Sven Christian [SC]: This iteration of Lines of Sight centres on your film, BLACK SUBJECTS (2012). Why film, rather than having audiences engage the installation directly? How did it come about? You also made some specific choices — the costumes and so on — that I’d like to talk about.

Serge Alain Nitegeka [SAN]: The film is a follow up to 100 Stools (2011). I wanted to do something and there was potential for funding, through this project on migration. The initial idea was to have a performance on the road, from Wits University all the way down to the Goethe Institute. People walking all the way down, carrying stuff. I don’t think the costumes were in place at that time. But it got big and complicated. I needed to let it simmer and stew, so I gave back the funding and sat with it for a bit, worked on it, then realised it didn’t need to be a performance out there. It could be in a controlled environment. I started to think about involving more participants; to use my own props and mess around with the language I’d been developing, like when I perform and take pictures of myself in the nude in the sculptures. I started to look for performers, through schools around Joburg. I put a word out and then contacted a filmmaker. The time frame was stretched and I hadn’t worked like that before, so there was a lot to learn.

SC: I didn’t realise it started with 100 Stools… What prompted the making of that work?

SAN: I’d always wanted to do something around asylum seekers and home affairs — that whole interaction; the waiting, the frustration, the bureaucracy of it all. I’ve been in those queues for years and the question has always been, ‘What can I do to respond to this?’ The idea of hospitality and treating people humanely came to mind. ‘How can I intervene, make a difference, in a way?’ Not to change the world or anything. Something subtle, but meaningful. I was thinking about hospitality as an African construct: when you come to someone’s house you’re offered somewhere to sit, refreshments. You have conversations, you feel welcome. Having people sit instead of stand felt like a sign that, ‘Yes, things are hard, the processes are long, but you don’t need to stand. You are welcome here. We are here to serve, physically.’ The idea was for the stools to be functional, portable forms of hospitality; a comfort that you can carry wherever you are. You can put it in a backpack, or on your lap in a taxi. It’s not going to get in anybody’s way. I’d thought about all those things when designing the stools; how to put them out into the world, how they were going to be interacted with…

SC: The film starts with people in different sections of the installation. Gradually they come together, carrying and moving things through it. Sometimes they go their own ways, then find each other again. There’s this process of reconstruction, reassembling things. When I first watched them moving through this deconstructed terrain, it felt like there were processes of world-making at play…

SAN: Ja. It’s almost the same subject, in different contexts. An event that’s just occurred and another, like with home affairs, that’s ongoing. The event has already occurred and is possibly perpetual, but this process of building, coming together, finding a home — it never ends. Those are some similarities they share. We’re talking about people who have fled persecution, crossed borders, and become refugees. They’re seeking safety, so that’s another similarity.

SC: The film is different in that you’re seeing this from the outside, as opposed to physically navigating one of your installations or participating directly. There’s an aspect of distance introduced in the film.

SAN: As far as comparisons go, they’re both performances. One is just more controlled. I don’t know if we’ve spoken about this before, but initially I wanted to hand the stools out at Crown Mines Refugee Reception Office. It’s no longer there, but it was the last place I went to, so I was quite familiar with it. I went there early one morning. When I arrived with a bakkie full of pristine stools — they looked like these sculptural things — I got out of the car and went to speak to security. I said, ‘I’ve got some stools.’ He was like, ‘Ah, you can just give them to us and we’ll hand them out’. I was like, ‘No.’ Because they could have sold them. Things like that happen, easy. We could have gone inside and asked the officials to hand them out, but they might’ve got lost or it could have become a publicity thing. It wasn’t going to be quiet and subtle. I wanted to get there incognito and get out, like, ‘Who did they come from?’ We don’t know. No one knew.’ That’s what I wanted. I had gone in without a plan. That’s how I work. I set it up so that I don’t know what’s going to happen. I deal with things as they come.

On that occasion, I realised I needed to leave. I quickly put the stools I was carrying back in the bakkie, we made a U-turn, and left. I had another week to think about what to do, given what I’d experienced. How to react. I knew I couldn’t go back, so I went to Pretoria, Marabastad, instead. When I arrived I had to offload and because I didn’t want any other way out — if the bakkie was there, I could still leave — I then told the bakkie driver to go. I asked a friend, who’s a photographer, to come and discreetly document from a distance. We came in different cars. I didn’t even know where she was. She gave me photos a week later and I was like, ‘Oh shit, where were you?’

