INTERVIEW WITH BRIDGET BAKER
Bridget Baker is a South African artist living in London and Cape Town. Her work forms a series of complex visual fragments realised through object making, installation, film and documented performance. Chantelle Purcell talks to Bridget Baker to find out about her current exhibition “Wrecking at Private Siding 661″ at CHRISTIAN FERREIRA at The Wapping Project. (29 September 2011 – 11 February 2012).
Can you tell us more about the current exhibition “Wrecking at Private Siding 661″ at CHRISTIAN FERREIRA at The Wapping Project?
“Wrecking at Private Siding 661” is a large scale site-specific work incorporating the facade and the interior of the accumulator tower at the Wapping Project in London.
The work brings together unpublished personal narratives and historical traces replicated as if in a recently re-discovered museum diorama. The work refers to the ill-fated movement of my ancestors, British colonial settlers to South Africa in the late 1890s, as well as the failing colonial wool industry adopted by them. These micro-narratives expose “finished” narratives as fragmented and undefined.
The spectator enters the work through a smashed hole in the brick wall of the disused accumulator tower. They discover what seems to be a shipwrecked relic, lying partly suspended and partly crashed on the tower floor. This object is described in colloquial terms as a “human transporter” or “passenger lift”. It is a cane woven basket with a door, and was in use from the late 19th century to the early 20th century along the coast of South Africa to lift colonial settlers and migrant passengers from ships onto smaller boats in order for them to be taken safely to shore.
On closer inspection, the human transporter encountered in Wrecking seems to have histrionically broken into the tower through the trapdoor in the ceiling, careened through a Perspex light box ceiling and smashed onto the floor of the tower, breaking its fall, and breaking open it’s door. Throughout the action two documents managed to remain attached to its mass: a glass Codd’s ball stopper soda bottle, and a bound bureaucratic document with a cover letter.
2010 – 2011
Can you discuss the conceptual and spatial gap that exists between the power station on the Thames in East London and the Buffalo River, East London, South Africa. And how your work bridges this chasm of time and lost history between now and then?
Perhaps I need to go back to the beginning, to look at how the process began with this work. It has been a somewhat drawn out experience involving quite a bit of travel and exhumation of archives, at times I have been successful in finding original documents and then when I couldn’t find answers from historians and family I invented and or appropriated information from relational archives in order to continue. This invisible process is not seen in the visual construction of Wrecking but seems to be controlling it.
I moved from Cape Town to settle in the UK in 2010, and my first encounter with the disused hydraulic power station in Wapping was during a site visit with Christian Ferreira that same year. The power station was built in 1890, the same year that my ancestors departed from Britain to settle in South Africa. It is an example of a late industrial period “machine”, powering up West End theatres and parliament up until 1977.
interior detail
image: Daniel Isherwood
Despite its vacant contemporary voice and conflicting past, this space is significant because it seems to seamlessly re-call the past into the present. And for my non-linear conceptual imaginings it is the atrium for the “time traveller”: a marker of the adventure of movement but also the crisis of “belonging”. It represents a constant shift between definitions: the colonial site echoing the arrival of the settlers and segregation in South Africa, and now recently re-inhabited as the site re-calling the settler to return as migrant artist in 2010.
Despite the vast geographic and spatial gap between these sites in South Africa and the UK, the historical significance of their exchange is conceptually immediate, independent of time and space. As such, the specificity of the tower along the Thames formed a precise conceptual starting point for me to develop a piece that would later, through research, help to uncover certain unknown South African histories of my family and the wool industry there, as well as discover photographs of the peculiar “human transporter” at the local museum in East London, South Africa. With the Codd’s bottle as compass, the document as bureaucratic aide, the “transporter” in the visual construction of Wrecking is the device with which histories move to and from these “out of time” sites.
Through your investigation into the history of the colonial immigrant, what have you discovered about your own family history and identity?
With a lot of my work, I go back and forward to questions I am curious about that have been incubating for a time. These questions often relate to my childhood histories, my identity and sense of belonging in South Africa. And I attempt to figure things out by making work. The problem with these attempts is that I don’t have a lot of original material to work with, archives haven’t been kept and people died too young.
