Babel Re-Play

Abstract

This article discusses the first phase of Babel Re-Play, a collaborative project by academics and artists in South Africa and Switzerland applying principles of art as research and play theory. The interest of the participants, inspired by the larger research initiative Construction Site/Chantier, is in deepening our understandings of the ways modernity is playing out in contemporary cities. The article shows how re-playing the well-known myth of Babel recorded in Genesis in the Old Testament, which has been explored and re-shaped by countless artists, philosophers, and scholars over the ages, affords new readings and new knowledge of the city. A South African team and a Swiss team each produced a short film, serving to sample aspects of the contemporary city led by interpretations of myths associated with Babel.

Keywords

African modernity art as research Babel collaborative research construction site play theory Swiss-South African collaboration tower

Genesis 11, St James version – The Tower and City of Babel And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there.

And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly.

And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.

And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven: and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.

And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language: and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.

Therefore is the name of it called Babel: because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Introduction

Babel Re-Play is a collaborative Swiss-South African art research project, which focuses on the ways in which modernity operates and is received in contemporary cities in the two geographical locations.¹ The project is headed by Georges Pfruender and Cynthia Kros, as well as digital artist and university professor Margarete Jahrmann. It is part of Construction Site/Chantier, a larger art-research initiative launched in 2014, with partners in South Africa, other countries in Africa, and Europe, focused on experiences with manifestations of modernity in contemporary African cities. Babel Re-Play is inspired by the profusion of art projects and philosophical ideas that have been stimulated by the myth of the Tower of Babel and its imagined setting in the city of the same name, and explores aspects of this in relation to cities today. Clearly, there is something about the Babel myth that strikes a chord in human consciousness across millennia. It has continued to intrigue artists, philosophers and scholars from many disciplines who have used it to represent, explore, magnify and sometimes to rail against aspects of their own societies that seem to portend catastrophe or radical change. The gaps in the story of Babel and its open-endedness, while seeming to say something universal about human ambition and cycles of triumph, ruin and renewal, allow for the myth to be re-played, perhaps endlessly. This means that there is considerable scope for new authors to have their own interpretations.

In this article, we document the productive use of theoretical and artistic methods as well as integrated theories of play and performative skills for deepening an understanding of multiple narratives, which inform and shape the identities of cities. The preliminary results of the project were two short films. Through these performative sketches a new awareness was gained about the potential narratives of specific locations, which can only be understood from a multi-temporal perspective. The myth of Babel serves as an entry point – a framing device – and allows us to surface what is not immediately visible (Malaquais, 2005: 31). In South Africa, the team comprised director and theatre practitioner Mwenya Kabwe, filmmaker Jurgen Meekel, three performance artists – Vanessa Cooke, Khutjo Green and Tshego Khutsoane – musician Jill Richards, and Kros. In Switzerland, Samuel Dématraz – video artist and film producer – worked with Jahrmann and Pfruender.

The project enabled a growing awareness of how to use play and myth to measure or determine the nature of our environment. The films themselves are instruments allowing us to gather materials and help us learn more about the protocols that govern what is real. We were inspired by scholars who reacted creatively to the epistemological and methodological challenges raised by the 1968 student revolt, and were urged on by more recent demands in South Africa for decolonized curricula – a contemporary call for productive ways to unsettle the canon.

Babel Re-Play enabled us, in the process of careful and nuanced readings of locations in South Africa, also to find ways to productively think cities of the North. We are in favor of global conversations informed by situated knowledge. We acknowledge, however, that such conversations can only be productive if inherent tensions are surfaced, addressed, and negotiated.

Bricks

In the Genesis version, bricks were a founding element for the realization of the Tower of Babel and the City. We originally proposed that the films would function as ‘bricks’ to be used in the construction of our own tower. In the process, we found ourselves kicking against the solidity of the brick metaphor. Instead, we began to focus on the brick as a visible result of a complex and differentiated process of firing involving a number of ingredients including core texts, protocols and working settings. Babel Re-Play Johannesburg and Zürich co-emerged from a series of dialogues that we conducted in a variety of formats, readings of particular texts, writing of new texts, recordings of city sounds, and re-playings of Babel superimposed on our local environments. For the South African film there were sketches, but no ready-made script until the final editing. The film sequences produced in Switzerland relied on stories/images/dialogues shared with colleagues in South Africa. For each site, a specific protocol and play conditions for action and filming to occur were created.