After offloading, I went to talk to guys in the queue. I parked all the way in the back, not to be seen, then went to them and said, ‘Hey, I made these stools. I think you guys can use them.’ Then I went to the women’s queue — men and women are queued differently — and told them what was happening. After giving two or three people stools, and after others saw them sitting, chatting, people organically gravitated to this pile of stools and everybody helped themselves. It took between two and five minutes, everything was gone. That was it. It was beautiful.

Later, some community security person who had seen the whole thing came to me and was like, ‘Ah man, thanks for what you’re doing. It’s like nobody really cares. People sleep here twenty-four hours. And they get plagued on by criminals for money and nobody is doing anything. I live here. I’m not a foreigner. And these people need to be protected. That’s why we’re here, and it’s nice to see somebody doing something that the officials should be doing; the people responsible for this place.’ And that was it. I didn’t take any photographs, but before I left I saw a man getting into a taxi, carrying a stool. I saw a vendor with one stool selling pens, cigarettes, and sweets, selling these plastic sheets to put documents in — the A4s. Already, they were being used all around. In some photos taken by my friend you can see people standing in the queue with these stools, holding them against their hip, you know? Not infringing someone behind or in front of them.

With BLACK SUBJECTS there’s an anonymity to the figures. You can’t tell who they are. Whoever came got the part. That’s all I needed. And we spent time rehearsing to get them acquainted with the story I was trying to tell. It was inspired by me moving across from one border to another and ending up in this school. I wanted to break that experience down, abstractly, into a space of obstacles, into nondescript objects being moved from A to B. That’s also a reference to the sculptures I’m going to be showing, the Lost and Found series; the idea that you can’t really see what’s inside of these bundles. There are a lot of overlaps.

SC: You mention the anonymity of the figures and the experience or treatment of people waiting — the bureaucracy of it, being a kind of statistic versus this very simple gesture, the recognition of what it feels like to be in that situation, and the profound impact of that gesture — how those stools worked their way into the immediate community. But in the film, the performers wear black costumes, and because the installation itself is black there are moments when they disappear into the architecture of the installation or emerge from it. So there are varying degrees of visibility and opacity.

SAN: Yes. Uncertainty is a bit of a recurring theme in my work — the unknown, the void; darkness as symbolic of uncertainty, the unfamiliar. Sometimes it becomes hard to distinguish a body from the built or staged environment. During rehearsals I gave the performers blindfolds to move from A to B. The masks had been designed so that you couldn’t see their eyes but they could see. But we covered that in rehearsals, and I was playing loud drum and bass. Like super loud. It was some kind of shake up, to get them into character. After that we sat down and talked about it, to see how they felt. It wasn’t nice, you know? One woman was claustrophobic. It was very hard for her, but there was triumph in that, in the sense that she didn’t tell me before that she had claustrophobia — she sort of forced herself to do it — but in the end was pleased to have survived and triumphed over it.

It also got hot very quickly. The film was shot during summer and we had to take breaks for them to take off their masks and breathe. So it was sweaty, loud, you couldn’t see where you were going… In terms of getting into character, you can tell someone something and ask them to embody it, but if you can feel it rather than think it, it sits with you. You talk differently, because now you’ve felt it in your bones. The whole body has experienced it.

SC: Before Tumelo’s [Mtimkhulu] exhibition, he shared an essay by Teju Cole called “Ethics”. It starts with a description of the kind of watery language used to describe migrants and refugees, like when you talk about a ‘wave’ or ‘flood’ of migrants, and how that’s often a cause for alarm, not on behalf of those going through this experience, but on behalf of the person receiving that information.

SAN: I see, yes. A flood — ‘taking over.’

SC: He also writes about the capacity of our senses to transport, which connects to what you’re saying about getting into character. For example how, in depictions of death or mourning, like in Caravaggio’s work, you have the person who’s most bereaved, who’s not conscious of the smell of the deceased, but the person in the distance is depicted blocking their nose. He’s writing about how that distance becomes a way in, of sorts, for those who are not as close; how being conscious of the smell of death might bring one closer to the reality of the situation. That reality somehow lands and gets taken into the body and registered through smell. It’s not a shared grief — it’s not the same type of grief as that experienced by the loved one — but when you spoke about getting them into character, creating this controlled environment through drum and bass, the blindfolds… I picture each performer being taken somewhere in their own life, wherever that be. Like this individual who felt claustrophobic. They have their reasons for feeling that way, but in this context it becomes a means for them to also grapple with another experience.