During my childhood I experienced two formative histories that have shaped a curiosity / an awareness, and a lure to re-investigate historical moments from my past, and develop additional memory archives that reflect an autonomous way of seeing. These formative experiences were: growing up under an apartheid regime in South Africa and the unexpected death of my father from a heart attack when I was five years old.
Both of these experiences were rather shattering, especially in hindsight. With the shock of the death of my father our young “white middle class” family became quite insular and self-sufficient. These were the years before therapy was considered vital for processing grief, and we were encouraged by my mother to find solace in religion, as she did, and by forgetting my father. So in a sense I have grown up not knowing very much about my father: his persona, his working life, his upbringing, his / my ancestors.
Parallel to this was the experience of growing up during the apartheid regime in South Africa. As a family we were conservative and insular, and again with hindsight notably unaware of the dire political and social situation present in the country, as most white South African minority groups chose to be. The history taught to us at school level during apartheid was cursory and politically biased, it was also impossible to access free and fair information via local television and newspapers because of stringent censorship regulations by government controlling agencies.
In retrospect, growing up during that bleak unforgiving period of South African history, and at the same time figuring out how to deal with the lingering grief at the loss of my father, explains why I am often skeptical of what I am told, and why I prefer to figure histories out for myself, often through obscure methods and visceral experience.
Research images courtesy of the East London Museum, South Africa.
This was a pre-amble to your question but I think important to create a context in terms of my history with identity construction. When I moved to the UK I naturally became more curious about my ancestral connection with this country, which ended only 3 generations ago with my great-grandparents leaving. It is strange to think that as a family we have no physical evidence of their departure or early arrival as 1890 wasn’t so long ago. But in fact, we don’t. I have no evidence to corroborate why they left, and what their circumstances were for leaving, and what their circumstances were when arriving in South Africa. The histories that I found of colonial immigration to South Africa are vast, and though they might not be specific to my family, I have been able to draw from these to begin developing narratives. When I found photographs of the “human transporter” at the East London Museum, this discovery further unlocked the narrative of the “colonial” settler enslaved to the industry of the colonial government (similar woven baskets on display at the Docklands Museum would have been used to transport people for the purposes of slave trade). I imagined the colonial immigrant, when arriving off the coast of East London, encountering such a basket for the first time. Then getting into it, and for this to be their first unfamiliar and estranging encounter with a new land: a disturbing foresight into the new role as colonisers. Time traveling to the present, the role stepped into that day in 1890 by my ancestors has made the psychological “sense of belonging” in an unsolicited environment rather ambiguous and complex.
The weights at the bottom of the landing basket are filled with sheep’s wool, a material that would inevitably fail to ground this momentous object. Were you pointing to the redundancy and non-function of the basket? Or is it more of a tragic commemoration to the object because it has been lost from accepted historical narratives? What does this signify?
Yes, these knitted weights are actually lined and filled with unprocessed wool from the Eastern Cape in South Africa. I have worked with unprocessed wool in a much earlier sculptural work called Inflatable and Puncturable (1995) where I lined and covered 2 inflatable water wings (devices used by small children to remain buoyant in the swimming pool) with unprocessed wool, one patched with bicycle tyre patches to denote a failing at re-calling the past. I have worked with this material as it is the material that my grandfather and father worked with on a daily basis as wool brokers in the Eastern Cape from the 1920s – 1977, when they both died. I have always considered the material as a connection to my father, the smell and properties of the lanolin triggers familiar connections, notably a particular photograph I grew up with in our home, where he is standing in a lab coat next to a mound of unprocessed wool.
The wool trade was an important colonial industry developed quite soon after the German settlers arrived in the Eastern Cape in the mid 19th century, and proved to be an economically viable independent industry during these years before the apartheid government completely rationalized the industry through government-run co-operatives finally closing the East London wool port in the early 1980s.
