Terra Nulla: Reclaiming Space, Place, and Power in Contemporary South African Landscape

Abstract

With the official end of apartheid in 1994, South Africa experienced a shift in the dialectic triad of space, place, and power that was inherently linked to the land. Consequently, this dramatic change also ruptured the trajectory of South African landscape art. Hence, at the turn of the century early colonial painters appropriated the South African land as the empty space from which to begin the colonial narrative. Yet, in the mid 1980s black township artists used painted landscapes as spaces of imagined homelands and in the contemporary context the land was reclaimed as an ideological force field ubiquitous with traces of politics, economy, and ecology.
This paper primarily focuses on works by the artist William Kentridge, who maintains a central focus on landscape in both his drawings and films. Using a deliberately outmoded expressionistic style, Kentridge employs traditional mediums to renegotiate sites of memory, while highlighting the contradictions of representing landscape as a neutral space. Arguing that landscape is an active rather than passive entity, this paper analyzes the layers of history hidden within dehistoricized spaces, and the role of the artist as mediator between the ephemerality of nature and historical amnesia. Situating the artist within Homi K. Bhabha’s conception of the Third Space, an interstitial site between the oppressor/oppressed and colonizer/colonized, Kentridge’s identity as a white, but Jewish, artist places him within a ‘double bind’. The artist’s unique space consequently determines the places he paints, and the personal memory he inscribes over sites of collective history.