Mind the Gap
2013; Routledge; Volume: 27; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09528822.2013.798179
ISSN1475-5297
Autores ResumoAbstract The spaces and tensions between races, ethnic groups, and communities in late Apartheid and post-1994 South African society, and the co-existence of different languages, religions and cultures, generated a society so fractured that cultural translation became a formidably difficult task. The concept of translation in a transforming society is examined through an analysis of two-dimensional language as a means of translating political events and experiences into visual forms, which attempt to communicate across cultural gaps. Iconic documentary photographs by Sam Nzima (1976) and Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) photographers (1997), struggle posters by co-operatives and formally trained designers, and artworks by Kevin Brand, Sue Williamson and Marion Arnold are discussed. The images reveal that different forms of visual representation encode different relationships of signifying content and aesthetic form to offer alternatives to speech and writing in communicating some implications of Apartheid politics, leaving a legacy that validates art and design as tools of political activism. Keywords: Marion ArnoldSam NzimaTRC photographersHector PietersonSowetoTruth and Reconciliation CommissionApartheidtranslationlanguagedocumentaryAntjie Krog Notes 1. The name 'Soweto' was derived from the first letters of South Western Township, the description of the area where black migrant workers, initially miners, were housed. 2. English and Afrikaans were the two official languages under Apartheid. 3. The official figure for lives lost between 16 and 25 June was 176; the Cillié Commission calculated a death toll of 575 of people who died in the riots by 28 February 1977. See Rodney Davenport and Christopher Saunders, South Africa: A Modern History, Macmillan, London, 2000, p 453. 4. Henri Cartier-Bresson's photographic book, Images à la Sauvette (1952) was published in the United States as The Decisive Moment, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1958. It gained that title because, in his preface, Cartier-Bresson cited a seventeenth-century text by Cardinal de Retz, 'Il n'y a rien dans ce monde qui n'ait un moment decisif' ('There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment'). The concept of the 'decisive moment' was recognized as the key to Cartier-Bresson's style. 7. Michael Baxendall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures, New Haven and Yale University Press, London, 1985, p 3 5. Michael Rosenthal, 'Approaches to Landscape Painting', Landscape Research 9, 1984, p 2 6. Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, 'Semiotics and Art History', Art Bulletin, 1991, p 193 8. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, Routledge, London and New York 1999, p 2 9. In Elements of Semiology (1964) Roland Barthes discusses 'the garment system', distinguishing clothes 'as written about' from clothes 'as photographed' (Barthes's emphasis), thus differentiating between the generic formulated in verbal description, and particularity embodied in the visual image. See Elements of Semiology, Hill and Wang, New York, 1968, online excerpt at http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/index.htm. 10. Charles Peirce defines icon, index and symbol in 'Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs'. See Robert Innes, Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, Bloomington, Indiana, 1985, pp 9–10. 11. Bühler's work on the psychology of language led him to distinguish a symbol from a signal within representation. He theorized a signal as a coded instruction influencing behaviour, and if his ideas are applied to visual representation, visual codes might generate action. See Karl Bühler, Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language (1934), John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1990. 12. For a range of posters, see The Poster Book Collective, Images of Defiance: South African Posters of the 1980s, Ravan, Johannesburg, 1991, and SAHA collections online. 13. Nzima was never paid copyright fees for the appropriations of his photograph. 14. Information in Art from South Africa, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1990, pp 81–82 15. For a discussion of Nzima's Hector Pieterson photograph and its role in memorializing the Soweto uprisings see Ruth Kerkham Simbao, 'The Thirtieth Anniversary of the Soweto Uprisings. Reading the Shadow in Sam Nzima's Iconic Photograph of Hector Pieterson', African Arts, summer 2007, pp 52–69. For a full discussion of the Hector Pieterson Museum, see Darren Newbury, Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa, UNISA, Pretoria, 2009, pp 290–309. 17. Michael Godby, 'Art and Politics in a Changing South Africa: Bongi Dhlomo in Conversation with Michael Godby', African Arts, vol 37, no 4, 2004, p 62 16. I discuss some significant politicized prints by Bongi Dhlomo in 'Cutting Anti-Apartheid Images: Bongiwe Dhlomo's Activist Linocut Prints', a paper delivered at the IMPACT 6 International Printmaking Conference held in Bristol, UK, in 2009, published in Impact 6 Conference Papers, LULU, 2011. 18. Dhlomo's print is published in Ann Oosthuizen, ed, Sometimes When It Rains: Writings by South African Women, 1987, London and New York, Pandora, p 44. Other linocut prints inspired by the Nzima photograph are Avashoni Mainganye, Heart in the Oven (1982) and Sydney Holo, Hector Pieterson (1982), reproduced in Gavin Younge, Art of the South African Townships, Thames and Hudson, London, 1988. A painting by Alfred Thoba, 1976 Riots (1977) contains reference to Hector Pieterson's death but the depiction suggests that Thoba worked imaginatively, constructing his composition from memory and knowledge of the riots, rather than from direct scrutiny of a photographic source. The image is emphatically a painting and not an empirical visual record. See the reproduction in Sue Williamson, South African Art Now, Collins Design, New York, 2009, p 47. 19. When it published its findings in 1998, the TRC Commission drew on over 21,000 statements on violations of human rights and considered the evidence contained in numerous submissions, amnesty applications and documents to which it had access. 20. Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull, Random House, Cape Town, 1998, p 42 21. See Davenport and Saunders, op cit, p 691, quoting the TRC brief. 22. TRC transcript, http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/amntrans/capetown/capetown_benzien.htm 23. Ibid. The hearings used interpreters so that testimony delivered in a native tongue – Afrikaans or a black language – was translated into English which was not always grammatically correct. Furthermore, English words, delivered under emotional circumstances, resulted in disrupted speech as is obvious in Yengeni's question. 24. Stills from this video appear in Sue Williamson and Nicholas M Dawes, Sue Williamson: Selected Work, Juta and Co, Brussels, 2003. 25. See Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, eds, Belknap Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 1987 26. Williamson refers to this in her Can't Forget; Can't Remember video. 27. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), paragraph 4, p 1212 28. These books are published in many countries.
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