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Walls and barbed wire: Johannesburg is fortified and ready. Many inhabitants live in fear of robberies. Categories like black and white, poor and rich, still divide the city. The art project Spines is countering that. By Aya Bach

A junk car, planted high above our heads, invites us to make a dubious rental: “Rent a Wreck” is the name of the car hire firm in the city centre. “This is a forgotten part of Johannesburg,” says the taxi driver, while bringing me here and searching for the address. We meander among tattered façades and rubbish bags. Just two years ago, I was advised not to drive around this area as a white. What am I doing here, then? Rent a Wreck is the beginning of an unusual city tour, not devised for courageous tourists, but for Johannesburg locals: United African Utopias is the name of the performance project that goes to neighbourhoods that are often avoided.



A motley arts audience, older and younger, dark and light-skinned people head off. Two performers in gold-coloured garments and with Japanese parasols lead us on foot through the city centre, through streets where whites rarely dare to venture. Equipped with brightly coloured designer radios, we are wrapped in a soundtrack that serves as an acoustic dunce and magic cap. We are accompanied by mysteriously masked figures that show up again and again as if from nowhere. We walk past clothing shops, street-side flip-flop sellers, advertisements for penis enlargements and abortions. We greedily peer at everything around us, take photos without inhibitions. The city inhabitants put up with the strange appearance unperturbed. No one is robbed, let alone accosted.

The artist team – João Orecchia and Mpumi Mcata (Johannesburg) as well as Hans Narva and Tanja Krone (Berlin) – not only guide is into the everyday routine of the streets, but also into the city’s history. In the Carlton Centre, once a noble high-rise with a luxury hotel, the lift spits us out on a spookily abandoned floor. An accordion player plays a few melancholy notes, and then disappears. Then, we are standing in the darkness; it smells stuffy, close. Gradually, we recognize a former skating rink: a reminder of better times.

Simple cynicism?

Like the Carlton Center, in the late 20th century the entire quarter degenerated as a result of Apartheid politics. More and more companies moved out, blacks were deliberately attracted as tenants to ensure revenues for the white owners of empty real estate. In the end, the area turned into a slum and still suffers from its negative image today even though police and cameras now curb crime.

Finally, a place is on the tour programme that no one from the group is really familiar with: Alexandra, a black township in the centre of Johannesburg, a stone’s throw from the fancy neighbourhood of Sandton. Precarious corrugated metal dwellings, port-a-potties. A few goats graze in the rubbish. We drive past in a minibus, peer out the windows: cynical squalor tourism? Simple voyeurism?

I do not feel well. I decide to ask how people in our group who live in Johannesburg and do not have light skin are feeling. Of course, they think it’s voyeuristic, too. “But, it’s better to expose yourself to it than not to look at all,” says Bret, a young man from the film industry. “The degree of demarcation here is extremely high. Many people are afraid. To go there would burst the bubbles of their lives that they’ve made themselves comfortable in.”

Deep trenches

None of us feels comfortable anymore. And the art project is a tightrope walk. “Johannesburg is a city in the post-apartheid era,” says Lien Heidenreich, director of the cultural programmes at the Goethe-Institut. “It’s a city that is growing together, but in which many parallel worlds exist alongside one another.” These have become distinct on the tour. But the Spines festival – the title is a play on the city’s transport axes – also wants to provide stimulus for growing together. Like the In House Project, a second performance series. Johannesburg native Sello Pesa has artists perform in the homes of private citizens, in their front yards or simply on the street in front of their houses.

Sometimes, the audience is manageable to tiny. While the Berlin artist Johannes Paul Raether AKA Protektorama philosophizes on the evils of capitalism, only two girls watch him over the fence. Yet, this is already a success in the Lenasia district where black and Indian neighbours are divided by deep trenches. “It took five years before they would speak to one another,” explains Sello, who comes from Soweto and is very familiar with cultural trenches.

They run not only between ethnicities or skin colours. Protea, a modern quarter of Soweto, is the home of blacks who have reached a certain degree of prosperity. It is irritating for the inhabitants to hear traditional warrior songs. The singers are men from Lesotho, who live in the centre of Johannesburg as rubbish collectors. Worlds separate them from Protea. When we are all asked into the house, they remain outside. “Are they going in to sit down on a chair? I don’t think so,” says Sello, “Anyway, they don’t speak English.” Communication is shied to a great degree. But in an interview – with an interpreter – they tell me how proud they are to be here and take part in the art project. I think they are being honest.

“I want to overcome the old barriers,” says Sello Pesa. There is no guarantee of success. “I want to get people to sit down together and after ten or twenty minutes, ask what’s your name. For me, art is an opportunity to get people to do so. I don’t know how it will work yet. Maybe I’ll know better in two years.”