Sven Christian [SC]: I’d like to talk about the motivations behind each of your respective practices and the work that you’re doing with Exhausted Geographies and pumflet?

Shahana Rajani [SR]: We returned to Karachi from grad school after 9/11, with the war on terror. At the time we were trying to process and deal with a new imperial and colonial gaze. More than ever, the city was being redefined as a pathological space, a breeding ground for terrorism. All around us in media discourses maps were being used to forward this particular kind of representation.

Zahra Malkani [ZM]: We had both been away from Karachi for a while at that point and the city was rapidly changing. It became subject to a wide range of fetishistic representations by artists, academics, and writers who wanted to represent the city as rapidly transforming. We were still re-acquainting ourselves with the city, so Exhausted Geographies stems from our own desire to navigate and understand the city, bringing artists, academics, writers, architects, and urban planners into conversation to open up more inter-disciplinary ways through which to see the city.

Ilze Wolff [IW]: I like the name Exhausted Geographies. From my experience the dominant narrative of architectural publications in Cape Town is very celebratory. We are told to view our city and to think about its architecture as a kind of showcase. It’s always about the newest building, the latest development. pumflet is intended for us to think about the social dynamics that this overly-celebratory narrative is entangled in — about the uncomfortable legacy of pre-colonialism, colonialism, and apartheid. I like the term ‘exhausted’ because exhaustion is about confronting yourself with a feeling. A lot of the work that we do is to think about the mood or feeling of a city — its condition — rather than the very material, technical ways of looking at architecture that we are used to.

SC: Could you give some examples of the various essays and maps produced for Exhausted Geographies, as well as the different editions of pumflet?

SR: The name Exhausted Geographies is borrowed from the term that Irit Rogoff uses. She talks about how, in some critical contested terrains, there is an exhaustion that accompanies the claims that are being made on the land. In this moment of exhaustion there is a collapse, and this collapse opens up an opportunity to revise and to rethink.

ZM: It was also a way for us to think about mapping practices that already existed in the city. A starting point was the work of the Orangi Pilot Project, an organisation led by the architect Parveen Rehman, who was killed in Karachi. To this day her killer is unknown, but it is clear that it was the land mafia of the city who had been targeting her. She created extensive maps that highlighted the indigenous populations living in the informal settlements of Karachi, often at odds with larger development agencies who wanted to take over the land. The map is included in the book as an important example of counter-mapping, alongside an essay by Nausheen H. Anwar, which problematises the processes of boundary making and the logic of privatising space. It also highlights a great many problems with the traditional modes and visualities of mapping that we are accustomed to using.

SR: The modern map as we know it is a colonial tradition. It carries with it a lot of epistemic violence. We wanted to think about how space was represented in other mapping traditions prior to colonialism. For this we asked a historian by the name of Shayan Rajani to contribute something. His essay and map look at 18th century narratives that existed in Sindh (the province in which Karachi is located) before it was conquered by the British in 1843, to see the ways in which people envisioned the relationship between region and world.

His map stems from a text that was written in the 18th century. Although the text describes the regions topographical features, it also placed importance on locating people within that space. He traces the genealogies of these important people in Sindh. What he finds is that to belong to Sindh did not necessarily mean that you had to be born there. In the 18th century Sindh was not imagined as a homogenous ethnic community. The understanding of borders and the nation state that we know today is very much based on processes of exclusion, immobility, and the restriction of travel. It was really different back in the 18th century — a time of great mobility and constant connections between different regions.

ZM: Each of us also contributed our own project. I was interested in looking at the practices of state-enforced disappearances, which accelerated at a dizzying rate in 2013 with the onset of the Karachi Operation and the rapid militarisation of the city. At the time Karachi was being represented as a violent city, a city at the forefront of the war on terror, but the disappearances had also been a phenomenon prior to 2013, especially in the Baloch community (the population associated with the province of Balochistan), which Karachi was historically a part of.