Locations – Outlines

The film Babel Re-Play Johannesburg is based on sequences filmed at different locations shot on separate days, but the final version is a mash-up of the following scenes given here in chronological order:

‘Marat’ in a bathtub in a house in Auckland Park, an old suburb of western Johannesburg near the city centre. Marat is reciting poetry about Nebuchadnezzar and the imminent fall of Babylon;

a dishevelled Nebuchadnezzar on a stool in front of a little tower-like structure. At his feet are the ruins of a locally well-known industrial site from the early 20th century, the Rand Steam Laundries and Cleaning and Dyeing Works in the Johannesburg suburb of Richmond;

two performance artists climb up the Tower of Light, a relic of the Empire Exhibition held in Johannesburg in 1936, now part of the campus of the University of Witwatersrand (Wits). They enact various rituals of bureaucracy on a balcony about a sixth of the way up; and

a small tower dissolves at the bottom of a suburban swimming pool, also in a western suburb, many of whose residents are either academics at one of the two Johannesburg universities, artists, or employees of the South African Broadcasting Service (SABC), the South African public broadcaster.

Three locations were used for the Swiss film sequences, allowing us to test different play scenarios, play context interventions and filming:

a performer reads a text in front of the ground satellite communication station of Leuk, which accommodates on its premises an interception system for Swiss and international intelligence gathering;

workers in safety suits are filmed at the Chavalon Thermal Power Plant, constructed in 1965, which operated as the only fuel-powered plant in Switzerland until 1995. Its 120-metre-high chimney serves as a visual point of reference for the region; and

cameras pan the Prime Tower in Zürich, built in 2011. With 36 floors, it remained the highest tower in Switzerland until 2015, attracting prestigious financial and legal services. It was hailed as an icon in the city’s drive to become a global economic and cultural metropolis.

Sensing modernity

Exchanges between the schools of art in Johannesburg, Addis Ababa, and Kinshasa, about how to decolonize the tertiary arts curriculum, as well as subsequent work with colleagues in Construction Site/Chantier, led us into re-considerations of the modern and modernity through the lens of the Global South. Conversations in Addis encouraged us to look for specific testing situations in a drive to reach a deeper and more embodied understanding of the city as a site where notions of the modern could be or were being critically questioned and re-shaped. In Addis Ababa we became aware of how the impressive development of infrastructure comes at the cost of displacing thousands of ‘lower income households’ to a life on the periphery of the city whence they are relocated often against their will, and in desperate conditions. Gebre Yntiso (2008) describes one of the consequences of relocation as the severing of informal networks that had allowed poorer households in the city to survive. The very notion of citizenship, as one of our Ethiopian colleagues put it to us, has become ‘fragile’ (Giorgis, 2014). This has led to the disappearance of areas of great social and cultural relevance, which, judged to be unruly and anti-modern, have vanished, and with them a part of the city’s memory.

Johannesburg is similarly a city in combat with inherited organizational logic that comes both from apartheid and lingering modernist ideas, which have their roots in the earlier 20th century (Dinath, 2014: 240). In the last 20 years, the population of Johannesburg, in Gauteng, the most economically dynamic province in South Africa, has more than doubled (Gotz et al., 2014). Unlike Addis, and in a trajectory that goes against the global norm, population density in inner-city Johannesburg has been rising since 2000 (Todes, 2014). Development in what is known as the Gauteng City-Region has been rapid, but uneven, along the contours of historically established ‘fractured forms’, as Graeme Gotz and colleagues describe them, referring to both racial and land-use differentiation and discrimination (Gotz et al., 2014: 46).

Yasmeen Dinath (2014) locates one of the principal difficulties for those officials who are striving to improve the amenities of inner-city Johannesburg in its deeply embedded genetic disposition, to be a city both of ‘permanence’ and ‘transience’, which for us has overtones of the Babel story. While recounting the difficulties of trying to accommodate the contradictory needs generated by the city’s dual nature, Dinath makes an ironic observation about ‘the municipality’s modernist impulse to fix, order and clean up the inner city as though it could be scrubbed clean and polished bit by bit until it is all “sorted out”’ (Dinath, 2014: 244, our emphasis).

