A Visible Problem

This essay was written as a companion to and in conversation with a series of three films: Land is in the Air, A Button Without a Hole and Working the Land (2019).1 The films describe the ongoing legal dispute around the land claim in Salem, Eastern Cape, the 19th-century history of dispossession in Salem, and the contemporary obstacles faced by the community on the already restituted farms, respectively. In both my writing and in these films, I attempt to find an interdisciplinary ground between art and the social sciences. In this essay, I wanted to experiment stylistically, foregrounding readability and accessibility to a broad audience, while playing with filmic narrative devices, hard cuts, montages and shifting rhythms. I have tried here to tease out some of the relationships and tensions between work, identity and land dispossession through the representation of work. Starting with a photograph found in the archives of Museum Africa, Johannesburg, I have structured this essay as a series of ‘scenes’ to map the relationship of the imposition of colonial work ideologies onto territorial expansion and the dispossession of land. I use the Marxist concept of ‘primitive accumulation’, the creation of a labour force, and the production of a colonial conception of work in South Africa to expose the entanglement of land and work. I conceptualise the idea of the ‘frontier’ as not just a territorial space but as an ongoing space of contestation through which the changing relationship of work to identity and the possibility of ‘subjectivisation’ (following Jacques Rancière) can occur.