Karachi is the largest and most diverse city in Pakistan. It also has the largest Baloch population outside of Balochistan. I was interested in looking at disappearances within the Baloch community in Karachi, considering the map as a surface through which to visualise this very opaque, obscure practice. In doing so I came across a great many problems. With all the militarisation it was difficult to access data that you could trust. At some point I found the map as a surface to be incredibly limited and problematic in trying to visualise or see the problem of disappearance. My essay looked at all of the different practices that make this issue visible, and the different kinds of visualities that have emerged through activists from around Pakistan: counter-visualities that overcome the problems and limitations of the map.

SC: Shahana you mentioned pre-colonial cartographic traditions that included the mapping of peoples. Zahra in your paper there is also a turn towards the personal or individual archive. This is an approach that pumflet use quite extensively…

IW: pumflet was born in Ganesh, a bar in Observatory [Cape Town]. I was having drinks with the co-founder Kemang wa Lehulere, and his uncle, Oupa wa Lehulere. When we started talking about it there was a sense of urgency. We were thinking about the lost stories of Cape Town. Oupa is an old activist who started a school in downtown Johannesburg in the ‘80s. Oupa says, “Oh, but you guys are pumfleteers, that’s what you are!” I asked him what a pumfleteer was, and he said a pumfleteer is an activist, someone who needs to urgently tell a story about a specific issue. I thought that was a very apt name, because the projects that we wanted to do needed to be quick, to be on site, and to tell a very particular story. We’re not trying to tell the whole story of Cape Town or its history. Each publication is an obsession about a particular time.

The first was about a cinema in Bo-Kaap, Cape Town. There is now a post office where the cinema used to be. It had been very popular during the ‘80s, during the period of the Group Areas Act, when the Cape Flats were more or less established. Transportation was often a problem for many people working in town. People couldn’t get out of the city very easily, but if you wanted to watch a movie you could watch throughout the night and catch the bus out to Mitchells Plain the next day, or to Heideveld, or any of the other townships.

The manager of the Alabama Cinema was passionate about that space, about keeping it semi-public, but developers were looking to turn the space into something more profitable. Doing research we found a lot of documentation protesting its demolition. One such story is that on the eve of the actual demolition, there was a movie playing called Fire Power. Before it finished, the bulldozers arrived. They had to stop the movie.

People had to run out. It was all documented in the Cape Argus. We thought, what if we actually play the movie from beginning to end, on the pavement, as a homage to that site, to that idea around the Alabama Cinema? We wanted to re-insert it into the social imagination, because people have forgotten about it. I certainly didn’t know about that space. So the publication is a consequence of that intervention. It includes a collection of photographs, archival material around that intervention, and a series of hand-written letters that I wrote to a whole lot of people, asking about the cinema. The only one that really responded was Kemang, and that is how this publication started.

The second issue that I would like to speak about, “Gladioulus”, is about the demolition of a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Simonstown in the ‘60s called Luyolo. This was before the demolition of neighbourhoods really began. We discovered this photograph where you can see the neighbourhood as it was in the 60s. Looking at this picture, and through our conversations, we realised that an artist from Gugulethu, Gladys Mgudlundlu, may have painted Luyolo. In the publication we meditate on this possibility, as well as the work of Gladys Thomas, a poet who’s work with James Matthews was the first book of poetry to be banned. She was a resident of Simonstown, and was forcibly removed to go and live in Oceanview, where she lives today. We visited her a number of times, wanting to somehow incorporate her story. In the end her poem “Fall Tomorrow” made for a beautiful conversation between Gladys Mgudlandlu’s painting and the poem. We titled this issue “Gladiolus” to pay homage to the two Gladys’s. We wanted to think about what the loss of this neighbourhood now means for us as young people intervening in such spaces.

