The first in a fledgling series of magazines showcasing Cape Town culture, creativity and talent
January 2007
Love Cape Town Volume One , Jan 2007
Soul fibres
I think we need an injection of new fashion ideas in our small city. Maybe we should import some other styles? Maybe we already have. Take an old coffee sack off the coast of Mozambique. Add Lizette Chirrime’s fine eye for shape. Throw in some stitches and snips. Abrigado: you have a new fashion favourite. Thank heavens the magnetic young woman heard her spirit calling and obeyed the urge to spread her wings. Otherwise I might drown in the tide of skinny jeans and poofy skirts slathering the streets like liberated lemmings.
Lizette is an independent, full-time artist with a different slant on things. Her epiphany came in 2003, after 5 years of a stifling role as secretary to an aluminium company in Mozambique. Gathering all her courage, she uprooted and came south to find out who she was. Cape Town opened its arms to her. She recycles, lives sustainably, puts art into the ordinary, and has a penchant for organic sentiment. She fits. Lizette is a self-taught creative who makes a living from her art and carves a positive and integrated life for herself in Cape Town through self-belief and networking.
Her art incorporates stylised metaphors of emotion and dream that can be taken with you wherever you go. Using the moody, tensile fibres of hessian, she fashions garments that hold colour brightly and sculpt form simply and beautifully. Vivid colours play in skirts, blouses, table covers, bags and bed throws. Sometimes they call to be painted on, other times bold embroidery sets a piece apart. Her tastes have obviously been informed by the shaping of seas and sands unfamiliar to us, and with them a whole paradigm and personality has developed through her life and borne itself into her art.
She was claimed by “voyage ensemble”, an exhibition showcasing African artists working together to explore our heritage as children of this stark continent. Then she launched an exhibition supported by the Mozambique consulate. She participated in the Cape Town Arts Fest and much of the sponsorship that followed was both temporary and independently sourced. Dreams led her to leave her country; destiny brought her to ours. And now, she makes Cape Town her home, exchanges riches with us, and is still lead by dreams.
On the Tip of Africa we’re on Edge. Of boundary. Of territory. Of ourselves. We are on the edge of discovery. It is not a voyage. It is a right. In the aftermath of liberation’s euphoria, we’re learning to look at ourselves though others’ eyes. Lizette is wonderful proof that life begins after thirty and that we can find the lost pieces through art. (And bring the city some style!) This empowered woman uses her own and others’ power and diversity to say brightly and boldly, with a heavy measure of humility: we are Africa.
Tel : 084 55 02773
Lizette_chirime@hotmail.com
www.voyageensemble.blogspot.com
Love Cape Town Volume One , Jan 2007
Urban Artery
words: Jess Henson
If the sum total of what you know of Main Road can be sung to a catchy pop song, maybe it’s time to take a trip. Those of us who travel or traverse it in user-friendly chunks might want to join the ride.
By no means a golden mile, Main Road stretches itself from the city bowl to the Cape Point Nature Reserve. Along the way it cuts a core sample of Cape Town’s many villages, towns, suburbs and industrial inlets; joining them in a continuous stream of tar and time. While it is not always pretty, the pulse of the peninsula is never dull. Gervaise Christie’s photography offers a glimpse to get you started.
Mainlining Main Road is an eye-opener. Stepping out of her comfort zones both literally and laterally, she takes her Cannon to the streets and photographs a tar strip that defines and delineates Cape Town like none other.
Her recent exhibition is an honest and artistic documentary of Main Road from Cape Town to Simon’s Town. Through the luminous depth of an SLR lens, Yesshi’s photographer takes split-second shots spanning a vibrant stretch of human territories.
Main Road is the common denominator binding such disparities as the idyllic coastal road past Muizenberg with the bottle-necked digsville that is Rondebosch central. While Salt River’s stretch is a “universe away” from most peoples’ experience, it is still Cape Town. But the road also divides. Try Claremont for starters.
Claremont demonstrates the ironic contrasts typical of our country – in the space of a few lanes, two worlds diverge. The chic, controlled mall offsets the sweaty station market. These days you can cross the road without a care. But who cares to cross at all? We’ve stopped seeing.
From the switch-blade charms of ungelded gangsters, through grand bergies’ daylight cabaret, under the gaze of kindly Moslem aunties, past swanky shoppers and charistmatic Greek shopkeepers, Main Road teems with human life from one end to the other. Gervaise’s imagery consistently infers this human presence, whether overtly or obliquely; a foot in mid-step might be the cue. Or a slash of shoulder against high blue. “Without us, there is no space and time,” she elaborates, “none of this really exists with no one in it.”
Unlike most commuters and pedestrians, her perceptual journey is not a simple route from point A to B. Main Road might be one long line, but it holds a hundred realities. Not one for limited thinking, she breaks the literal down into metaphor and discovers philosophy in the fundaments of Cape Town’s socio-cultural artery. Aspects of the Cartesian theory are silently sprinkled into her metaphor of Main Road. Her photography seeks to measure existence along the planes of space and time.
