Converting Eviction is a collaborative project* concerned with the realities of land, identity, policy, place-making and more. The first stage of the project was supported by Pro Helvetia Johannesburg and incubated at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in May 2019 as part of the For Once programme with intentions to be further developed and shown again in South Africa and Switzerland.

A collaborative undertaking by Sello Pesa and Tim Zulauf, Converting Eviction features contributions by a variety of international artists and performers, namely MX Blouse (SA), Vivien Bullert (DE/CH), Hlengiwe Lushaba Madlala (SA), Humphrey Maleka (SA), Lindiwe Matshikiza (SA), Zamo Mkhwanazi (SA/CH), Christoph Rath (AU/CH) and Tracy September (SA/CH).

Reclamation, removal, separation and crowding. While Converting Eviction is an amalgamation of a number of modes of performance, these themes characterise the performance to varying extents, while also running through it and holding it with a distinctive resonance. The performance begins outside of the venue itself, with a cordoning off, or perhaps, a demarcation of space. Tape is drawn across throughways, while fixtures and items of furniture are piled up in the centre of these newly rezoned spaces.

Audiences are guided to their seats, surrounding the multifaceted spectacle of Converting Eviction – the white tent. Viewed from the outside this structure is a construction site, an events gazebo, a field tent, and a barrier to entry. From the inside – streamed to the audience in real time via a set of hand-held cameras operated by the cast – it is a series of passages and rooms inside of an abandoned building, a physical archive, a monument to eviction and reclamation. Throughout Converting Eviction, this fictional, speculative structure adopts a plethora of spatial realities.

Short documentary-style interviews lay further thematic foundations for the performance. Projected onto the white tarpaulin of the structure, they circle notions of land as a site of ancestry, sustenance, medicine, familiarity, exploitation, extraction, and more – a place of great respite, or irreversible damage. Both contrasting and mirroring this is a series of newsreader-style soundbites outlining the rise of Johannesburg, “The golden city”, and the decline of its inner-city, a notorious “no-go” zone.

Then there is a drilling, a tearing, a picking apart. It is suggestive of the Red Ants, a South African security company specialising in forced eviction and relocation. Pseudo-documentary interviews take place inside the tent-turned-building and touch on contemporary forms of extraction – research, foreign investment, cross-continental partnerships with artists, investors and more. As much as Converting Eviction is a performance-led work, shrewd attention to language serves to hold much of its thematic concerns, too. Choice lines from South Africa’s Constitution are read over a group of restless, sleeping (or perhaps dying) bodies.

Audiences are not insusceptible to the re-enacted realities of Converting Eviction. Corralled into the centre of the speculative building and separated by a series of increasingly absurd social markers, they are made to leave their chairs and their positions as passive viewers behind and enter the performance.

Closing the show is a live musical performance – the lyrics of which wrestle with a number of the performance’s points of inquiry – and a sketch-like performance of the cast rehearsing and testing their documentary script in a series of stop-start events. Finally, during a solo vocal performance, the set of Converting Eviction is slowly and methodically picked apart, down to the last chair, as the audience have no choice but to get up, gather their things and leave.

*The first iteration of Converting Eviction is supported by Pro Helvetia Johannesburg and co-produced with The Centre for the Less Good Idea (Johannesburg), Gessnerallee Zürich (CH), Kaserne Basel (CH), Dampfzentrale and Schlachthaus, Bern (CH) and supported by Stadt Zürich Kultur, Fachstelle Kultur Kanton Zürich, Fachausschuss Theater&Tanz BS/BL, Ernst Göhner Foundation, Migros-Kulturprozent. Additional research from Hennie van Vuuren and the team of Open Secrets (SA), KEESA/ADR – Apartheid Debt and Reparations Campaign, Basel (CH) and the Khulumani Support Group (SA).

– David Mann

CREDITS:

PERFORMERS | Sandi MX Blouse, Vivien Bullert, Hlengiwe Lushaba Madlala, Humphrey Maleka, Lindiwe Matshikiza, Zamo Mkhwanazi, Sello Pesa, Christoph Rath, Tracy September & Tim Zulauf
COLLABORATORS | Sello Pesa & Tim Zulauf
CINEMATOGRAPHER | Lukas Piccolin
PROJECT MANAGER | Shruthi Nair