SC: Something that came up in a panel with Pages founder Babak Affrassiabi, Tazneem Wentzel, and Ashley Walters, was the importance of location in relation to the archive. Going to the site where the archive was produced, rather than where it is housed. I’d like to think about this in relation to, say, the story of Gladys Thomas, or your project Zahra, “Disappearing Karachi,” which was very much about the site of these disappearances. I want to know whether or not archives, once removed from their location, can still serve as authentic accounts or if it’s from this point that they begin to become mystified or disconnected from, I guess, a ‘true’ account of history?

ZM: In the case of missing persons it was precisely these formal archives that failed us. When I was doing research, going to police stations where reports were supposed to be filed, or to human rights organisations where this information was supposed to be collected, it was precisely these spaces that the information itself was missing. There were these incredible gaps. There is a lot of fear that impedes proper documentation. The archives that I ended up using were the formal archives, which I found primarily on the internet. These are archives that are already in circulation. They aren’t specifically or geographically located anywhere. With Disappearing Karachi, or the Voice of the Missing Persons, the desire is to subjugate this information and make it visible across the geography of the nation state, by going to the spaces where people were abducted and projecting their images there, or carrying out a long march holding images of missing persons. In that sense the location of the archive is always already in flux. It has to be, so that it can spread.

SC: Shahana in your paper, “Karachi: Geographies of Exclusion,” you write that “the development of Karachi, as with all cities, was laden with the ideology that included and excluded people to serve a larger ideal about what the city should be like in its proper form.” Could you tell us more about the various exclusions that happened and what you mean by ‘the proper form’ in the context of Karachi?

SR: In a post-colonial context this idea of the perfect or ideal city has everything to do with the colonial era and the anticipation of the white settlement. The colonial spatial imagination defined the city beyond anything as the tautology of disease, a space of immorality. Forms of urban planning were introduced to bring supposed order. Infrastructure was really important during the colonial era for the police and administration to be able to survey settlements. In our contemporary era, with neoliberal development, the ideal form of the city is found in this idea of the world-class. Karachi’s development and transformation is part of the state’s aspiration for the city to be like Vancouver, Dubai, New York, London and so on. Of course these desires bring with them a degree of media and discursive violence.

Thinking about what Zahra just said about missing persons and the connection that we’re making to state narratives: in Pakistan the one major development project that’s happening is the China-Bax Economic Corridor, known as EPAC. A lot of people rallied against it. There have also been a lot of enforced disappearances. Anti-terrorism laws are being used to intimidate people who are making visible the violence of this development. Of course the other discursive kind of violence that’s happening is being propagated visually with maps. When you think about Karachi, for instance, one of the facts that people are most proud of is that it’s the sixth or seventh fastest growing city in the world. People take great pride in this big, unparalleled urban explosion. How this development is imagined naturally expands to the peripheries and that development or urban sprawl is driven outwards towards the blank spaces in the map. Of course those areas in the peripheries are not empty. They’re not blank. A lot of the maps recall this colonial idea that it’s uninhabited, so it’s fair game to develop, and that this is the only future available to these spaces. Even in Karachi these peripheries are occupied by communities—whether agricultural or nomadic—who have been living there for generations. A lot of the work that I’ve been doing for the past two years has been to document and make visible the violence of development and real estate projects at the peripheries of the city.

SC: There are many instances of that in South Africa too. I’m thinking now of areas like Salt River or Woodstock, here in Cape Town, or back to the 2010 FIFA World Cup, when you would hear stories of people living outside that would be taken out of the cities so that when the world arrived they saw an ‘ideal,’ postcard-perfect city.

To go back to the idea of the map as a site of contested territory, I’d also like to talk about your intervention here at the museum, Ilze. The archive is something that has come up a number of times, especially in relation to the gaps that exist and the areas that are left out, yet this isn’t something that we’ve explored in relation to map-making. Could you talk us through your project, and how you see power being exercised through mapping, both as a site for spatial and political contestation, but also as a site for knowledge production?

