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Interview with Jens Cording
in i-n-t-o.de
2-2011
On Rumori da Monumenti

J.C. - How do you regard your stay in Johannesburg in retrospect? Do you have the feeling that you know this town now?

L.R.-I had the good fortune of having many, quite different, people showing me the city through their eyes. What remained is a complex, dense and contradictory image of Johannesburg. In spite of all that the city lost nothing of its attraction, for me it is still mysterious and ungraspable. One just cannot take it in; it is as if people and things are in continual flux.

J.C. - What makes this city so fascinating?

L.R.-The crossover of architectonic styles which reflect various cultures but also the social development as a consequence of the most recent history. On the one hand there is the inner city, which was built by the white population during apartheid and whose architecture recalls rich European cities. Today it is primarily lived in by black fringe groups, the city administration has long since left this area of the city. In this surreal, vertical township people often live in luxurious architectonic shells with neither water nor electricity. It is as if at the centre of a ring of ultramodern suburbia the middle ages have broken out again. I find it fascinating how extreme individual city areas can differ from one another. The most impressive contrast is to be found between the Alexandra Township and Sandton, the hyper-futuristic suburb, neighbours topographically but in terms of the rights and lifestyles, potentials and perspectives of their inhabitants they are worlds apart. What I particularly like about Johannesburg is the virtual verticality of the city – the distance between the deepest mine and the highest buildings (which can amount to almost 5km) and their respective elevators carrying people above or below the ground. I had the sense that the level upon which I moved to be a fragile surface, a partition wall between two worlds – one underground and one over ground. To obtain a first impression of Johannesburg the writer Ivan Vladislavic took me to the Carlton Center on Commissioner Street. In the skyscraper you can take a lift to a viewing platform called »Top of Africa« on the top floor. From there you have a panoramic view of the city and its bewildering counterpoints of decadence and futurism.

J.C. - Try, using five adjectives, to describe the city.

L.R.-Loud, virtualised, metamorphosed, multi-layered, ruptured.

J.C. - What did you investigate in the city and what themes did you discover for yourself?

L.R.- In my search for the noises and sounds of the city I recorded conversations in the various languages of the country (there are 11 official languages!) and people carrying out their work. While out and about I was continually accompanied by Johannesburgers and I collected their impressions and acoustic perceptions of the city. The result is a polyphonic panopticon, a collection of people’s acoustic memories, those I encountered during my stay. To give an example: the artist and curator who lives in Braamfontein, Marcus Neustetter took me onto the terrace of his apartment on the 17th floor where I could experience the noise of the air-conditioners, generators and cars all melting into a kind of sound of the sea; hist fictional ocean; the composer Philip Miller took me to the Melville Koppies, where groups of Zionist, Ethiopian, Pentecostal and Apostolical church singers celebrated their Sunday services under the open sky, generating a fantastic mix of gospel variations, the mbube; the sound artist James Webb gave me a recording taken from the deepest mine of the country – the sound of the cage-lift descending, the stamping of the machines and the noise of thousands of miners at work; Mpho Maponya, a black sound engineer from Soweto, accompanied me to the Mai Mai market, where the Inyanga, Zulu medicine men, pounded medicinal herbs in huge metal mortars producing polyphonic bell-like sounds which gave the ritual crushing quite its own distinct rhythm.

J.C. - Has the image you had, up to now, of Johannesburg changed since your stay here?

L.R.-Before my trip I read a great deal of literature on Johannesburg and so I knew quite a lot about the social and political situation there. What has really surprised me is the attitude of the people who live here; they embody a quite special combination of dreamer, idealist, a positive and communicative people, who appear to be fully conscious that it is impossible to lead a normal life in such a dangerous and chaotic city. Yet they all yearn for positive contacts and true friendships and seek to be social and creative in their work.

J.C. - Just how much have your impressions and experiences influenced your work?

