The art of trucking, Malian style

“This truck is older than me,” laughs Mamadou Seye. The 25-yeard-old Senegalese trucker is standing in front of a dilapidated yellow lorry parked in a dusty plot of land near the central train station in Kayes, a bustling market town in western Mali. Ornately decorated with strange motifs – pineapples, lions, a Cobra sticker (remember that awful Stallone movie?), long-stemmed flowers, the Senegalese flag – Seye’s truck is attention grabbing, and yet also unremarkable. The lot, which sometimes doubles as a soccer field, is filled with many similarly decorated wrecks, all of them quietly baking in the early morning heat.

To say that Kayes is hot is an understatement: the Rough Guide lists it as Africa’s hottest town. The barometer pushes well over 40 degrees Celsius everyday, and it is not uncommon to see groups of people, especially the truckers, sleeping by the roadside as the sun follows its conveyor-belt arc across the sky. Some lie in groups, others alone, some on the floor; luckier ones rest in customised hammocks attached to the underside of their large articulated vehicles.

Although populated by Bambara-speaking Malians, the name Kayes is pure Senegalese; it means “come here” in Wolof. Legend has it the town got its name from impatient travellers standing on the banks of the river calling out to the ferryman. Despite the urgency its name implies, Kayes has always been a place of pause. Situated on the Senegal River, Kayes is (more or less) the halfway mark between the Malian capital of Bamako and the port of Dakar, in neighbouring Senegal.

If you ignore the whistle-blowing traffic police and slow-paced customs officials, the town offers the attraction of entertainment, porn movies at an outdoor cinema and cheap roadside grub. Mariam Barry’s saga-saga-nan, a meaty stew of cooked entrails served with Thai-style rice, is typical.

I meet Lassine Sanogo, a 38-year-old trucker and fan of footballer Didier Drogba, a short distance from where Barry’s ramshackle eatery stands. He is delivering cotton, he says. So too is 53-year-old Drissa Diarra, whom I meet further down the main road, which is backed-up with parked trucks. Point being: trucks deliver almost everything in the region. While Mali has an airport, also a functioning railway line, as is the case in South Africa, and indeed most other places in the world, trucks do it faster, quicker, now, now, now.

Their ubiquity, both in Mali as elsewhere, hints at an idiosyncratic lifestyle, one that is often approached (rather than understood) by its cosmetic adornments.

In Japan, for instance, truckers there add impossible chrome and metal extensions to their vehicles, also bright flashing lights and visually excessive paint motifs. The net effect is something intriguingly futuristic, never mind the fact that the interior cabins of these Japanese trucks tend, typically, to be filled with fluffy toy dolls. It’s the same in Kayes, just different. One obvious difference is the condition of the trucks. To use a great English expression, they’re shagged, completely.

Still, these trucks, for better or worse, are home. Drissa Diarra knows as much. He has been driving since 1979. Although married with four children, he is rarely with his family. “I see them maybe once a month,” he says. On most nights he sleeps in front of his truck, on a stretcher, covered by a blanket and a mosquito net.

It is perhaps because of this simple reality, of never being home, of always being elsewhere, on the road, that these Senegalese and Malian workingmen, much like their Japanese counterparts, take such great pride in their trucks. Instead of driving around in featureless mobile homes, as tends to be the case in South Africa, their vehicles are richly decorated.

Where some West African trucks are full of stickers bearing the faces of influential Islamic teachers, or vinyl-cut lettering announcing a terse Koranic admonition, other truckers find their spiritual sustenance elsewhere, Bob Marley, for example. Senegal being such a proud football nation, it is not uncommon to see trucks featuring prominent images of lions, the symbol of the national team.

Of the many animal motifs I encountered, a naff bunny painted onto the front of 25-year-old Sekouba Kone’s truck was the most peculiar. “I used to breed rabbits before I became a driver,” explains the demure trucker. That was 1994; he was still a teenager living with his parents in a village outside Bamako.

