On the rooftops and high
places of urban Johannesburg, imagine the appearance at dusk of creatures so
strange that their role could be that of sentinel, or fugitive, or witness,
interloper, heir, envoy, clairvoyant, even impostor. Not entirely of this world,
but still with a very real and disfiguring multiplicity that speaks of a bitter
and exotic inheritance - their bodies heavy with the relics and anxieties, gifts
and weaponry of many generations. And at this moment, the very newest in history,
all has been gathered into a tight, tense entirety, and everything is at risk.
Whether that which they carry with them is shelter or shortcoming, or even where
their peculiar belonging belongs, is hard to say. We all know that no-one gets
to have a bird’s eye view of history.
In a new photographic series, Minnette Vári confronts the condition and
self-awareness of being both white and African. With, as reference, the family
emblems of European settlers to the Cape, she asks what it is that keeps people
from really belonging to the place where history has brought them, and why,
after all this time and on the brink of political and emotional homelessness,
there are those who sit in high places, awaiting the new day that they have
promised themselves.