Maldonado-Torres reminds us that modernity/modernization rests on ‘colonizing ideas, institutions and practices’ (2011: 7). In his book, teasingly titled We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour (1991) argues that, to some extent, modernity is merely an illusion conjured by ‘westerners’. They have succeeded in inculcating the belief that there are culturally distinct, mutually exclusive knowledge systems, of which theirs is the most highly evolved (also see Fals-Borda and Rahman, 1991). Babel Re-Play was developed in a context that made us acutely aware once again of the hierarchies of knowledge that are entrenched, both in the academy and in the management of cities, which we wished to question productively. We were also conscious of the jarring disjuncture between utopian visions – like the one Dinath gently parodies – and dystopian realities.

Constellations

In the course of our work we have kept on coming back to the idea of the constellation as a useful construct (Pfruender and Kros, 2015), which allows a simultaneous reading and re-reading of a selected number of scholars. We read their texts in relation to each other and ourselves from our own situations. Four principal scholars/artists have served as reference points for the constellations in this first phase of the project: Michel de Certeau, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Djibril Diop Mambéty and Paul Zumthor.

De Certeau (1925–1986)

De Certeau, standing on the 110th floor of the World Trade Center in New York City at the beginning of the first volume of The Practice of Everyday Life, is by turns casual voyeur, city planner, cartographer and ‘minister of knowledge’ (1988: 95). He gazes down at the ‘texturology’ of the city below, under the illusion that he can read its gigantic letters at a glance. But De Certeau knows that to understand the city he must trade the disembodied ‘ecstasy’ he experiences while he is standing on the observation deck of the World Trade Center, through embarking on what he calls the ‘Icarian Fall’ (1988: 91–2). He anticipates how very much harder it will be to study the ‘migrational (his emphasis)…city’ than it is to comment on the ‘planned and readable’ one that appears below him before the Fall (1988: 93). De Certeau knows that the ‘Concept-city’ (1988: 95), created by those who look at the city only from an elevated vantage point, is simultaneously producing the conditions for its destruction. The ‘Concept-city’ will never survive the ‘endless labyrinths far below’ (1988: 92).

Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)

Catalysts for our project come from the diverse range of the Swiss author and artist Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s work. The image of the Tower of Babel is a leading theme in his oeuvre and is the title of the second collection of his autobiographical Stoffe (1990). Frustrated by the difficulty of conveying in writing both the gigantic proportions of the tower and what he believed was the folly responsible for it, Dürrenmatt turned to representing Babel in several drawings.

In the project, we read his work An Angel Comes to Babylon [Ein Engel kommt nach Babylon], 1957; hereafter Angel), which was as close as he could get to writing a play about Babel as a parody of the modern state. Dürrenmatt inserts the characters of Nimrod and Nebuchadnezzar into the story of Babel against the backdrop of a city whose landmarks match it to ancient Babylon, but which is filled with the debris and social afflictions of a modern city.

Dürrenmatt’s Nebuchadnezzar, temporarily in control of the throne, battles vainly against what he considers to be the dangerous proliferation of poetry in his city, and is humiliated by the indomitable street wisdom of the wily beggar Akki, who also accommodates homeless poets. Beset by Nimrod’s pesky attempts to unseat him, as well as the inherent contradictions in his own vision, Nebuchadnezzar is unable to create the ‘rational society’ which would inaugurate the ‘New Order’ he dreams of (Dürrenmatt, 1957: 67, 90). Nebuchadnezzar’s New Order seemed to us to be a version of De Certeau’s Concept-city.

The Angel of Babylon brings Kurrubi to Nebuchadnezzar’s city. She is a woman created by God for the ‘lowliest of men’ (1957: 11). When she meets Nebuchadnezzar disguised as a beggar to snoop on Akki, she falls madly in love with him. Unable to love Nebuchadnezzar as the king he reveals himself to be, she flees the downfall of the tower predicted by Akki even before it is built, under the latter’s protection (1957: 92). It is the bitter contradiction of Nebuchadnezzar’s situation, brought home to him forcibly as he surveys the ruins of his vision of ‘perfection’ (1957: 90), that he interprets as God’s injustice, and against which he resolves to build the tower.

Mambéty (1945–1998)

Djibril Diop Mambéty, one of the important cinéasts of Africa, portrayed in his films (Badou Boy, Touki Bouki, Le Franc, La petite Vendeuse du Soleil) the city of Dakar, his hometown, in all its many colours of beauty and ugliness, talking about the dreams of residents in a better ‘elsewhere’, whilst organizing their lives in uncertainties in their day-to-day realities. ‘I was born in the Dakar of my childhood. In other words, on the outskirts of the capital itself, because the road from your birthplace to the capital is always the path of a desire called emancipation’ (Voser, 2016). In his book Cendres et Braises, the award-winning writer Ken Bugul describes Mambéty wandering through Dakar, his encounters with people on the streets, in markets, in cafés – a flâneur of sorts capturing stories of a city he saw in a struggle to overcome corruption and chaos (Bugul, 1982; Clements, 2011). De Certeau also speaks of the necessity of experiencing the city at street level to come to a nuanced understanding.