“I had six rabbits. One day a thief stole all of them.” He says he paid a local sign writer (R61) to paint the bunny. Given that the average monthly income of a trucker is (R770), such decorative adornments are by no means cheap indulgences.

Perhaps a kernel of wisdom, rather than a literal explanation of why drivers indulge in such seemingly unnecessary expenses, is offered by 62-year-old Coulbaly Tahirou. “A good driver does three things,” he asserts. “You look out for your own truck, the one in front, and the one behind.” Ironically, in looking out for their own exhausted trucks, however whimsically, these West African truckers have managed something unexpected. They make others look too, appreciatively, in amazed wonder.

Walter Battiss: The last orgy

An undated self-portrait of Walter Battiss in watercolour

It’s not that the art world doesn’t know how to have a good laugh, it’s just that it doesn’t do it often enough. Not typically. Take as an example the 2004 Brett Kebble Art Awards, held in Cape Town. While you couldn’t fault Clive van den Berg’s efforts as chief curator, the dour formality of the awards’ party had all the charm of a gathering of church elders.

Which is not to say that there are not those dissident moments when a broad smile replaces the art world’s constant frown. This was one of those nights.

The date: late October 2005. The scene: downtown Johannesburg, the orange sun sagging west over the scurvy mine dumps, long evening shadows drowning Standard Bank’s newly revamped gallery in a distinctive inner city murk. The occasion: a retrospective exhibition celebrating the life of Walter Battiss, that famous son of Somerset East notorious for his art, good humour, occasional bouts of nudity and – according to my grandmother – habit of driving his Rolls Royce wearing shorts.

The chocolate fountain set up adjacent the entrance was apt. Inside the gallery, it was a sweetshop of colours. Barring William Kentridge’s absence, everyone was there, from artist Sam Nhlengethwa and collector Lucia Burger to Giles, Battiss’s son.

Rubbing shoulders with these insiders from the South African art world was a weathered gaggle of posh ladies whose expensive surgical habits couldn’t hide the sag from all those years spent lying on Clifton Beach. Flitting around like the butterflies they once were.

“Doddering old souls emerged from the grave one last time,” someone disparagingly remarked next to me.

“But who the hell are they?” I asked, referring to the octogenarians in the crowd.

“The old guard.” He meant this quite literally.

Upstairs in the bustling main gallery, an elegantly attired lady, dressed in flowing kaftan, stood quietly in a corner, a pipe coiling from her nose to a portable oxygen tank parked next to her.

“There’s Marianne Fassler,” someone next to me pointed out – not meaning the breathless old biddy.

It was more than appropriate that this doyen of local fashion should be in attendance. Celebrated for her “exuberant Africanism” and vibrant combinations of colour and pattern, you could pretty much say that what Adam Levin observed of Fassler is true of Battiss as well. But this is also probably a gross simplification of Battiss’s artistic legacy, which is vast, profound, irregular and unpredictable.

“In conforming I am wasting a hell of a lot of time,” he said in his own defence during a SABC interview in 1981. “This ritual of conforming often gives people a certain security … And I like living in insecurity.”

Of course, compared to the lived insecurity of fellow modernist painter Gerard Sekoto, this is all artistic hokum. Battiss, before he retired to Port Shepstone, lived in Menlo Park, which in the 1970s was idyllic neighbourhood on the eastern outskirts of Pretoria. He also earned his day-to-day keep, as many artists still do, teaching, first at Pretoria Boys High, then later at Unisa, where he retired as a professor in 1971. He died in 1982.

Artist Braam Kruger first met Battiss in his later years, when he was a professor of art. Flamboyantly dressed in a scarlet Chinese silk gown for the opening, his nails painted red, Kruger was not much impressed with aspects of his mentor’s art. "Mostly kak," the artist and food writer whispered to me.