IW: Sure. The word ‘archive’ is something that we as a collective kind of banned. It proposes importance, stateliness, institutional power. We try to use other words, to think about history and to think about extracting important stories through different mediums — through going to people’s houses, like Gladys’s, and getting her story out. You could call it an archive, but it’s actually her lived experience. These are notes that she’s made, poetry. It is a collection of somebody’s work. As soon as it enters into a space or conversation suddenly it becomes an archive. I want to understand that a bit more, because I feel uncomfortable with the kind of power that is imbued around that word. I would like to challenge us to find other words for that practice.

The thing about the word ‘archive’ is that one immediately associates it with powerful architecture — museums, schools, institutions, modern art galleries… Could an archive exist in a house in Oceanview? Could an archive be in a library in Gugulethu? Could an archive be in Tembisa, where Moses Molelekwa produced his powerful music? Those are the kinds of archives that we are interested in, that we want to explore and think about without calling it an archive.

Audience: Can I ask a point of clarification. I get that you would like to include the household into your idea of an archive, but from where I sit, would you want to exclude formal archives?

IW: I think it’s got to do with the kind of blindspots that we create when we produce history, when we produce publications. For a long time only traditional archives were looked at. It’s a point of enhancing what we have, rather than excluding. The project that we did for Zeitz MOCAA came out of a very brief WhatsApp conversation with Kemang about how we wanted to do this. It was a week before the opening of Publishing Against the Grain. We really wanted this body of work to form part of this wonderful travelling exhibition, and we thought, “What are we going to do to highlight the unsettled nature of the space and the Waterfront, but still be able to take part in this wonderful project?”

The Graduate School of Business [GSB], which is a ten-minute walk from the museum. It used to be the Breakwater Prison. We were thinking about the history of that site, the people that used to be incarcerated in that building, and wondering about where the texture of that history is in this building, because there is none. There’s a tiny brochure with the Protea Hotel’s logo on it, which tells you the history of that site. We didn’t have time to do a pumflet on that site before the opening, but we thought that we could write a letter to the organising curator, Sven, to highlight the issue or the conversation that Zeitz MOCAA could have with that site, around the Waterfront.

The official map of the Waterfront doesn’t include the history of the Breakwater Prison, so there was an opportunity for us to think about that history in a more nuanced way. We wanted to think about the people that were involved in constructing the Breakwater Prison, and to bring that back into the contemporary social imagination.

SC: Zahra this brings me back to something that you spoke about in your paper, “Seeing the Missing”. Could you tell us a bit more about the Voice of the Baloch Missing Persons, and how they activate public space — how they go about resisting the disappearances?

ZM: I was just rereading my essay earlier today. I wrote it in 2013 and had a lot of thinking to do about how rapidly things have changed since then. In 2013 the Voice of the Baloch Missing Persons was probably at its peak in terms of visibility. They were being led by the activist Mana Philip, whose son had disappeared. Just to give a little bit more history, the province of Balochistan has been engaged in a separatist struggle against the state of Pakistan since Pakistan’s independence in 1947 [inaudible], thinking about the boundaries of Pakistan as we know it today, the one’s that the British colonisers, and every single boundary is contested to this day. But perhaps [inaudible].

SC: Shahana in your paper you reference the Dawn newspapers that were produced in Karachi during the ‘50s. Although they painted a very specific picture — one that favoured the interests of the elite — you mention that there were letters written to the paper that gave some insight into what public opinion was at the time. I’m interested here in the personal format of letter writing, which is something that pumflet use quite extensively. Ilze, how has this format varied when working on other more collaborative editions, like “Spectre”?

IW: “Spectre” was a collaborative project with graduate students from the University of Johannesburg’s architecture school. We located it in an area called Fordsburg, which was a site of forced removals. Over the course of a week students were asked to find one story, one narrative, one obsession, and think out from there by going into the museums, going through the archives and the newspapers, and by going to people’s houses. I didn’t ask them to go interview large groups of people.