Late in this first phase of our project we realized that Mambéty, whose reworking of one of Dürrenmatt’s plays had already caught our attention, in addition had something to teach us through his word-play on ‘grand-mère’ and ‘grammaire’ (Voser, 2016). Grandma tells the story in a different way each time, whilst grammaire (like that of the ABC of film school, Mambéty explains, which he himself never attended) insists on standardized techniques and formats and sets permanent rules. Obviously Mambéty was far more inclined to follow grandma.

Like Dürrenmatt, Mambéty used the vocabulary of magic and of the outrageous to create fiction with a deep political echo, believing that ‘if we want to change things, we have to be aggressive, to irritate the spectator, to make him feel ill at ease, without expecting immediate and tangible results’ (extract from interview with Mambéty in Voser, 2016). As Ukadike (1999) points out, Mambéty acted in anti-canonical ways, refusing to follow the path of conventional filmmaking. He liked collage as a way of mixing elements of story-telling and visual impressions. He was looking for ways of reinventing cinema from positions of the de-colonial. For Mambéty, Africans were the true originators of cinema because of the power of oral traditions to create images and sequences.

Zumthor (1915–1995)

Paul Zumthor, the Swiss historian and linguist, claims that the abandonment of Babel does not represent catastrophic failure as depicted in Renaissance paintings, but a new beginning. This promise of inachèvement (the unachieved) is paradoxically the great triumph of Babel. To Zumthor, the pestilence of late capitalism is overwhelming. Among other afflictions he mentions unemployment, xenophobia, segregation, war, pollution, and waste. In this nightmarish landscape, the finished, inhabited city is the zone of an umbilical cord attached to a terrifying reality at the mouth of hell. It is immobile modernity that has failed spectacularly, so much so that ‘the real’ has been ‘de-realised’ (de-réalisé) (1997: 218), rendered sterile by consumerism in all its manifestations. Zumthor, who cites Axelle Kabou’s (1991) Et si l’Afrique refusait le développement? (And if Africa refuses development?), implies that the nomads turning their backs on Babel have recognized that development is domination and that God’s act is not punitive, but salutary. For Zumthor new scenarios of cities are yet to be dreamed and realized by the departing nomads.

Methods for measuring the real

When De Certeau was commissioned by the State Office for Cultural Affairs in France to study everyday life, he recognized that the methods that were highly regarded by the academy (and which he by no means rejected) were, on their own, unequal to the task because they had been ‘constructed for other objects and with other aims’ (De Certeau and Giard, 1998b: 256). In a similar vein, David Everatt (2014: 68), reporting on the recent findings of the GCRO, argues for new ‘measurement tools’ capable of delivering information about what he calls the ‘psychosocial realm’. In the same collection as Everatt’s chapter, Nqobile Malaza (2014: 557) suggests ‘narrative, memory and interpretation’ as ‘tools’ for measuring the ‘intangible’ black urban experience. Similarly, Dominique Malaquais (2005: 21) talks of the ‘imaginary of the city being brought into the realm of the real’ by the aspiration of city dwellers to make it what it could become. Through their collective desire they make of this imaginary a consistency as strong as architecture, and make this movement towards the new possible (2005: 22).

What tactics, we asked – to borrow De Certeau’s vocabulary – could we adopt to look with fresh eyes and open minds at the way the city is being lived? We were jealous of Dürrenmatt’s boast: ‘meine Freiheit als Künstler besteht darin, dass ich mit dieser Welt spiele’ [my freedom as an artist is that I can play with this world], quoted in Gasser, 2014). We knew that it had allowed him to break productively with the conventions of academia, theology, and stagecraft in search of a more complex and permanently open-ended understanding of the world.

Play as instrument

We believe that through re-playing Babel new knowledge can be activated. We acknowledge with Fagen (1981) that play taunts us because it remains elusive and to some extent inaccessible. The artist Yohann Quëland de Saint Pern, our Réunion-based colleague in Construction Site/Chantier, defines play as the space in which doubt reveals itself and thus prevents us from reaching hasty conclusions because something in play remains ‘unsolved’.

