"Where Shall We Place Our Hope?": COVID-19 and the Imperiled National Body in South Africa's "Lockdown Collection"

During April 2020, for the first twenty-one days of what South Africans term "the Lockdown" (elsewhere in the world referenced as "shelter in place" or quarantine), prominent South African artists were invited to create or share work that spoke to COVID-19 and its unfolding crises. A second series was organized in May 2020 as the national Lockdown was extended. "The Lockdown Collection" (TLC), was underwritten by sponsors in business and cultural communities and has generated funds to support vulnerable artists as well as the South African President's Solidarity Fund. The initiative has also occasioned an open call to other South African artists and creation of a special collection devoted to works by student artists.

Our essay explores how the initial project came about, the circumstances that led so many artists to respond with great energy and imagination to its call for submissions, and how this varied group of creative figures engaged with the challenges of representing COVID disasters and beginning, tentatively, to imagine new worlds that might emerge once (and if) the pandemic subsides. We conclude with a discussion of challenges faced by students at Johannesburg's Artist Proof Studio, who represent an emerging generation of South African artists and who inherit the deep challenges that this pandemic represents in a country of extreme inequality.

Our title is taken from the work which launched the collection, William Kentridge's Where Shall We Place Our Hope?, a drawing of a great tree in full foliage, inked across a ledger page from a late-nineteenth-century mine on the Rand. The work is drawn from Kentridge's production of the opera Waiting for Sibyl, in turn inspired by the classical figure of the Cumaean Sybil, guardian of the Underworld, who is said to have written her prophecies on the leaves of an oak tree, gathered at the mouth of her cave. Winds would chaotically rearrange the leaf-inscribed messages, rendering those seeking guidance from the soothsayer, uncertain as to which message might be intended for them.

The haunting question, "Where shall we place our hope?" is perhaps the oldest human lament. It echoes the opening of the 121st Psalm, "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help." This interrogative takes on particular poignancy in Kentridge's home city of Johannesburg, a metropolis built on the backbreaking labor of millions of African migrants who toiled in the gold mines, driven by often-unrealized dreams of a better life, even as they and their descendants forged vibrant cultures of dignity and resistance. The deep shafts and tunnels they created, a persistent motif in Kentridge's work, are resonant with the Sybil's ancient cave, in which the future was hinted, but invariably elusive.

Kentridge's enigmatic query, which he inscribes on a low wall in front of the tree, is an apt frame for the works of TLC. In various registers these artists and their works approach the COVID-19 crisis as an opportunity to pose challenging questions about the nation's past and its uncertain future, grappling with climate change and environmental catastrophe, socioeconomic inequality, unresolved legacies of colonialism and the "colonization of consciousness," and a long-term crisis of alienation and social fragmentation under conditions of modernity. As we shall see, they also approach these novel plaguescapes as opportunities to reimagine new worlds founded on emerging visions of compassion, social justice, and solidarity, while transcending patriarchy and other parochial interests. The works draw upon and refashion histories of late Apartheid resistance art informed by indigenous cosmological and ritual imagery. Taken together, the creations ask us to ponder the promise of a democratic South Africa that, like so much else in our world, hangs in the balance. Where shall we place our hope?

THE PROJECT'S ORIGINS AND GOALS

On March 25, 2020 South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced Lockdown for twenty-one days. While listening to the speech, Carl Bates, CEO of the...