River which once flowed in this spot, not the plentiful runoff from the thunderstorms in my highveld refuge, and certainly not the waters of the offshore spring near Saldanha Bay where colonial ships would send a man down in a row-boat with a cup to taste the seawater until they hit the spot where it was salt free. The artist who documented this scene on the walls of a cave in the Groot Winterhoek mountains must have thought they were mad. As mad as the man who goes out in a similar rowboat these days on the castle moat to fish out rubbish with a pool net, as if it isn’t going to be replenished daily by the group of unhoused people who live between the castle and the stained-glass windows of the old “non-white” section of the Cape Town Station.

Thirty years after South Africa’s transition to democracy, it is hard to imagine a stronger indictment of our contemporary society than the scenes that play out on this sliver of land. On the one side the Castle “of good hope”, where groups of indigenous people were already recorded to be “squatting” outside these very same walls when they were built between 1666-1679, dependent on the colonists who had stolen their land and separated them from their people with devious promises and bribes of alcohol and tobacco. On the other, the 1966 section of the station building, which was one of the few large-scale structures in Cape Town that was designed specifically for racial segregation. These days it is still being renovated to function better, as if its very foundations of segregation, of rail goods leaving the harbour for the hinterland, of commerce and conquest is a problem that could be solved by architectural revisions.

I was born at home, a 30-minute train ride from Cape Town Station, not far from Pollsmoor Prison, in a facebrick house next door to the Waldorf School where my father was a music teacher. One of my first photographic projects took place in the adjacent Muslim cemetery which I had walked through daily as a kid to visit my best friend, and which is still the place where thousands of people come to bury their dead near the dispossessed land on which they can no longer live. As I became aware of the violent histories of these spatial juxtapositions, some of these photos were printed on the covers of books that justified apartheid or celebrated Rudolf Steiner. I was hopelessly trying to understand the strange combination of Weimar-era German occultism and “high” apartheid into which I was born.

I came across Home Building Ideas for South Africa, a publication filled with the architecturally-designed aspirations on which our house must have been based. As it says in the forward, “the language of the articles accompanying the plans and photographs will be found to be factual and unembellished with adjectives. This is because they have been selected from a cross-section of work published in the monthly magazine Architect & Builder for professional men concerned with the technical problems of design and construction.” On the contrary, one turns the page to a stream of images and words that are as dripping with ideology as Steiner’s The Occult Significance of Blood.

This book forms the ground for two large paintings that lived in my studio through seven years of intermittent focus amidst all my other projects. The first was formed quite literally from the dissected pages of the book, affixed onto the canvas as an undercoat. Successive layers of paint and masking tape splintered and flooded the houses before they re-emerged with the removal of the tape. Pick Up Sticks is what I started to call the process; creating a big messy pile and then slowly picking my way through it over months and years, a very solitary version of the game I played with my older sister in our Cape Town house. The formal exercise of twisting space, modulating the colour contrast, guiding the eye, and pushing and pulling the body in relation to the scale of the painting merged with the intent to shatter the idealism and aspiration embedded in the book’s words and images. On the second canvas I sketched our house in both plan and side view. Pasted on top is a photograph I found in a box in my mom’s storage, scanned and printed in sections on a very thin Japanese Gampi paper – an unnamed band that looked ready to recreate the Manson murders, my father the cellist. Here the specifics of my version of these ‘70s dreams are laid bare: in the yellow of the room where I entered the world, in the memories of that stoep, those pine trees, the underworld of the Waldorf School, and the red of my father’s study where his cello stood eternally facing the corner as a reproach to his past and my future of not playing.

As I drew close to finishing these works in late ‘23, a friend came by the studio and recognised the guitarist in the photograph. He called Colin Shapiro up who couldn’t believe it: Suzy Sklaer, one of the singers pictured, had contacted him out of the blue a week before and sent him a recording of the only concert that this band, Gateway, had played. The Poetic Edda set to ‘70s folk music. I was prepared to hate the music, for it to fit my critical narrative around the transposition of the hippie and Steiner movements in the context of a racially segregated South Africa. Instead, I was taken in by its beauty and something clicked when I set it to fragments of a film I’d been working on. The music immediately animated ghosts from the paintings, which I projected onto my father’s cello (the very one in the photograph which I had also played as a teenager, and had to retrieve from my disinheritance at great fiscal and emotional cost). The lyrics, the 14th century nordic creation myth which was later co-opted by the Nazis and America’s alt-right, were both apt and strange. Why did these 20-something-year-olds invoke this story from a far-off continent when their own country had such rich fables of its own? And how can I square the weirdness of my own origin myth here in this town, with my belief in the usefulness of art and the value of these gestures?

With warm regards, M—