Play has been theorized in many different disciplinary fields and has been applied as a methodology for investigation, interrogation, subversion, or re-imagining of the real (Huizinga, 1995; Winnicott, 1971). Flanagan suggests that scholarship can be situated in one of two different ‘camps’ – ‘those who see play as voluntary, intrinsic, and important to class structure (leisure) and socialization…and those who look more to ritual, to communication, and who study play in natural settings’ (2009: 5; see also Sutton-Smith, 2001).

Inspired by Raban’s (1974: 2) assertion of the intrinsic theatricality of city life, a number of artists since the 1990s have developed projects in urban environments in which play operates as a revealing agent and a probing device of the real (Pfruender and Kros, 2015). While working on Babel Re-Play, we have seen that play, when it is infused with critical reflection, can offer possibilities for a ‘careful examination of social, cultural, political, and even personal themes (that function as alternatives to popular play spaces)’ (Flanagan, 2009: 6).

Myth as a framing device and perpetuum mobile

Myths operate as federators of, and mediators between, cultures (Lincoln, 1999). De Certeau’s fondness for using a range of mythical heroes as ‘go-betweens’ mediating between named individuals and the anonymous collective, or between the exploratory writer and the reader, was remarked on by his associate Luce Giard (1998a: xxxii; see also De Certeau, 1988: 102–3). Eye-opening for us, moreover, was Zumthor’s study of the seemingly endless permutations of the myth of Babel across centuries, which led him to conclude that the reference to the real never ceases to oscillate in relation to the myth (la reference au réel ne cesse d’osciller) (1997: 116; see also Lévi-Strauss, 2001). The particular anxieties of an era are brought into close focus through the contemporary literary and artistic interpretations of the myth – whether it is the ‘contamination’ of a supposedly pure language (see, for example, the ‘confounding’ of languages), or the anarchic properties of urbanization, which were seen as announcing the demise of western civilisation. Myth’s distance from the real allows for a multitude of positions when considering its agency in a current context – a bit like Mambéty’s grandma, the narratives triggered by the root story point in many directions, and contain potentialities which are only discovered in the telling.

The films – Towards analysis

Our project’s WhatsApp group started out exchanging images of towers both literal and figurative. In October 2015 when students began to protest volubly against the South African universities’ attempt to raise tuition fees, and called for ‘decolonization’ of the university system, Mwenya was reminded of the perennial ‘ivory tower’ metaphor. The video she posted of students demonstrating in the concourse of Wits University’s Senate House at the base of what is known as the Tower block reinforced the imagery.

On the WhatsApp chat site, we had begun to imagine ourselves as an assortment of inhabitants of our own tower. Through our play situation we each developed a character who we discovered, as we went along, grew into an exaggerated version of a type or identity that one would encounter in post-apartheid Johannesburg: the female black worker disgruntled with the unrelenting job of keeping the tower clean, the patronizing middle-class white woman whose fear of the ‘other’ erupted sporadically, the manager who could only fall back on managerial rhetoric in the face of catastrophe, the stubborn aesthete who insisted on looking for beauty, and the complacent but agoraphobic European. We experimented with various subject positions and perspectives on the crisis in the universities from within the relative safety of our imaginary tower, although real tensions were also revealed in the increasingly acerbic banter. As our tower threatened to collapse or to be exposed as a structure that was held up merely by the collective will-power of its residents, we played, chatted, made up scenarios, and at the same time scouted our local landscape for towers.

Babel Re-play Johannesburg

For the Johannesburg team, the character of Nebuchadnezzar (nicknamed ‘Nebby’ by Akki)² in Dürrenmatt’s Angel exercised a particular fascination in late 2015 and early 2016: during the time we were filming, the National Department of Higher Education had given in to students’ insistence on a zero-percentage fee increase, and then later on entirely free education, and had shifted the responsibility back to the universities. The principal of Wits University Adam Habib’s nadir came when a press photograph was distributed showing him sitting cross-legged in the space at the bottom of the Tower block, submitting to the directions of a group of students who were holding him hostage. For us this was the quintessential Nebby, when he realizes that the enterprise he had embarked upon with such high hopes has crumbled, and that the balance of power, temporarily at least, has been spectacularly reversed.

