Winding your way along Kromdraai Road, Sun(w)hole pops in and out of view. From a distance the artwork is recognisably man-made: the top corner juts out from the hillside like a sundial, its silhouette stark against a crisp, winter sky. In summer the rain clouds gather, reaching outward and upward before spilling their contents across its weather-beaten surface. Amine El Gotaibi’s intervention has become something of a talking point at FARMHOUSE58, visible as it is from different vistas. It shifts with you as you move, like a giant revolving door. People on hikes are drawn to the work, uncertain about what it is or why it’s there. Most linger on the hole at its centre, unable to see anything through it but sky.

The hole reminds me of a game I used to play as a kid, when I would close one eye and press a roll of toilet-paper to the other. Peering up through the cardboard on a bright sunny day, I could always find a full moon. Try to look at anything else and the illusion disappears; my sense of vertigo replaced with an imaginary line that connects me to a world of things. Sun(whole) alludes to this connection, but it also displaces it. Like the clouds, the wall reaches outwards and upwards; a condensation of both natural and man-made elements: earth and concrete, but also stones, grass, glass — all caught in the act of compression. Other forms of plant-life have taken root within the wall. Insects move in, out, and across its surface, building nests and carrying food.

Looking at the form-work used in its construction I picture an ant farm, yet the wall doesn’t let up its secrets. The hole is a vanishing point without a horizon line. It provides nothing to hold onto, no telescopic lens through which to fix my gaze. Still, the thin film of sky it circumscribes is strangely expansive. And it’s clear that I’m not the only one drawn in by the hole’s gravitational pull. At its base lie two rocks, placed by inquisitive hikers. They’re large enough to stand on, but not large enough to spot land. Even on tip-toes, I’m left wanting. I step back and walk around the wall. Everything I could have wanted to see through it is in front of me. Still, I turn back and peer at the hole.

It’s only later that I become conscious of its cone-like form. El Gotaibi has not just made a hole but a funnel, mirrored on either side. Watching the close-up footage of him chipping away at it with a pick-axe, hammer, and chisel, I can’t help but think of those movies in which people tunnel their way out of a tight spot. At the same time, the hole reminds me of an hourglass or ant-lion trap. It catches the sun in its arc and places it squarely at your feet. Only, what you’re looking at is not the sun. What you’re looking at is the shape of the hole, defined by the shadow of the wall.

Sun(w)hole has a habit of doing this; of turning things inside-out, flipping things on their head. It is the earth, pulled up from below and anchored above; a straight line atop a curved hill. It bends space and time, drawing attention to the strange yet affirming effect of the particulate — light, sound, smell, and touch — whilst muddying hard-and-fast distinctions between self and other, here and there, present and past. It reminds me of the opening passage of Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I Will Write About This Place (2011), described by one reviewer as a book of ‘ellipses and half glimpses.’

The story begins in Nakuru, Kenya. Or more specifically, in the backyard of a middle-class home, between two makeshift poles. At their centre is a boy of seven. Standing in front of El Gotaibi’s Sun(w)hole — the wall stretching out on either side, the hole just above — I imagine myself alongside him. His younger sister Ciru and older brother Jimmy are there too. They are playing soccer. The middle-child is meant to be keeping tabs on the game, but can’t help his daydreaming.

Warm breath pushes down my nostrils past my mouth and divides my chin. I can see the pink shining flesh of my eyelids. Random sounds fall into my ears: cars, birds, black mamba bicycle bells, distant children, dogs, crows, and afternoon national radio music. Congo rumba.

He is the goalie, but he keeps finding himself outside of himself. In such moments, time stretches, and the immediacy of the game, its urgency, dissipates. He can feel his laugh ‘far away inside, like the morning car not starting when the key turns.’

There is an anticipatory logic here, and his sister, Ciru, has just got the upper-hand. She is coming his way. He is ‘ready… sharp…. springy.’ He is ‘waiting for the ball.’ But then Jimmy intercepts Ciru, and our protagonist is outside of himself once more:

A few moments ago the sun was one single white beam. Now it has fallen into the trees. All over the garden there are a thousand tiny suns, poking through gaps, all of them spherical, all of them shooting thousands of beams. The beams fall onto branches and leaves and splinter into thousands of smaller perfect suns.

The sun reads like a metaphor for his own subjecthood, and right now it is hard to tell where one beam starts and another ends, whether he is whole or fragmented, or whether each fragment is whole:

I laugh when Ciru laughs and I find myself inside her laugh, and we fall down holding each other. I can feel her laughter swelling, even before it comes out, and it swells in me too.

Much like El Gotaibi’s Sun(w)hole, the world described by Wainaina is osmotic. Things bleed into each other; are constitutive of each other. Both stretch the bandwidth of how we understand ourselves in relation to the rest of the world. They play up the desire, on the one hand, for certitude, and on the other, to let go. It is this tension between stablility/certitude/self and its inverse that I find inherent, not only in El Gotaibi’s Sun(w)hole, but the various images taken of the work, and their afterlives on social media.

In contrast to the crumbling wall, which was built in 2021, Sun(w)hole’s location at a popular tourist destination has led to a growing archive of images, from selfies and marketing material to a mention on Google Maps. Although some were taken for the purpose of documentation — as evidence of its former life — most were not; they are records of life, a way of saying ‘I was here.’ They mark the passage of time, offering ‘indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had’ (Sontag 2005, 6).