“In the final analysis, I realised Battiss was actually a fucking bad painter,” he soberly expanded the day following the opening. “All those early Maurice van Esche cribs.” (Esche was a well-known teacher in Cape Town and former pupil of Matisse.) “And his oils had none of the luminosity they should have had.”

Not so responds Johannesburg dealer Warren Siebrits. A big fan of Battiss’s Orgy screenprints, he also made an appearance at the opening, albeit dressed in more sober attire – he was on his way to a dinner engagement.

“Critics say he had a conservative palette – that’s harsh. He might have been limited but he certainly wasn’t conservative. I think some of Battiss’s best paintings from the 1970s easily rival those of Keith Haring, particularly in his Neo-Geo, graffiti-esque aesthetic.”

It is worth bearing in mind that Haring, a New Yorker, was himself dismissed for producing, what one critic labelled, “pleasant downtown wallpaper, evanescent Bobby McFerrinism”.
McFerrin, in case you forget, penned the immortal lyrics to that song, Don't Worry, Be Happy.
Which, to all intents and purposes, was exactly what the assembled crowd of mothball bohemians and perplexed art school graduates were doing, having fun, and being happy.

None more so than painter Robert Hodgins, another Pretoria reprobate whom Kendell Geers once described as “a guru for four generations of artist”.

Nattily dressed in white shirt, black tie and striped Lacoste windbreaker, Hodgins could teach scruffy Long Street hipsters a thing or two about style.

“Doctor Hodgins!” I greeted the 85-year-old artist. He recently received an honorary doctorate from Tshwane University of Technology.

“Ba humbug,” he grumbled, his blue eyes grinning.

Busting suddenly through the crowd near us, a greying man, also in caftan, his grey head topped off with a straw hat, swept by -- light as a breeze. The perfumed scent he left in his wake was unmistakably alcoholic.

“That's Walter Saunders,” Siebrits remarked as the perfumed bird strutted onto the makeshift stage. As it turns out, Saunders, an influential figure in the literary underground of the 1960s and 70s, was the evening’s praise singer.

For a generation milk fed on hip hop’s machine-driven lyricism, the incomprehensible gobbledygook, or Fook speak, coming out of Saunder’s mouth while on stage was, well, kinda weird.

Doubtlessly influenced by the literary culture of its time, particularly the poetry appearing in Ophir (a poetry magazine Saunder’s co-founded), Fook’s insular language was a way of not being a part of the mainstream, of speaking past the Censorship Board, and its head, Jannie Kruger, not coincidentally Battiss’s archenemy.

Fook, as artist Norman Catherine explains in the exhibition catalogue, was

Battiss’s “user-friendly and fun for everyone” idea for art, his reaction to the deeply serious conceptual art he saw while on his numerous travels abroad.

“Basically, Battiss invented Fook Island because he wanted everybody, children as well as people his own age, to enjoy the freedom to create art, especially at a time in South Africa when there was serious censorship,” adds Catherine, who looked strikingly sober with short cropped hair and white T-shirt -- even though he wasn’t quite that, sober.

Then came the formal speeches, even this otherworldly event obeying art world decorum by displaying a small frown in between all the frivolity.

The day was saved by Queen Asteroa, Linda the Only, which in plain English translates as the not just plan Linda Givon. South Africa’s foremost gallerist, Givon was a close acquaintance of Battiss, or King Ferd the Third.

Looking ever the hippy child, she heaped praise on all in Fook’s talismanic language. A formal version is reprinted in the exhibition catalogue, and reads: “King would have loved what Queen Illuminata (alias Professor Karin Skawran) and the Royal Bank of Standard (alias Standard Bank) have done to remember him and I join in the thanks and appoint them Fookians.”

“She’s calling you,” someone said jabbing my ribs.

“Who is?”

“Queen Asteroa!”

Which, more or less, leads the climax -- me getting Fooked.

I had to, of course, stand in line for the privilege. Artist Kathryn Smith, whose catalogue essay on Battiss offers a wonderful insight into the artist’s provocative yet still funny public performances -- she was Fooked. Melissa Mboweni too.