As we began to interact with our locations we were struck by the encounter with the city’s colonial past and some of the early 20th-century aspirations to modernity that accompanied one of Johannesburg’s previous attempts at being what is now proclaimed in the city’s marketing material as a ‘world class African city’. Inadvertently we were disturbing pre-emptory ghosts like those described by De Certeau and Giard (1998a), whose demands for acknowledgement it is hard both to predict and to accommodate through the instruments we have to hand – for instance heritage legislation. Perhaps we felt their presence most keenly on the site of the Rand Steam Laundries and Cleaning and Dyeing Works in the Johannesburg suburb of Richmond, the location we chose for the re-enactment of Nebby in his decline (played by Vanessa Cooke).

The laundry, with its distinctive industrial architecture, closed down in 1962 but remained a landmark for the western suburbs until its buildings were torn down in flagrant violation of a provincial heritage order in 2008 that the Parktown and Westcliff Heritage Trust (now the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation – a civil society organization) had obtained in an attempt to pre-empt its anticipated destruction. The offender was Imperial, a car dealership, whose name provided the cause for much bitter mirth among members of the heritage fraternity. The laundry, testimony to the rapid industrialization and technological innovations in Johannesburg once proudly proclaimed as being the ‘largest establishment of its kind in the whole sub-continent’ (Bird, 2006: 2), was now a debris field featuring a truncated tower-like structure.

For the Heritage Foundation, the laundry site was heritage-worthy, not simply because of its architectural qualities but also for the evidence it offered of differentiated forms of accommodation for a racially segregated work-force. The Heritage Foundation wished also to commemorate the migrant isiZulu-speaking men from what is now KwaZulu-Natal who had done laundry for the residents of Johannesburg on the banks of the modest river known as the Braamfontein Spruit from the late 19th century into the first decade of the 20th. These AmaWasha were broken up and dispersed several times by the local authorities. The final blow came from the new steam laundries, backed by foreign capital, which were able to take advantage of the emergent state that discriminated against Africans (Van Onselen, 2001;³ Bird, 2006; Fraser, 2008).

As we play around the pathetic little tower on the laundry site (the borehole purification tower) while Nebby – sitting in front of it – takes slugs from his gin bottle, trying vainly to hold onto his crown on a hot summer’s morning in 2016, we reflect on the desolation of the site, haunted by its quarrelsome ghosts, and are simultaneously aware of the uncommon sound of birdsong mingling with traffic noise along Napier Road that runs along the front of the site.

The Tower of Light is located on the campus of Wits University just over the rise from the Richmond laundry site. It is considerably larger in scale than the laundry tower, but neither as tall nor imposing as it was intended to be (Lee, 2015). The Tower of Light was erected in 1936 in what was then the Milner Park show-ground for the Empire Exhibition. Johannesburg, celebrating its Jubilee with due deference to its remaining imperial connections through a display of heraldry in the city centre, was coming into its own as a world metropolis in ways magnificently recounted in Clive Chipkin’s Johannesburg Style (1993: 89–104). Chipkin casts a well-trained eye over ‘the breeding ground for modernism in South Africa’ (1993: 93). Sponsored by the Electric Supply Commission and the Victoria Falls Power Company, the Tower of Light became the third highest building in the city, and was one in a global series of monuments meant, as Chipkin explains, to glorify electrification as the ‘magical ingredient of modern society’ (1993: 108). He sombrely notes that while lights blazed in the city centre and at the show-ground, in Johannesburg’s ‘slum-yards’ and black townships ‘there were no lights…no electricity – only braziers in winter, candles and paraffin lamps’ (1993: 106). That was, he suggests, the real darkness of pre-modernism – or perhaps the other side of modernism. And 1936 was also the year of notorious legislation that further restricted the rights of black people.

In our film, after a complicated experience with securing permission to use the first-floor balcony of the Tower of Light, it became the stage for Khutjo and Tshego to enact the absurd rituals of bureaucracy, which ends with them tossing down the voluminous pages of our contract with the university, later to be almost, but not quite, caught in graceful slow motion by Tshego on the ground. In Angel bureaucracy is cited as one of the central props of the global order, a bit perplexingly along with begging and capital punishment (Dürrenmatt, 1957: 58). We presume the connection lies in the management of complex systems, the operations of hierarchy, and rigid adherence to rules. Begging might be read as the subterfuge of the powerless so wonderfully embodied by Akki, the beggar in Dürrenmatt’s play.

