location_Kliptown, Soweto, South Africa

24 September 2021

running time 15 minutes

director/photographer_Thabang Nkwanyana (Visual Creative, 1955 Creative Collaboration, South Africa)

producer/editor_Kristen Kornienko (RAIC Centre for Architecture, Athabasca University/CUBES, Wits University; 1955 Creative Collaboration, South Africa)

In “Private Moments, Private Wastelands”, V.S. Naipaul describes contemporary African navigation of cultural worlds, ‘South Africa with its many groups, its many passions, its biding tensions...[with] political realities so overwhelming that they have to be taken into account’. Johan- nesburg, he articulates as layers of differing values and ideologies, seemingly disparate individuals. Disparaging Soweto, the southern Black township, he leaves unresolved as to what holds her together, offering only flagging hopes hung on the images of Mandela. Enter, Soweto as protagonist. Mandela increasingly inaudible. Amapiano throbbing in the air. The deteriorated/cannibalized Metrorail as both metaphor and reality, aperture negotiating city and township/CBD mass transit link. Drone imagery unmasquing (dis)connection, exploring subversion in the reciprocal human experiences of urban (un)boundaries of sound, fear, distance, disregard, clash, insurgency. How does boundary, visible and invisible, inform ideologies and values, and thus the socio-spatial constructs of our own and shared realities of the city?

Like neighbourhoods across the world, Kliptown has grown up and densified around mass transit infrastructure. But this is part of a much longer story of the relationship between Johannesburg and Soweto that dates back to the discovery of gold in the Jukskei Riverbed, when the unspoiled veld became the Witwatersrand Gold Reef. This film explores contemporary socio-spatial injustice, a legacy rooted in that discovery. A short stretch of the closed Kliptown line of the Gauteng Metrorail becomes stage to agency of subversion and nakedness of place.

© 1955

location_Kliptown, Soweto South Africa

1 September 2020

running time 49 minutes

This film has been shot and driven by the people living the story. It reflects on the everyday lived realities for the residents of Kliptown's shack communities as they face the threat of the Covid-19 disease. It shows the urgency of today's pandemic set within a neighbourhood that has been neglected by the government for decades. It tells the individual stories of the people living there and of an extraordinary group of residents who are heroically fighting to slow the transmission of the virus in their community.

Thabang Nkwanyana director

Kristen Kornienko producer

Thabang Nkwanyana photographer

Ginger Mahlamvu photographer

Bafana Nkosi photographer

Sbusiso Somniso aka Demigod postproduction editor

Kristen Kornienko co-editor

Robert Shai community liaison and location scout

©1955