“The opening gave me an inkling into what Battiss openings must have been like,” remarked Mboweni, who works for Givon and is a budding writer.

Where she received an ornate red flower, I received a stone, albeit with a painted motif courtesy of Norman King Norman (aka Norman Catherine).

“I suppose being Fooked means you’re an honorary citizen of an island in which anyone is royalty,” explained Smith to me afterwards. “The original hand-painted certificates given to previous Fookees by Walter, declared that being Fooked meant you were a ‘complete human being, the highest form of life on earth’."

For someone who himself has perfected the fine art of brow creasing, it was an unexpected privilege. While I may have dashed the honour in this writing, in my defence I should say: Mothballs or not, I want to be that cool at 80.

Moshekwa Langa: A painter's muse

Moshekwa Langa's installation Temporal Distance (with a criminal intent) …

“Don’t be so nervous,” remarks Moshekwa Langa. We have been chatting for close on two hours, I’m late for another appointment, but here I am, still hoping for an insight into a portrait of Langa by his long-time friend, Marlene Dumas.

“Do you see a shrink?” he continues, pointing to my knotted fingers.

“No.”

“Better you don’t. That is very unhealthy. I have never seen one.”

We are seated in an empty bar at his Cape Town hotel. In a chronology defying narration of his professional biography, Langa recalls his first encounter with Candice Breitz in mid-1990s Yeoville, a 2007 visit to Venice with Linda Givon, a wild night out in Germany in 1997 with Dumas, also his first meeting with the expatriate painter two years before.

It happened shortly after his explosion onto the art scene in 1995, Langa on an artist residency at the Thami Mnyele Studios in Amsterdam. Dumas, an active member of the studio’s board, visited one day.

“Someone said I should meet that girl,” says Langa.

The pair traded polite introductory greetings. Later, while walking home, he bumped into Dumas again and struck up a more casual conversation.

“We exchanged addresses – I was living in Yeoville at the time – and she and I started writing letters to each other. She sent me stuff. She writes very nicely, you know, sweet nothings.”
The correspondence, which is ongoing, continued even when Langa was in Amsterdam again, in 1997, for a stint at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten.

“We didn’t really have a connection because I was doing my stuff and she was doing hers. We would write each other postcards across town. And that, actually, is still how we really communicate.”

On a day three years ago, Dumas finished a large portrait she had been working on. When she presented it to Langa, he replied that the painting was too big for his home in Amsterdam. So Dumas did the next best thing: she promptly despatched his likeness on a world tour instead.
Exhibited locally on Dumas’ travelling retrospective Intimate Relations (2007-8), Langa’s portrait is now travelling across the United States on another Dumas retrospective, cheerfully titled Measuring Your Own Grave (2008-9).

Rendered in dark hues and perfunctory brushstrokes, Langa’s portrait includes a marked purple blemish on his brow and right cheek, also a smattering of bright blue around his nose and mouth. The outcome is an arresting study of a mercurial individual: Langa.

Born Moshekwa Mokwena Aron [sic] Langa in Bakenberg, Mpumalanga, in 1975, Langa is the only South African artist who made the official selection for this year’s Venice Biennale. Two years ago it was Dumas.

Fans of Langa’s shape-shifting work, which demonstrates a remarkable fluency across a range of media, might be disappointed to learn that he will be restaging an old work. Originally shown in Cape Town in 1997 as part of the second Johannesburg Biennale, his quirkily titled Temporal Distance (with a criminal intent) you will find us in the best places… is a mixed-media installation comprising bottles and spools connected by a vast weave of thread, interspersed with toy cars and plastic animals.

Like his photographs, video work, drawings and paintings, the installation forms part of an evolving body of work that collectively reads as a sort of visual biography, not just singularly of the artist but of his birth country too.

