Welcome
This is the fourth of our newsletters that’ll accompany the Afterimage screening programme, signaling the halfway mark. The primary aim of this newsletter series is to commission writers to document, unpack, and interpret each screening. The ancillary aim is to keep those (sane) individuals without social media accounts in the loop for upcoming screenings and bookings.
This week’s newsletter contains:
a piece written by Sinazo Chiya on Sitaara Stodels’s screening that took place on the 23 January 2025 at The Labia.
an update on our next screening, with information on how and where to book.
On Sitaara Stodel’s Open House (2021)
by Sinazo Chiya
The Thursday of the fourth Afterimage screening was well suited to nostalgia. Outside, the usual segregation-inspired outflow of labour from the city was swapped for a traffic of suburban Gen-Xers headed to Greenpoint for a concert headlined by American bands popular in the early 2000s. Inside, curators Mitchell Gilbert Messina and Ben Albertyn delayed the start of the evening so the stragglers could get to their seats.
As with previous iterations, tickets for Sitaara Stodel’s screening were sold out. As we - strands of colleagues, friends, acquaintances, enthusiasts, students, and familiar strangers that weave together to call the arts a community - waited in the dark, small conversations with larger implications unravelled. In the weeks prior, the chatter was about Stillfontein and the fires in California; this week the topics flitted on Trump, the fair and the ceasefire. One person spoke about their how their collection of satirical GIFs of that self-important president functions as digital resistance, another mentioned looking into investing in anti-anxiety aides since clearly, ‘we’re gonna need them’.
Embedded in this heated small talk and worldly banter were revelations of mediated selves; glimpses into minds and algorithms, reflections of the worlds we occupy within the personalised rectangles that act as our interface. Unwittingly, with this strange but organic intimacy we had primed ourselves to understand the mechanics of Stodel’s work. Having studied photography at Michaelis, the artist began working in collage from a realisation that the found (not the taken) image was a potent medium to unspool the intricacies of our relationships - with place, with time, with being. Where the previous edition discussed the existential dimensions of success and its pursuit, Stodel’s articulated how we all become monuments to our memories and mediations.
Open House (2021), the key film in this selection, quieted the room for its entire 8 minutes and 16 seconds. Soundless, with narration provided in the form of subtitled text by the artist, it combined animation and collage within the framework of film. In sharing her origin story, Stodel’s hands guided the gloss of coated paper onto ridges made with joinery of Prestik, tear-lines delineated her ruptures. In the sequence of images of laminate flooring, open windows, a bevy of clocks, nighttime skies behind Devil’s Peak, shoes on ceilings, doors hidden in fireplaces, we learn of an itinerant life described as ‘adventure’. The text beneath, matter-of-factly stating, ‘I have moved over 40 times now, in childhood because of evictions, as an adult out of habit’. We learn that her relationship with collage predates the academy, she traces it to vision boards she, her mother and sisters would make to help them imagine their next house. Perhaps this is why she is so able to fabricate a whole picture from fragments, to share a seamless story that is bigger than the sum of its parts, and the parts themselves are many. ‘My lineage were seekers of a better life, slaves from Malaysia shipped to South Africa and Jewish immigrants escaping an oppressive state. I am easily seduced by the idea of a clean slate’. It’s early in the work that she states her memories are like a ‘bag of melted candy’, and by the time it ends - having connected her father’s experiences of forced removals to his loving acts of hoarding, having outlined her mother’s protective gestures of deception and the sympathetic envies of her childhood - it becomes apparent that wilful erasures can be another form of mediation. In this cosmology we glean that it’s a gift to possess the kind of euphoric mental gymnastics that can fashion a ballet out of fugitive states. As the film closes on the blank canvas of an interior wall, she ends, ‘Peeling away at memories and dreams and history will always reveal another layer that links to the next’.
The next film, a work-in-progress by Stodel titled Soapie Mixtape did just this. Instead of silence, the campy scenes with Stefano DiMera, and Karabo Moroka occasioned spurts of laughter even as eyes stayed narrowed with critical appraisal. Characters in 90s shoulder pads and 2000s chunky belts let out anguished pleas about the murder of their grandmothers, villains with eyepatches schemed, young couples planned home renovations to anchor a storyline of promise. Through the power of retrospect, these obvious allotments of good and evil, fixed by simplistic signifiers provide the means of tracing our diminished literacy for slower kinds of violence and joys unaccompanied by saxophones.
