Dark and Lovely
"If you break through the most ordinary of all walls, then chaos enters like an overwhelming current."
102/103 Nox Secunda The Red Book, Carl Gustav Jung
When I moved to Johannesburg in 2008, I was shocked to discover that I would have to live in a condominium with extreme security measures. The entire perimeter was protected by a wall more than four meters high, reinforced with high-voltage wires and monitored by cameras controlled from a single access gate. No one could enter without authorization.
I had lived in different Latin American cities where insecurity was real, but I had never experienced such an explicit architecture of fear. In Johannesburg, violence, a legacy of apartheid, of extreme inequality, of structural racism, had completely reshaped urban life. The city ranks among the most dangerous in the world: violent robberies, express kidnappings, home invasions. But beyond the statistics, what strikes me is how fear organizes space: walls, fences, guards, sensors, and a fragmented social life between those who can afford protection and those left outside.
The only thing that broke that isolation was a river, the Jukskei River, which divided the compound in two. Without recognizing borders, the river carried traces of other lives. And with them, inevitably, it carried mine as well. I too came along with the current. Like so many others, I left one life behind to build another. And as I did, that river, insistent, silent, dragged along objects that spoke of other existences, but also of my own.
Video installation, 10’54’’