“If you can forget your past, why can’t you remember your future?” the argument goes. The idea of recording the immediacy of the moment is an attempt to take a step back and see things afresh, and it suggests we can create our own reality.
Her arrangement of images is an extension of this theory. A series of shots, either from the same space, or the same set of moments broken up into frames, suggests a staccato flow. These are “fractions of seconds stitched together” that follow the same line. “Framing is how people access information these days,” she says. Seeing the continuum through Gervaise’s blinks slows us down to stop-frame speed long enough to take a look at our self-referential reality. It asks you to
Stop. Look. Comprehend.
your world in the context of the collective.
From the city centre through Woodstock’s warehouses, crack houses, families and second-hand stores; by the peaceful desolation of semi-Industria; past the shebeens of Mowbray; along the mumbling suburbia of the plums’ and ‘bergs to the buzzing bustle of Kalk bay’s weekend world and out into the coastal stretch dividing only mountain and ocean; Main Road carries Cape Town to itself, through itself.
“Everyone is fighting to make their own meat and butter and potatoes, but at the end of the day, hey brother - we’re all the same…And if you think - just because you’re from the other side of the road - you’re any different; then you’ve got it all wrong.”
Gervaise’s photography is an alternative iconography of a place we know and love that suggests there’s more than one way to see things. This is the main stream; the journey starts here. Step out. And take a piece of Main Road’s sensuality home with you.
Gervaise Christie
Yesshi Photography
+27 72 074 3357
earthstomper@hotmail.com
Love Cape Town Volume One , Jan 2007
Lend me your EAH
words: Jess Henson
Think of a tight, hard, sexy sound sneaking up on a free, fluid, floating sound. Drop them lightly into the same audio glitch with the smooth touch of an edgy angel and let them play. You might begin to hear the strains of Humanizer’s musical trail.
Humanizer is Paul Resell, composer and producer of emotional antacid for urban headaches. At the fore of Cape Town’s progressive music wave, this digital and analogue maestro blends melodic playfulness with a deep seriousness that is seamlessly sexy. His Electronica opens the path of the self inside the soul along the street in the middle of the day in the middle of our lives.
Electronica is an evolution, a music genre whose audio free styling speaks to people without dictating to them. While making digital music is über-hip, much of the Electronica in circulation is criticized for losing listeners because its embrace of obscurity lacks musical narrative. We all need story. We all have stories. Humanizer tells a tale with sound. It is technology with a heart. A heart that beats a bit differently.
This unmistakably unusual sound sits itself ambiguously between definitions and quietly questions your thoughts and feelings. Boundaries are dissolved as it sinks in and explores the subconscious. My first time left me with new spaces inside. The sounds set my mind to idling, and its seeds sprouted subtly and suddenly through my soul. Listening to Humanizer is a journey of extremes.
The prevalence of a bass that defies previous depths without dominating the composition is offset by tinkering tech trills that turn the melodic experience into serious fun without losing its centre. Humour and playful grace dominate the compositions’ unique rhythmic structures. A tight but forgiving sound, it brings light; and it gives birth to dark tales without selling out to them.
Re/Fusing audio extremes to create musical synthesis, Paul regularly syncopates an audience’s musical assumptions with actual experience. This son of the mother city frequently drops beats that surprise. And delight. Or offer abrupt insight. With implicit musical poise he alternates between sound and silence; and, in its synapse, leaves room for interpretation. Flowing seamlessly between dark and light without warning and playing silences without apology, Humanizer guides the listener through their own dreamscape and mental planes. If we want to keep up, we have to wake up and listen. Under Humanizer’s touch, it’s impossible to listen without being moved; and it’s impossible to move without surrendering.
His is the soundtrack of blood and being, and Paul knows how to turn the tables. He drums the decks; he makes white noise sing. He suggests there is music in everything, and proves it. The modern subconscious is incessantly colonised by a ubiquitous broadcast of jingles and blips. They’re the congenital metro-tones that pervade city living and invade our lives. In his electric, tight orchestra; the ring tones, electronic blips and hold hymns that dominate our tech-etched psyches are free to return to harmony. It’s ironically uplifting; it’s the traffic hum you mistook for the incessant sigh of distant, crashing waves.
Successful collaborations with VJ Simtim (Charles Lee Thorpe), have established a solid relationship between the sound and the seen at Humanizer’s three independent album launches this year at live music’s second home, the Independent Armchair. Simstim splices images of everyday extraordinariness and bespoke graphic visuals in time to Humanizer’s beats and melodies. The result is no less than iconic. “Eye Am Hear”. Exactly.