I ask Langa how many times he sat for Dumas to enable her to make the now famous portrait of him. (The painting has appeared on the cover of two art magazines.) He didn’t, he responds. The portrait was created entirely from a photograph.

The back-story to the making of this photograph offers a concise insight into Langa’s life, which since his debut exhibition at Newtown’s now defunct Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery in 1995 has involved ceaseless travel, constant exhibiting and partying.

A couple of years ago Langa was in Martinique, a French island in the Caribbean Sea, for an exhibition. While out socialising one evening he struck up a conversation with another visiting artist, a woman who had caught the eye of a couple of locals, resulting in a late-night shouting match involving Langa.

The next morning, hung-over and glum, he had his picture taken by artist Marlon
Griffith. Langa promptly used the photograph for a “wanted poster” he created as his contribution to the Martinique art event. When he returned to Amsterdam, he gave Dumas a copy. Inadvertently the elusive Langa presented Dumas with an unwavering and always present sitter for her painting.

(This article originally appeared in the June 2009 edition of the Business Day art supplement.)

A message to Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave

"No-one is illegal," reads the graffiti on a wall facing the N1 at Evaton West

At first, there wasn’t a wall. Then, it happened sometime after 2001, they built this thing, a wall. I don’t know who “they” are, but I do know this: it measures about five kilometres, or thereabouts, hasn’t been painted, but for this lonely piece of graffiti, and principally serves to section off the community of Evaton West, located about 50km south of Johannesburg, from motorists using the N1.

I also know that the wall wasn’t there in March 2001, which was when I met Zakes “Satch” Motswane, a resident of Evaton West. Satch was 53 then. Born on the farm Wembley in the Free State, his eyes glowed when I asked him about his first kiss. “Jesus… bliksem… 1968… Lydia, in the Free State.”

Officially, Satch was unemployed. This didn’t mean he was unable, Satch helping his wife to run a crèche used by the working moms and dads who call Evaton West home. According to the old timer, he’d been laid off from a job as a managerial assistant on some mine in Welkom. Before that, during the 1980s, he’d worked as an organizer for the Transport & Allied Workers Union, and before that he’d been a driver. These details didn’t really interest me.

Instead I asked Satch how many cars he’d personally owned in his life. “Many, many,” he responded, mentioning a Vauxhall, a Beetle, a Valiant, a Chev 4.1, a station wagon, also a Toyota 15-seater.

“When I was a driver I sometimes drove to Cape Town,” he added. “When I saw Robben Island it caused me great pain. No one can stomach that kind of pain.”

Satch moved to Evaton West in 1998: “It was a new lease on life.”

At some point during our conversation, we spoke about the highway that passes his neighbourhood’s western boundary.

“Some white and black people that pass here have guns and they shoot at the people who live near the highway,” Satch stated. “The people here get angry and innocent people who pass can get injured if people here decide to close the road and take matters into their own hands.”

Perhaps, and I am only speculating here, this might be why “they” put up this wall, to stop any nonsense. But the wall is only half the story. I first spotted this graffiti last September. When I passed by Satch’s neighbourhood in May, it was still there, albeit now re-written over the spot where it had originally appeared and been erased.

As a piece of art, which is how most graffitiests tend to speak of their creations nowadays, it is perhaps forgettable. Faith 47, Falco and Mak1 make prettier art. But that isn’t why I want you to pause on it. Put aside aesthetics. Concentrate on ethics. Think about the implications of something Satch told me.

“Nigerians are dangerous. If a Nigerian looks at you while you are sitting at a restaurant, he will be able to draw you the same as you see yourself. Those Nigerians! Angolans are only after diamonds, and Kenyans after emeralds. Mozambicans… phew… everything. That place where the Portuguese people learnt those peoples everything. If you give a Mozambican a chance, he can do anything. Weld, fix things. Let’s not talk about cars. A car is a very minor thing for a Mozambican. Those people [immigrants] are dangerous. Myself, I would like to take all of them in one ship back home, finished and over.”