Susan Sontag has suggesting that the medium, especially where tourism is concerned, might placate one’s anxieties about being outside of one’s comfort zone (2005, 6). Wrenched from one habitual environment and the stability, routine, and purpose of one’s nine-to-five, the camera becomes a mechanism for travellers to re-establish the co-ordinates of their everyday. In this way, the growing archive of images attests as much to the lives of others as they do the work, which is often included without reference — more of a backdrop than anything else. ‘Back at it… we hike and we snap,’ notes one of the captions.

Importantly, Sontag writes that despite photography’s ability to ‘certify’ experience, ‘taking photographs is also a way of refusing it — by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir,’ and thus ‘assuaging general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel’ (Sontag 2005, 6).

Without a compass, we turn to the camera to ‘[give] shape’ to our experience’ (2005, 6), yet the lifeline that photographs proffer is by and large illusory; as elusive and ephemeral as the wall itself. My interest, then, is not with the wall but its effect on people: how they experience and respond to it, and how the camera may inadvertently capture and distill the artist’s core concerns. If, as Sontag writes, ‘to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed … putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge — and, therefore, like power’ (2005, 2), then the role of the camera may not be all that dissimilar from those early navigational instruments, such as the sextant and astrolabe, which create the illusion that one is central to the worldview established through the viewfinder.

As writes Hito Steyerl, many of the navigational instruments used by seafarers in the early stages of imperialism had a profound impact on how we view ourselves in relation to the rest of the world. Such instruments reduced time and space into a linear format, plucking the sun from the sky and bringing it down to the horizon so as to be able to pinpoint one’s position. Like photography, it requires that one ‘fiddle with the scale of the world’ (Sontag 2005, 2). In order for such tools to work, one has to disregard the ‘curvature of the earth,’ conceiving of the horizon ‘as an abstract flat line upon which the points on any horizontal plane converge.’ Like the camera, this abstraction required a ‘one-eyed and immobile spectator,’ creating ‘the illusion of a quasi-natural view to the “outside,” as if the image plane was a window opening onto the “real” world.’ Importantly, Steyerl writes that this transformation of space and time — which enabled the construction of things like longitudes, latitudes, and ‘linear progress’ — also had a profound effect on our sense of subjecthood:

As the whole paradigm converges in one of the viewer’s eyes, the viewer becomes central to the worldview established by it. The viewer is mirrored in the vanishing point, and thus constructed by it. The vanishing point gives the observer a body and a position. But on the other hand, the spectator’s importance is also undermined by the assumption that vision follows scientific laws. While empowering the subject by placing it at the center of vision, linear perspective also undermines the viewer’s individuality by subjecting it to supposedly objective laws of representation.

Much the same could be said of photography, which translates all of our experiences into a search for the photogenic. El Gotaibi’s concern for this singular vision is rooted in a concern for conquest, domination, alienation — in short, imperialism, and the scramble for Africa that had the continent divided up and subjected along similar lines.

In Sun(w)hole, as with other works like Lion Atlas (2021), it is the particulate that counts; the matrix of light and shadow that enables one to traverse the distance between one’s self and one’s other. Similarly, in his drawings of sheep, the figure is frozen in place between one or two vanishing points. Significant here is that Gotaibi keeps this matrix in plain sight. He does not erase the lines, nor does he try to place his sheep on anything that might resemble stable ground. Instead they appear floating in space, convinced as he is that ‘any pictorial medium cannot represent, in an exhaustive way, today’s life in its crumbling, its complications, and the acceleration of its temporality.’

In Phoenix (2019), the artist suspends a sheep mid-air. On one side, its form is silhouetted by a thin metal frame, yet on the other it appears to dissolve; an atomic transformation that enables the trapped form in all of its solidity to mingle with the light and escape through the open window. After Steyerl, his is ‘A fall toward objects without reservation, embracing a world of forces and matter, which lacks any original stability and sparks the sudden shock of the open: a freedom that is terrifying, utterly deterritorializing, and always already unknown.’

Social media could be said to illicit such a shock. It is a space that is forever changing; where the process of documentation is at once sedimented, layered multifaceted. So that while the taking of a photograph might temporarily soothe one’s anxieties, posting it on social media has the potential to renew them. Like the wall, the sheer scale of such platforms can have a disorientating effect. Just as soon as an image is added, it gets buried beneath the weight of other images, all of which compete for attention. While its tags and hashtags may enable points of connection to be made, the sense of communion they convey — of a shared experience — is by and large illusory. As with Sun(w)hole, one’s perspective, and therefore one’s position, is forever mobile, unstable. His is a crumbling world, a collapsing world, a place to daydream. Its effect may be disorientating, but as writes Judith Butler, it is only through ‘disorientation and loss’ that ‘the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know.’

A large crack emerges in Sun(w)hole, running from the top of the wall through to the hole’s circumference, then down to its base. It’s hard to tell if the wall will come down in increments, or if I’m going to wake up one morning to find that the crack has metastasised; the top half split through and in heaps. I can’t help but wonder what will happen when there is no more hole; will visitors still feel inclined to place rocks at its base? What will they look for, or through? Will they mount the broken pieces to get a better vantage, or walk along its length? What kind of creatures will make their home in the wreckage? When the posts replace the work, what kind of story will they tell?