Minnette
Vári
Road.
Artist's statement on Alien.
En route, there is a lot one can pick out from the passing landscape to serve
as example and evidence of a history still being lived out, being lamented and
celebrated. A thin black scribble, the road is witness to so much history. My
best conversations with the occasional visitor from Europe or elsewhere happen
in my car when we are on our way to or from the airport, from Johannesburg to
Durban, or Cape Town, or Pretoria. On the road there are people and situations:
minibus taxis weaving through the traffic, large groups of tourists who crane
their necks to take in the scenery, men in overalls perilously crossing the
highway on foot, big old buses with school children who sometimes wave at us.
We see billboards that advertise international brands for an African market,
factories, ungainly monuments, the sunsets, the expensive German cars, the high
fences, beggars of all descriptions with their trade mark handwritten cardboard
signs. Traffic cops pass by us on their motorcycles, we see street vendors with
their dismal wares from Taiwan, armoured vehicles carrying cash to and from
banks, lamp-posts festooned with various posters, many printed boldly with the
newest headlines, dead animals by the roadside: dogs, big ones and small. Cats.
Hares. Pigeons. Other animals too: we call them roadkill, one category. Often,
what you see doesn't resemble anything much, no specific breed or type of animal.
But it's clearly roadkill: shredded flesh, smeared into the tarmac, pieces of
fur or feathers loyally sticking to unrecognisable remains of animals torn from
their skins, opened up, broken and twisted, exposed, naked, dead. At times I
speed past such scenes of destruction as fast as I can, to try and blur away
some of the impact of this sadly unwelcome and unwelcoming sight. Strange that
I would feel so uncomfortable driving by animals crushed under speeding tires?
Still, the road is a living document, and our memory must be uncompromising.
Here, these roads connect the scenes of a more famous destruction, not as clear
or as final as the fate of a ruined dog. Every day brings new witness of a history
of blight, and new reasons to wrench hope from a past and a present violently
bound together in the anticipation of a very different future. To understand
something is in a way to close in on it, to dissolve distance, to embrace that
maimed thing, if only with your mind. But up close, some memories seem improbable
and perverse, so unrecognisable that their owner, torn and uncomprehending,
fails to dodge their crushing momentum. A known and lived past has shown itself
to be monstrous: like an animal that, in trying to cross a dark road, has instead
crossed over another less visible divide. Mutilation introduces a distance:
that animal is now part of a very different reality. I cannot, as such, feel
'one' with it anymore: it is a crowded encounter that affords no space
for empathy, an impatient decay with no time for nostalgia. There can be no
healing in the simple sense, no whole parts to piece together again. No re-membering.
Only brokenness, separation: and because of this, horror.
On the dark mirror of the road there is a moment of hesitation. Why is it so
painful to write myself into this history? Doubt freezes me in its headlights
and, on impact, shatters my body into a horde of strange reasons, each rising
from the oily surface of forgetfulness. They rise with an awkward gait and begin
an inexorable march on a road that will retrace a history I was not ready to
recall. The road is hot, hazardous in its elasticity, the boundaries not yet
solid. I recognise with dread the discomfort they feel in an ill-fitting skin,
too tight and too thin for this critical journey. Naked in an alien landscape,
their story retold by a thousand tongues, they wake with the scent of blood
on their breath, and with the smell of burnt hair. Into a grey and heartbreaking
dawn they march two, three abreast. There is no honour in their silence. Against
an ever-brightening sky they must perform their tragedies, negotiate their triumphs
and their losses and weigh their currency over and over again while their mute
interrogation rings in my ears.
© Minnette Vári
Port Edward, South Africa, November 1999
Artist: Minnette Vári
Title: Alien
Medium: Video Animation
Date: 1998
Dimensions: Variableprojection
Duration: video 52sec, audio 134sec. Looped indefinitely on DVD