Seven years later, pissed-off South Africans attempted to broker this final solution. I can’t honestly say if Satch was one of them. I don’t think so. I could be wrong though.

Stephen Hobbs: Recording a city in flux

Installation view of High Voltage / Low Voltage (2007) by Stephen Hobbs

In the mid to late 1990s, around time artist Stephen Hobbs was making a name for himself with a series of gritty, low-grade video recordings of inner city Johannesburg, actor Burt Reynolds was staging a comeback.

As audiences were marvelling at PT Anderson’s wayward masterpiece, Boogie Nights (1997), which stars Reynolds playing a caddish porn director, a doubtlessly embellished story started doing the rounds. It had to do with the cruel discourse of media success: asked how it felt to be back, Reynolds replied that he had never been gone.

The same is true of Hobbs. Since making 54 Stories (1999), a short video piece recorded by parachuting a camera down the centre of Ponte Tower, he has continued to live and work in Johannesburg. Like Reynolds, however, there was a time when the former Wits graduate was said to be lost in the woods, or to abbreviate things, gone. Many blamed it on his move from video to photography.

Hobbs retort: “The definitions around photography in this country are very limited.”

Rather than defer to these conservative definitions, Hobbs has over the past few years railed against them. A finalist for the 2003 DaimlerChrysler Award, Hobbs, whose ease into fatherhood hasn't seen him grow his perpetually clean-shaven head, used the opportunity to construct a vast camouflaged wall display. Unlike Guy Tillim, who eventually won the award, Hobbs’ photos were anti-iconic and sometimes downright hard to even see.

“Rarely will one photograph serve as an essay,” he says of his approach to making pictures.

Equally significant is Hobbs’ argument that he is not a photographer.

“Photography is just one of the modes of expression I employ as an artist. It is not the definitive language that I’m interested in – it is part of an assemblage of languages.”

In September 2007, at Wits University’s makeshift Substation art gallery, Hobbs revealed just how adroit he is at moving between media – or, as he would put it, speaking in a new language. Titled High Voltage/ Low Voltage, this strikingly mature exhibition included small sculptural models made from dowel sticks, tie-straps and various found elements. It even included a homage, in the form a toy model, to his yellow VW Golf. Sat on plinths, these models suggested speculative architectural possibilities while offering wry commentary of urban utopianism.

The standout work, however, was also the largest. Two walls of mirrors, each decorated with grid-like tape designs, were held in place by rudimentary pine frames in the main exhibition area. Spotlights created a mesmerising display of reflected light and shadow. The optical experiments of contemporary Danish artist Olafur Eliasson came to mind, as too a host of high Modernist ideas.

An elegant paean to Hobbs’ abiding muse, the city, this work also underscored a key point: “What I do in the free space of my artistic practice is to objectify, criticise, elevate, celebrate and pay homage to a city in flux.”

Finding Little Switzerland

Still from Week End (1967), written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard

It is a love affair. I want to end it. It is an affair without love. After all, the thing I love is just a thing, a handful of stones. A landscape.

Predictably, it all ends with a photo. Actually, there are two of them. One – not the one I love (small “l”) – shows a view from inside a moving car. The car is travelling along a dusty Free State road. It is somewhere near Onverwacht/Botshabelo, 1997. It will always be 1997 for the fucked-up taxi approaching Santu Mofokeng. But this is not the photo; there is another, a photograph that will take me to Little Switzerland, the end of the journey, my journey. It was taken in 1996, at a place called Little Switzerland. Santu Mofokeng was driving a U-Drive Rent-A-Car. At some point he stopped. He was nearing New Switzerland, a resort somewhere in the KwaZulu Natal Drakensberg. He took out his camera and made something I would tentatively call a photograph. It doesn’t offer much, just a car door, half ajar, and beyond it an imprecise landscape. That's pretty much all. Except for the door, everything is out of focus, present yet somehow also missing.

How to find this present but missing place, this landscape?