The seven-minute film from Johannesburg also contained reflections on writing, language and the legacies of revolution (Marat appearing as one of the figures of revolution). We are still engaged in re-reading the stories we were telling ourselves during the making of the film (see Geertz, 1972, on Balinese ‘deep play’ and the ‘players’ telling stories to themselves). We make connections and acknowledge particular legacies that probably would not have occurred to us through conventional research or reading the historical literature. Thus far the stories we are telling are of the contemporary moment, and of both the constancy and fragility of power; of its institutional and economic origins in what turned out to be the final days of empire; and of the cyclical attractions and repulsions of modernity.

Babel Re-Play Zürich

For the Swiss film we wished to create narratives that build on scenarios and texts developed in South Africa, and offer concrete examples of play situations, to be replicated in South Africa. From the perspectives of Switzerland, we undertook to play with topics linked to the Babylonian myth in selected contexts, which would talk to Johannesburg. We were considering the current tense political environment in Europe and Switzerland informed by debates on migration, nationhood, and identity politics.

Close observations in situ delivered impressions of a contemporary urban environment deeply affected by the global, where notions of space and of time crumble (the concept of space now to be understood as informed by a grid of economic, political, and cultural interconnectedness, and the concept of time to be complexified by the interweaving of digital and real and the new possibilities of ultra-rapid travel). Constructing re-play scenarios of the urban in Switzerland, we wished to address this new tower situation, no longer just a vertical one, but located in simultaneous space-time expansion. We felt this could be best expressed by choosing spots in the country which connect to, or mirror, ‘the urban’.

Dürrenmatt’s texts became a potent source for giving shape to what seems to be a main characteristic of Swiss versions of the Tower of Babel: the dimension of the invisible and hidden – the hoarding and trading of global financial wealth and the world’s primary resources happens with such efficiency because it is organized away from the probing eyes of an unwelcome public. In his wonderfully corrosive speech at the ceremony in which Václav Havel was awarded the Duttweiler Prize, Dürrenmatt represented Switzerland as a prison to which people fled to protect themselves from the world, becoming simultaneously guard and prisoner. His prison metaphor made the team reflect on how control is exercised today, both at individual and collective levels, and how exemplary sites can be identified to reveal narratives of control.

One such place was the satellite station at Leuk, an installation divided into two zones, one under Swiss control and managed by the defence ministry, the other one (which covers the larger surface) owned by a company belonging to an American firm. The antennae are part of the Swiss Onyx surveillance programme, which intercepts international civil and military communications that transit via satellite. In Edward Snowden’s revelations on the work of the American National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013, these big ears made news as they were rumoured to be in use as spying stations and the origin of major data leaks. We encountered the custodians who reluctantly allowed us a brief visiting period of a limited zone of the station. In the post-Snowden era they seemed sensitive to the possibility that the confidentiality of their towers could be breached. Our presence was scrutinized as if it could endanger the safety of the transmission of these invisible data flows. Standing next to one of the gigantic satellite dishes, Margarete Jahrmann read from her book void published in 2016 – a reflection on emptiness and vertigo – with a voice so minute and with so little impact in relation to all the undetectable voices that were being broadcast and subjected to global scrutiny. Sound extracts of the ‘radio transmission’ scene in the surrealist film Cocteau’s Orphée (1950) underscored this sequence.

At Chavalon – a fuel power plant built in 1965 on the side of a mountain overlooking the Rhone valley to ensure electricity for the cities of the region, shut down in 1999 – we witnessed its costly and lengthy dismantling process. The plant, unsustainable and inefficient, was contaminated by asbestos. Formerly, it had been the pride of the region, considered a monument to progress, and a catalysing force for industrial development. The surrounding residential village for workers had been built in a kind of post-Ledoux utopia, now abandoned, and slowly decaying. The current disassembly of the structure was undertaken by a foreign workforce – mostly from Portugal – instructed not to talk to visitors about their conditions of work. ‘We are good enough to do their dirty work and then leave,’ one of the workers told us. Filming in and around this site, we tried to capture the kind of investment which comes not only with building but also with un-building. The sad nostalgia of the site reminded us of sequences of Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, where the main character guides his clients through the debris of abandoned industrial sites to Zone. Sound bites of this moment of crossing were integrated into our sequence.