The merging of sight and sound is more than a music experience. It encourages sensory integration; the mind passively engaged through visuals, the heart activated through sound, and rhythm the grounding, primal force. Beyond being entertained and stimulated, New media becomes a realm for spiritual expansion through experiential art. A composite sensory experience can take an audience to another level. Humanizer is taking the Cape Town underground to places it has never been.
It’s a subliminal and intuitive journey. Paul effects an understated subterfuge on musical supposition, a vent of true emotion and creates a gateway to urban/esoteric experience. It gives voice to suppressed songs inside, gives wings to dreams, but remains situated in the realms that our bodies belong to. It sings our own lives back to us – innocents of an info age, victims of mass consciousness, vigilantes of the creative underground, and vagrants of the spiritual wastelands. Humanizer tells the stories we aren’t aware we’re creating or being created by.
It’s a call to arms and a ceasefire at once.
Love Cape Town Volume One , Jan 2007
Home : the Fine Art of Daya
There’s always something tentative in touch. Something alive. Something much more than skin on surface.
There’s a woman in the city who knows this. She brings sculpture to life. She gives silence shape, opens doors unseen, but felt.
In the heart of the city bowl renowned for four seasons in one day, it’s late spring. I walk into Daya’s high-ceilinged studio. We’re not alone. Two creamy-ochre crete-stone women are waiting. Quietly. Waiting for their figures to fill out. Waiting to come to life.
It's a womb. Breathing. Sculptures in various stages of growth coexist with resin moulds and wire frames and hold court with the stillness between bursts of conversation. The still women are watching us. Patiently. I feel compelled to go over to them and touch. Ten.ta.tive.ly.
“That’s why I love sculpture,” she says in response to something I didn’t say as she runs her hands over the contours of a kneeling statuette, “you have to take notice; it moves into your space.” She’s always felt that form has feeling; I’ve always felt that feeling has form. If we are all mothers of our art, maybe our art also brings us up. My eyes follow her hands’ slow meander over slopes of shoulder and curves of calf. There is a definite sense of something emerging, but whether it is in the room or in me, I can’t tell.
A born and bred Capetonian, Daya loves and learns from a mother we all share. In a city teeming with diversity, she finds inspiration in simplicity. Reducing excess to its essence and embracing paradox, she can tell a broken heart in two words, or a sunset with none. She moves intimately between mono-dimensions and poly-realities, and finds irony, curiosity and celebration there. Her metaphors are petals of self that follow her faithfully and lead her willfully. Under the practical mechanism of her magic, sculpture becomes a statuesque text; a narrative sourced from the whole.
We’re sharing a cup of coffee. She moves around the studio, a slow dance of building excitement. A dance of four years of art school, and a lifetime of life-making are culminating in an exhibition that promises to deliver.
I think about the cleanness of her conceptualization. As a sculptor, she pares the unnecessary to within a sliver of its sin. I mean, skin.
The body is primary territory; it’s a personal and universal reference point for everyone. Daya uses this fact with insight and sensitivity, exploring the relationship between dichotomies. Merging metaphors of mortal physicality and spirituality, she uses feet, heart, bones, wings as the elements of life to offer a fresh perspective. Her sculptures transcend rationality to answer the divine.
Think of a tiny room brimful of sunsets and mirrors. This is her take on infinity – freedom within boundaries. Daddy Long Legs Hotel in Long Street commissioned her to create a custom room for roving revolutionaries and incognito emissaries. She covered entire walls of an awkward-shaped sleeping space in suns setting, sinking, rising and reflecting in intermittent mirrors.
A partiality to selective detail shows itself in her illustration most acutely. Her ink drawings reveal shapes and tastes of solid spirit playing peacefully with powerful emotion and the incumbent shifts in perception. She tackles issues of birth, death and rebirth in all her mediums, but keenly explores it in two dimensions. A commissioned canvas as long as my lounge holds a ripe woman on one end. And space on the other. Flat. Alive. Art. That’s just the embedded edginess you’d expect from someone who works with the flow and revolution of cycles.
It doesn’t matter what material she works with: text, pixels, paint, plaster; it all works. Her concepts are clear. Her complexities are clean and she intuits the role of each work in the wider context of the world with the sagacity of an elder. The fundaments of her creative format more or less fit into one of her favorite symbols– the circle in the square: infinity in the finite.
She turns back to the kneeling woman, having demonstrated the entirety of her plans for the December exhibition to me. She’s listening. And there, tattooed tacitly on her neck is the shape I’ve been thinking of.
“It is a bit like giving birth,” she says of an exhibition, an exchange with the public eye. Which is your eye. And mine.
Daya Heller, sculptor and life shaper, exhibits at Michaelis, 6 December, 2006. You’re invited to this coming of age. You’re invited.
Labels: Artist Profile, Chervaise Christie, Chirime, fashion, foreigner, jan 2007, Lizette, Lizette Chirime, Love Cape Town 1, Musician Story, Paul, Paul Ressel, print, print and repro