Rather than having a conversation, some of the shopkeepers that they spoke to made sketches of the old shops they used to own. For me those sketches were invaluable. They were new archives, new knowledge forms. It was interesting because these were architecture students, learning about visual identity, visual thinking and story telling. I’m an architect myself, and I make buildings. For us it’s a way of finding out how we can intervene wisely in a space like South Africa, with all its contestation and its troubled history. What are the wisdoms we need to gather, to make beautiful new spaces that are sensitive and relate to a history that is so entangled with struggle?

For that workshop the students became very attached to the people they spoke to. One of the students ended up writing a letter to a person that organises walks in Fordsburg. This idea of correspondence is interesting, because often one gets lost in academic writing. I am also an academic, I write in that way, but I think there are different ways to think about history that are more direct, more personal. When you read a letter that is addressed to somebody else it’s kind of like, should you be reading this? There’s a tension there that I like to set up.

Another project that we did, called “Gaiety,” was a story from Die Vlakte in Stellenbosch. It was basically a conversation between myself and my father, who grew up there. He has a lot of stories about the Gaiety bioscope, many of which he’s already written about and published. We ended up screening an opera which he told me he could never watch in the Gaiety because it was a cinema that was dedicated to people of colour in Stellenbosch. The opera that he wanted to watch, La Boheme, was only playing in the Plaza, for people who were considered white at the time. We played it at the site of the Gaiety to pay homage to that situation but also to rectify it. We then published his story.

That was a particularly personal publication for me, because those are the stories that we grew up with as a family. I think that is important. We need to delve into the personal. The tension is about how one makes it publicly accessible, because sometimes the personal can almost become too personal — inaccessible to the wider public. It’s about how one bridges that tension between the collective and the individual.

SC: I think the point you’re raising now, about how one is able to intervene or bridge that gap is key. Once land has been marked out, demarcated, or occupied, it becomes very hard to rectify. Just in terms of the physical space, you can’t rebuild an entire city’s infrastructure overnight. You have to find ways to transform pre-existing structures, make them accessible, or at least find ways to make them more accommodating. I’m curious to hear what you think the next step is. What is our own individual responsibility towards collective action?

SR: It’s about trying to centre the personal, even in a political practice; trying to reconcile art and research in order to think through these erasures. It’s something that we are all struggling with. While working together on Exhausted Geographies—searching for answers and working through these questions—we started this collaborative project called the Karachi Lajamia. Lajamia roughly translates to ‘active university’. The idea for us was to create an active institution or experimental project where we could re-politicise art education to come up with radical ways of making art that collate with ongoing struggles in the city. In Karachi, art that is exhibited in the gallery has become very disconnected with urban issues.

ZM: It can be incredibly demoralising, to approach a space as artists or researches or architects and learn exactly how powerless you are to change the processes that are happening. The only thing that we’ve really been able to tell ourselves is that at least there is someone doing the work. Someone who is there and is documenting what is happening. We just need to continue.

SC: Ilze is there anything that you would like to add to that?

IW: Just to echo those sentiments, it’s important that we continue to think through the city and its multiple narratives. We need to think about how we look at development. How do we create nuances? How do we make it more inclusive? How do we think about the city as a site for social cohesion? How do we highlight ways of thinking about our histories through other subjectivities — through feminist histories, children histories, anthropocentric histories? The development of our cities is very much concentrated on recent histories of human intervention. We need to think more long-term. We need to think about new narratives and break down some of the blind spots that surround development, and hopefully influence people that can actually make change. We need to convince influential people — those who have the power to make buildings, cities, and neighbourhoods — to be sensitive to the kind of wisdoms that we would like to continue gathering. As you say, I think the key word is just to continue. We have to keep on going and develop that discourse as we go. It is a discovery for us all to think about in that way!

Audience: Ilze you spoke about the issue of archives. I was wondering if you could just reflect a little on the notion of a building, like the one we’re in, as an archive?