We became more alert to, and mindful of, how towers of surveillance produce spaces of disciplinary power (see De Certeau, 1988; Zumthor, 1997: 169). At the site of the Prime Tower in Zürich, these spill even beyond the tower into the open spaces surrounding the building, as security cameras control the movement of pedestrians from all angles – the performing of the public is here strictly regulated. Despite several attempts, the team was refused access to the tower other than to the restaurant located on the top floor where filming was forbidden because of issues of ‘data protection’. In response to this setting of precision and control, we secretly used go-pro cameras as actors. Moving them around the building, we wished to scrutinize the architecture from multiple perspectives, offering unstable views of that which seemed to suggest a total self-containment and stability. In the editing we worked with passages from Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, a book about power and failure in a futuristic urban environment.

Such impenetrable architecture could only be met with the actions of humans. When working on the video sequences, we became aware of the need to create another layer of narrative to interact with, and to counteract, images playing with monuments of the urban. In a situation of re-play, we wished to re-size and situate the films, opening up space to some of the minor stories, which were the products of various encounters prior to and during the filming, organized as real-time interventions. The smaller and more absurd these actions were, the more they could say about what any act of resistance has to acknowledge as a start – that even a tiny gesture can have a consequence for the environment. An architectural setting will become exactly what it was built for – to serve as a stage for various actions and through this process to be transformed.

The working processes in Switzerland and South Africa occurred in two parallel movements, during which both teams shared information and discussed findings. In this dialogue we became aware of the substantial differences in how cities reveal themselves and become real to us. Re-Playing Babel in Johannesburg brought us scenarios of debris, quarrelsome ghosts, forgotten towers, bureaucratic impediments and the echoes of ongoing protests. The Swiss project seemed on the surface to produce a counter-text of control, stability, regulation and orderliness. Yet on the mirrored surfaces of Zürich’s Prime Tower countless stories are being withheld, or are reflected only from a safe distance. We are keen to investigate these for, as Dürrenmatt pointed out, Swiss wealth and stability has come at a price, and is built on many injustices – or the blatant lack of solidarity – occurring elsewhere. Would Switzerland be as rich if, for example, the mining industry in South Africa were to pay workers a living wage? Can the beauty and stability of the Prime Tower be read in direct relation to the towers drilled into the ground in South Africa? We are convinced that both these questions need an othering perspective, which the team can provide as a consequence of its expertise and changing locations.

Conclusion

We have been exploring the origins, nature, and distribution of power through re-narrations and re-playing of contemporary Babel scenarios. The contexts of colonization have once again forcibly been drawn to our attention as we work in two teams in South Africa and Switzerland. We have been stimulated to think about the imprints of modernity in Johannesburg, whether visible in the management ideology and practices of the municipality, the rubble on the laundry site in Richmond or the now incongruously placed Tower of Light on the university campus. These traces may be anachronistic and impotent, but there is life in them yet and we cannot simply ignore or transcend them.

In the film project in Switzerland, we are discovering that our own narratives and those of co-citizens need to claim a space in the way the urban is to be told as a set of stories to shape that which is still invisible, yet makes up the fabric of life. In this we follow Malaquais’ suggestion that the urban should be thought from the perspectives of those who have experienced it in its most complex and harsh dimensions – recognized as a kind of science – and comprise as much expertise as that of those who consider themselves the specialists yet lack, for the most part, the knowledge of a city as lived experience (Malaquais, 2005; De Certeau, 1998a).

In the next phases of our project we hope to explore these notions of the urban and their ramifications for the citizens of the city more extensively. We also hope to elaborate on an idea about linking the sleek, elegant towers of Zürich with the dark and dangerous inverted towers of the South.

After recounting a litany of the excrescences of global capitalism, which oppress the spirits of late 20th-century westerners, Zumthor deplores the loss for the new generation of the research collective in the social sciences. Over the course of several art projects we have had ample opportunity to think about what it means to work as a collective. We see the collective and the individual in an inextricable and mutually reinforcing and stimulating relationship that brings with it serious obligations, but also the opportunities for visionary shifts of consciousness (see also Simondon, 1989; Barthes, 1967). We understand our work with the films as a form of collective research, which operates on the principles of extraction and sampling. We have brought them into a laboratory setting where experts from different disciplines are analysing and reconfiguring the fragments into new constellations of meaning (Symposium Centre Dürrenmatt, 2016). We see this work process as productive and as a promising prototype to allow us to enter the next phase, which will focus on aspects of agency and authorship concerning citizens and nomads.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding came from Pro Helvetia Johannesburg, Centre Dürrenmatt and the Fachhoshule Nordwestschweiz.

Notes

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