There are some obvious possibilities: a car key and music player, time and a library card, ritual and tradition. The last of these is perhaps the most revealing. Tradition dictates the route.

1. Church Street Cemetery: my inheritance lies here. Stand at the grave of J.H. Pierneef and look east, as he did 80 years ago. Touch the tree close by. Feel the scar from the Tshwane metro bus that smashed through countless graves to get here. It happened on July 7, 2008. The bus didn’t kill the father.

2. Drive the Ben Schoeman to Joburg. Do it again, ad infinitum. Make notes – unqualified, observational sketches – preferably by SMS, while driving: “Two pieces of pine planking, tapered, like large splinters; bits of plastic bumper; cigarette butts; a crumpled piece of paper; more cigarette butts; glass from a shattered window; other things less easily described, all fleetingly observed from the car at stationary intervals. You look at them; their placement and location is random, determined by accident – an unfortunate word. They say nothing about the congested frustration, the waiting.” (June 5, 2006)

3. Read JM Coetzee’s White Writing (1988) at the Star Stop in Midrand. Ask yourself, “Am I just a victim of sentiment?”

4. Phone Clive Chipkin. (I have his telephone number.) Ask him about Bridge 6, better yet, ask him if you can drive him to the south end of Joburg’s city centre, End Street, so he can narrate its story. (Optional reading here is Chipkin’s book Johannesburg Transition (2009): “The new peripheral elevated road system took an amorphous spread-eagled city on the plains, tied it together in an urban package and provided a sense of recognition for visitors and locals alike.”)

5. Get stuck in traffic, again. SMS yourself, again: “A fat woman in a red shirt, next to her a skinny man, both seated in fold-up chairs at the Buccleuch interchange. Are they studying the traffic? What do their clipboards prompt them to look out for? Nearby, the new electronic sign reads “NO INCIDENTS AHEAD”. Less than a 100 metres on, in the fast lane, a pulverised Honda is parked near a dump truck angled into the concrete barrier. “FUCK DA POLICE” reads graffiti on the rear of the truck. An orange Metro Police car, a Mercedes, pulls up to the scene.” (October 4, 2006)

6. Read William Kentridge’s 1988 essay ‘Landscape in a State of Siege’.

7. Watch Jean-Luc Godard’s Week-End (1967): it pre-empts the obvious, JG Ballard’s Crash (1973). Time Godard’s accident scene. Mourn Ballard’s absence: “Joseph Conrad once said that it’s necessary to immerse yourself in the most destructive elements of the times, and then attempt to swim…” (Ballard, 1976).

8. Look at other photographs of highways and industrial landscapes. Edward Burtynsky. Toshio Shibata. Catherine Opie. In 1994, Opie, best known for her large-format colour portraits of Los Angeles’ gay and lesbian community, ditched her clunky camera and made small, intimate little photographs of Los Angeles highway overpasses. The work is unpretentiously titled Freeway. It is an archaeological record of now. So too are Jo Ractliffe’s photographs of the N1, photographed at every hundred kilometres. Made in 1999, Ractliffe calls her nothing scenes of straight lines and featureless veldt “blandscapes”, which is not her being urbane. The camera describes surface, not feeling.

8. Google “S’busiso Leope” and “257km/h”.

9. Make a road mix (or playlist), limiting yourself only to songs that offer place names. (Big Black: Jordan, Minnesota. Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto: Berlin. Kalahari Surfers: Free State Fence. And so on.)

10. Locale, locality, location, locus, point, position, site, spot: all synonyms for place.

11. Revisit the archive. Find that letter William Plomer wrote to the editor of The Natal Mercury in 1925: “We are in danger of too many veld-yearnings, too much Karoo-urge, too frequent sunsets on the Drakensberg, and moonrisings on Groot Constantia. A little less landscape and a little more portraiture would be highly stimulating.”

12. Look at Santu Mofokeng’s photo again and dissolve into the landscape.