Minnette Vári

Sentinel, a series of videographs, 2002-3

On the rooftops and high places of urban Johannesburg, imagine the appearance at dusk of creatures so strange that their role could be that of sentinel, or fugitive, or witness, interloper, heir, envoy, clairvoyant, even impostor. Not entirely of this world, but still with a very real and disfiguring multiplicity that speaks of a bitter and exotic inheritance — their bodies heavy with the relics and anxieties, gifts and weaponry of generation after generation. And at this moment, the very youngest in history, everything has been gathered into a tight, tense entirety, and all is at risk.

When we carve ourselves into or out of history, where does flesh end and stone begin? By grafting the family emblems of European settlers to Southern Africa into tumescent lumps, I confront the condition and self-awareness — the contradiction — of being both white and African. I ask what it is that keeps people from truly belonging to the place where history has brought them, and why, after all this time and on the brink of political and emotional homelessness, there are those who sit in high places, content to await the new day that they have promised themselves, an uneasy wind gusting all around.