The third, The Moon Has Its Reasons (2012) by Lewis Klahr deftly combined the form of the first work with the occupations of the second. In this three-minute soap opera in collage, brylcreemed characters from comic books are seen enacting passion and betrayal from interiors that appear taken from 1950s magazines. A figure sulkily drinking a glass of wine could be the blueprint for Barker Haynes, highlighting how imperial fantasies of affluence and intrigue were insidiously exported the world over.
The fourth and fifth films, Kassaram (2020) by Thania Petersen and The Pied Piper’s Tale (2014) by Lebohang Kganye equally made transparent the uneasy social contract between signifier, image, reading and meaning. Echoing Stodel, they also poignantly peel back the layers between past and present. To tell the story of her lineage’s movement within the colonial trade routes between Africa and Asia, Petersen used herself and her family. The film is framed by a border of hibiscus flowers (native to Malaysia) as well as tweegevrietjies and Hertzoggies - confectionaries said to be developed by the coloured population during apartheid to condemn the administration. The artist and her children appear as scholars, musicians, flower-sellers in a tableau of pre/colonial life. In the next scene the artist performs as a Klopse minstrel, alone except for a disembodied mouth flashing its missing teeth, which multiplies across the screen, distorting into a mandala. As this mouth is reconstituted as pursed lips towards the film’s close, the music turns more sinister, underpinned by the sound of flames, and a man on fire comes into view – this is footage of the murder of gangster Rashied Staggie which took place in salt river. In less than 15 minutes we’re presented with a story arc that spans enslavement and the systemic violence marking its aftermath. Kganye too chronicles the movement of a generation. Dressed as her late father, she tells her family, ‘follow me to the land of milk and honey’, yet it emerges that this land is the township and Kganye is soon seen being wheelbarrowed home in a drunken stupor, later robbed. The film closes on a quiet image of domestic life, Kganye eating a white-bread sandwich, girl-children around her drinking from enamel cups, older women knitting. Beyond the act of migration, the women of the film are only seen in the home while the dramas of men - heroic and humiliating - take place outside. Though sonorously presented, this work too articulates the orchestrated disquiet that informs the everyday.
Taken in totality, this selection of moving images, provided a discussion of home as a constellation of stories, mediations and elective interests, all shaped by a crosscurrent of resonance, brought to boil in a casserole dish of history and context. With the support of the National Arts Council, this edition of afterimage painted a picture of the thorns in the rose on South Africa’s lapel, it provided a reminder of how images - even when seemingly arbitrary and cosmetic - become the apparatus that translates experience into identity. In the Q&A that closed the screening, the differences in insights and opinions suggested that a ‘clean slate’ might no longer be possible, that the divergence of causality that shapes how we all arrive in the shared present may make disagreement inevitable, but in making these symbols visible, we can revisit the past with some degree of autonomy and build familiar lexicons anew.
Updates
This Thursday (6 February 2025), The Lo-Def Film Factory will be screening Core Dump, Russel Hlongwane will be screening Ifu Elimnyama, The Dark Cloud: a short film, and together they’ll be screening their collaborative film Dzata: The Institute of Technological Consciousness. The films will be accompanied by excerpts from other films and media.
The screening is free and open to the public, bookings via Quicket are required as seating capacity is limited to 48 people. Booking will become available from 9am on Tuesday, 4 February 2025, and can be made via Quicket
The Lo-Def Film Factory was created by Francois Knoetze and Amy Louise Wilson. Their work involves archival research, dramaturgy, and visual strategies associated with video art, collage, sculptural installation and new media, to create space for experimental storytelling. They are particularly focused on engaging with young people to make participatory research-creation projects.
Russel Hlongwane is a cultural producer based in Durban, South Africa. His work is located at the intersection of Heritage/ Modernity and Culture/ Tradition as they apply to black life. His said practice in includes artistic research, film, creative producing, design theory, curatorship, writing and performance – often against the backdrop of installation form.
Afterimage is a film screening programme, funded by the National Arts Council and run by Mitchell Gilbert Messina and Ben Albertyn. Each screening has an artist share a work of theirs alongside some of the short films and reference material that informed it. The programme aims to spotlight artists working with film and video, demystify their making, and reveal the traits they share with works that came before.