IW: Any material that was developed over lifetimes can be viewed as an archive, but I think the reading or the interpretation of the archive is important. A building is always situated. It is part of the social history of a space, of a neighbourhood, of a city, of someone’s creative thinking. How we interpret that for our own creativity, how we read it, is important. Are we going to read it through a very didactic or a very specific lens, or are we going to read it with other subjectivities, those in our back pockets?

Audience: Don’t you think we’re expecting too much of maps? Maps are made to tell us where something is, it’s geographic location, or for a specific utility. It depends on what your focus is. The map provides the ‘where’, but the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ depend on the narrative. This museum only focuses on art from Africa and the Diaspora, dating from the year 2000 onwards. It just depends what story you want to tell and how well you tell that story. The question is, can you be definitive or do you always have to say what it is you’re trying to do and try represent that as best you can?

Audience: My question adds on that. It’s about the vision and the mission statement of this museum. I’m interested that pumflet include stories like that of Gladys Thomas or James Matthews, who are not artists of the 2000 era. They’re old people. Do they only get a gig in this museum through young people? What about uncle Lionel Davis — does he only get a gig in this museum through younger people? What about all our other photographers?

You can’t collect everything in the world, there has to be a collection policy, but for you to have a panel discussion like this somehow obscures that you don’t recognise that your museum hides people. You have to be upfront and say “We are a museum that don’t want to see our really good people that haven’t had a chance to exhibit their work, people that were in jails at a time when our city didn’t have a chance”. Our black people didn’t have a chance to exhibit their work.

I understand that this is not a government building, but it has a government history. It has an apartheid history. You can’t sweep that away. We have to deal with it! My child is a new child. She’s a South African and she says “Mom I get tired of this apartheid thing”. I also told my father to please stop talking about the Second World War, that I’m not interested. I’m tired. But when you start a discussion like this, start it openly and say “This is what our collection policy is, but in this framework we’re going to have a discussion”.

SC: I agree with most of what you’re saying, especially about recognising the history of this building and the need for spaces that celebrate such artists. With regards to the museum’s collection policy, I think the focus on contemporary art dating from the year 2000 onwards is a choice that has been made, but I don’t think it necessarily excludes history or that the work only speaks to the contemporary moment. The experiences and stories that are being told are firmly connected to these histories.

Audience: I’d like to come back and support what the Zeitz MOCAA are doing. Their focus is contemporary art from Africa and the Diaspora, starting from the year 2000. Emotionally I hear why you would like to give space to voices that weren’t represented before the year 2000, but that is really the responsibility of the South African National Gallery or the Apartheid Museum. There are other archives that should explain that history. And when you do a map, perhaps, of great South African artists, not to include people like that would be obscene. But what this institution is doing is taking us from the year 2000 forward.

IW: I quite like this way of thinking about space because it brings up certain binaries that we have. I’m always trying to think through the intersections of those binaries, and how things can overlap. I like that you brought up the fact that Gladys Thomas is a whole generation of people that have produced work and are now being seen in a new light. That is the beauty of a different generation thinking back and thinking forward. Part of the reason why we didn’t incorporate our pumflet in the museum is directly linked to the troubled nature of this space. A lot of institutions in South Africa have this problem. This museum is not the only one.

We chose not to include the booklets at the museum but at the Graduate School of Business in order to bring people out and get them to think about the GSB in a different way. So there are these inter-generational overlaps. Maybe there was someone in 1999 that could have been interesting, or maybe there will be people in the future, children that will be making art that are also very interesting. How can we think inter-generationally, inter-sectionally, in non-binary ways? I think you are raising a very important point. Many institutions have events that are very well intentioned, but a lot of things go disavowed. There’s a kind of silencing that happens. I think it’s important to keep on talking about it.

With regards to maps, I agree with you. They serve a specific purpose, but I think there are certain subjectivities that are produced when you’re making a map. There are maps produced for certain audiences, for example, and there’s a power and a privilege that goes into many of the maps that we see. Our role is to constantly question that so that it doesn’t become a dominant map. Maybe there other maps, other subjectivities, other narratives that need to also be made visible.