SAN: Anonymity is all inclusive. It’s like when I talk about viewer’s completing the installations by being in them, walking through them. The anonymous figure could be anybody. It could be you. It could be someone you know. Trauma is trauma at the end of the day. Being uprooted is a trauma. Relocation is one of the most stressful things for any human being. It’s not an easy one to deal with. When working on the film and trying to get people into character, I gave them some backstory, feeding them bits and pieces, and discovering for myself what could be done. Like I said, I work on the spot, improvising as we go. Trying to be attentive and aware of the possible meanings that I can create or that are already there.

SC: When we spoke in residence, about making do, you told me about taking your uncle’s calculator and the trade-off that happened, but when you mentioned the Lost and Found works, you were describing a kind of foil, something that masks what’s inside, like baggage or something embedded. Can you speak to the choice in form, and the relationship between each ‘object’ and its base?

SAN: I was trying to make platforms — something that talks to a platform, like a train station platform. Something raised, flat. Luggage and baggage; things being moved. That’s why I call them platforms instead of stands or anything like that. I’m alluding to that kind of transit.

SC: Like a conveyor belt, where there’s some forward trajectory?

SAN: Yes, I’m alluding to movement. They’re not where they need to be. They’re in transit. Like they don’t belong where they are. The fact that they’re stitched the way they are… They’re not quite finished as objects. They’re sort of temporary. They don’t yet belong to anybody. They’re like communal / non-communal objects.

SC: It reminds me of the void you were talking about earlier. When I came across your film, it was through your book Into the Black (2015); this idea of moving into the unknown…

SAN: “Making do”, “Into the Black”… It’s one thing approached from different viewpoints. Uncertainty is right up there. What informs a lot of who I am is still back there, thirty years ago. That mindset never goes away. It stays with me no matter how old I get or who I become. It just evolves with me. That way of being features a lot in my work, but in different ways. Like I talk about the Exterior series, or the Liminal Cargo series… All those cargos that I’ve made since I started sculpting talk about the load. The personal effects. The things we carry when we leave home. The things we carry with us all the time, invisible and visible. How we package and carry them. The forms they take. The accumulation of things over time, which manifest in different ways to different people in different times, wherever we are.

They’re not quite set as objects, they change and take different forms according to where one is in life. Where one lives. Or what one has access to. Those works are based on this situation whereby things were gathered to make these vessels; something to carry other things in. So you scrounge around and find ropes or these very hard UN tent tarps, which you cut up and join to make a huge bundle that can take on mattresses, bedding, food… This tarp could be stitched together with a rope and nail that has been fashioned to resemble a needle. And the tarp itself could have waterproofing capabilities. When unwrapped, the wrapping could be fashioned back into some kind of tent, so it’s like one-in-all camping gear, for lack of a better term. There was no camping. But you have this equipment, put it all together… It’s very convenient. Lost and Found, as I call them, are efficient objects. The bare necessities, mish-mashed together to be easily carried from A to B and then unravelled into either bedding or housing.

SC: When you talk about something that’s ongoing, or something that you carry with you… I’m curious about how others can absorb and sit with that information. Of course, nobody can share that experience, but there’s a significance for me in being able to sit with that difficulty and in that knowledge, as you did with 100 Stools… There’s this compassionate leap that happens.

SAN: It’s more like a leap of engagement. Like with Barricade I or Obstacle I — those were obstacles put in private spaces, without consideration for access. Whoever is willing to engage, to fold themselves into a small series of openings to get where they want to go… This is uncomfortable for me as a viewer. How far am I willing to go to engage with this? I also ask that question. It’s one that is asked through the physical body. It’s not like you get into a space and look at something and your body can just walk away. Your mind might stay with it for a while, but there’s something quite confrontational about, ‘You’re going to deal with it starting with your body.’ So there’s that. I think with the other artists on show, those similarities come through. The willingness to engage or understand, to sit with something…

SC: You’re reminding me of a quote by Susan Sontag, from Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), which was in the essay that Tumelo shared, where she writes: ‘Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don’t become inured to what they are shown, if that’s the right way to describe what happens, because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.’

SAN: That’s powerful. Compassion is a withering emotion. Perishable. It’s one you constantly have to exercise. It’s like the opening to your essay, the first few pages in there.

SC: The one I’m currently writing about Tumelo’s work features both these texts, but it’s also interesting to see how what you’re saying resonates so strongly too.

SAN: There is quite a conversation there, I would say, if one is willing to sit down and see. I mean, you’ve set it up — there must be a reason you’ve set it up like this, right? It’s not obvious, you’ve got to exercise that muscle, but it’s there.