L.R.-I hope that the linguistic wealth of this land will enter my composition. The black population here speak the most varying melodic, rhythmic languages in which all information is clothed in a story. This traditional narrative art is both mysterious and clear at the same time. In my time here I have been acquainted with the beauty of the Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho and San languages and made recordings with the speakers explaining the characteristics of each of their idioms. Most of the time I have spent here has been with locals, I have accompanied them during their day, gone with them to rehearsals, studio sessions or to their work place. I was fascinated by the multifaceted concepts of life that are possible here and how people succeed, in spite of all the social and ethnic differences to get something off the ground together. Of course I realise that where these people are concerned we are talking of the creative “elite” and not the average person. But I really enjoyed spending a day at William Kentridge’s Theatre Studio, watching a new production of »Woyzeck« of his featuring Adrian Kohler’s puppets. In his extraordinary ensemble white and black dancers, actors and puppeteers live and work side by side. I was also at Philip Miller’s studio while he was playing the music for a French film production on South Africa. When I saw the way the black musicians came to the studio and started their musical dialogue, free yet imprisoned in their tradition, how they were completely submerged in their landscapes of sound and in the process styles overlaid each other producing a kind of vertical compression (in particular the wonderful Zulu singer Zamo Mbuto), I got the idea of how many levels of experience and memories are overlaid upon one another in this city. Johannesburg is extremely old and simultaneously ultra modern, and perhaps music is a place in which these two apparently irreconcilable extremes can find positive expression.

J.C. - Have you become acquainted with the music of this country?

L.R.-The landscape of contemporary South African music is far too complex and to a large extent far too »underground« for one to discover and understand in the course of a month. But I think that I have succeeded to assemble a colourful musical “compilation” with, amongst other things, unpublished recordings by musicians who I have got to know here. The collection makes no claims on objectivity, but exhibits a cross section of traditional South African music. It is a panorama of the musical fundaments of the ordinary people here.

J.C. - Will you incorporate elements of South Africa’s musical inheritance in your composition?

L.R.-Yes. I will realize a composition for solo recorded voice and ensemble using fragments from Ivan Vladislavic’s “Portrait With Keys”. The voice will be realized by a South African actor under the direction of Minky Schlesinger. In this way, a South African voice will be included, reading an English text full of topographic names, specific words of Johannesburg, showing the unicity of linguistic local sounds.   In the score I will certainly integrate some results of my acoustical inquiry in the formal andamento and also in sound texture, without, however, using concrete quotations or examples.

J.C. - Who did you purposefully seek out? And how did it work out?

L.R.-I got to know several artists who live in and work on Johannesburg. The huge social commitment of these people is the expression of the most recent history of the city; their works always appear to address the real political problems. In this instance I am thinking of some memorable »tours« we made, for instance with Terry Kurgan to Yeoville (an area on the periphery where predominantly illegal immigrants live), where at the time she was developing her next public project. Along with that were the encounters with Ismail Farouk, who was carrying out a social art project for the Johannesburg Art Gallery in the Joubert Park area, and with Marcus Neustetter, who was busy with the Hillbrow communities and headed numerous street sculpture projects in public places (in which artists and artisans were involved), or with Bronwyn Lace, who was carrying out a project for street children and making long term investigations on it. I also spent unforgettable days with a Johannesburg trio, two unemployed black sound artists, Thabo Maponya and Mpho Maponya, and a young woman, Zodwa Radebe who at the time was writing her doctorate in anthropology. The three had offered their help in my search for sounds and explained to me the social situation of the Xhosa, Zulu and Sotho from their own perspectives and in their respective townships. From them I experienced how people in South Africa live. They introduced me to their family and friends, artists, musicians and local politicians, they showed me their Johannesburg and it was all with a joy and generosity that I will never forget..

J.C. - Which experiences will you most certainly introduce into your composition?

L.R.-I hope that I will be able to write a composition that will be understood and appreciated by the extraordinary, colourful mixture of people I have met here. Hopefully not too utopian a goal.

J.C. - How did you experience your being foreign in this city?

L.R.-Strangely enough precisely the opposite – I had the feeling that I belonged here, which is probably due in a certain way to everyone being foreign to all the other communities in the city. Nobody feels they are part of a single great community here; which is why they all try automatically to integrate newcomers into their own group, and thereby develop an astounding sense of the problems and needs of the others.

J.C. - You had to seek out a small present for the Ensemble Modern, something which for you symbolises the city. Have you found anything suitable?

L.R.-My souvenir is a mobile of coca-cola bottle tops representing street musicians playing the guitar. I bought it from a couple of children, who like many poor children here, recycle waste products of the first world. I marvel at this object for its immense elegance and because it has been made with such skilful handcraft; aside from that it symbolises the lack of resources and the suffering and poverty of the post apartheid generation.

J.C. - Do have the impression you have discovered the essence of the city?

L.R.-If after such a short intense stay I can say anything at all about the city it is that the constant »movement« is what gives it its charm: the daily, chaotic, bustle of people from the most various of origins "travelling" inside the city

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