For Wrecking I worked with the wool in these weights to refer again to a failed attempt to ground a personal past that is lost. This idea is offered further context in the attached bureaucratic document on the side of the basket. Reproduced as a cyanotype document, the cover letter was drafted in 1975 by my grandfather to my father on the letterhead of their business. At this stage my grandfather had retired, and they were the last independent wool broking company to sell to the government run agency. In it my grandfather introduces a biography of their business (which would follow on the attached pages) a way to remember all that they had achieved. However, the attached document of 38 pages doesn’t resemble a biography at all, but rather cyanotype replicas of daily newspaper clippings relating to the wool industry in the Eastern Cape during the 1970s. The broader history unfolds, a foretelling of the closure of the East London wool port, plummeting wool prices, and on the last page of the clippings, an article written by my father that indicates his concerns for the future of the town of East London.
This document and the weights signify, with personal solemnity, the public weight of a past that cannot be undone and cannot keep the basket buoyant.
The viewer enters and exits through a smashed hole in the brickwork, creating a similar action to what the colonial passenger would have experienced when climbing out of the landing basket. How does an experiential work like this help an audience to engage fully? And how have you re-captured this momentary rite of passage through the project “The New Arrivals”?
With The New Arrivals project I am looking to create an uncomfortable relationship: art spectator as tourist, and installation as well trodden cultural site. I am curious about the art object being validated to tourist or colonized spectacle, and how the spectator posing for the photograph becomes a willing participant in this spectacle as if it’s their discovery.
Within the space you have constructed an elaborate staging that interweaves both fiction and non fiction, by presenting fabulation alongside this complex history do you think it acts as a way to unearth the hidden recesses that exist within the archives and challenge what we have come to know? And how does this mythic construction help to suspend the viewers disbelief?
When I construct a quasi-historical narrative such as in Wrecking I consider the methods and processes that would shift my perception of reality in the moment of seeing and experiencing. With this work I wanted to shift the spectator’s reality even before entering the accumulator tower, to create a division between realities, to render the action of entering the expected “exhibition space” as needing consideration, and also to get the viewer to wonder about what they will see on entering. These questions needed to be considered before entering the space. Here, I was also thinking of Duchamp’s posthumous work Étant donnés, inviting the viewer to look through the broken wall as through a peephole. In the case of Wrecking the function of the broken wall plays with the function of the building as a derelict space recently re-discovered, an interpretation of the lost history of Wrecking installed inside the tower. Once inside the tower, and the spectator’s reality shifted, they decide to what extent they will uncover and question the visual history they are encountering. There are clues, fictional and non-fictional, present in the materials and invisible processes used to configure the narrative. These clues, when found, further activate the function of the object and its history, and are archived in the mind of the spectator.
We talked of your work existing externally from the traditional art contexts and perhaps being parallel to a work that would be seen in a museum. How do you think your work goes beyond representation and aligns with an educative artwork?
Well, I find this work does pose questions that ultimately are underpinned by museum methodology and the canons of history making. The basket as object is posing as an “authentic colonial relic” that would be expected to be seen in an institution, giving it its historical definition. But what I find interesting is that this relic (which many thought was borrowed from an institution) now has another voice, it cannot rely on the institutional voice to validate it, it has to construct its own language as it sits outside of the rigors of the established institutions of history making. As artwork, it appears to be a relational museum installation, and appears to be uncomfortable in the setting it is discovered in, as if it should be in a museum, but landed at the wrong address. These points are devices to trigger the validity and the voice and language of the object, creating unexpected and authentic spaces of belonging, which sit outside of the expected valorizing institutions.
The landing basket as an object seems to demand affirmation, a wanting to become part of the history it has been fragmented and lost from. How will you continue to develop this piece’s legacy? And affirm it’s place within history?
I am curious to document and archive the installation in different ways. At this stage I am planning to shoot a moving footage piece in the tower, working with 2 circus practitioners. The work will document the discovery of and intervention with the basket, but from an aerial point of view. Whatever methods I use, I am not sure whether I will affirm the landing basket’s place in history for posterity, but I am certain it will be retained in the mind of some spectators.
Research images courtesy of the East London Museum, South Africa.
The landing basket was cane woven by the Cape Town Blind Society and shipped here to East London, how important was it that the basket physically made this ‘pilgrimage’ by sea?
When I consider the making of a work, I consider every aspect of the realisation as giving the piece its voice. Especially when it comes to a work, where there is little history written about it, I am creating another historical incision with the piece, so there needs to be a responsibility towards its language construction. For me, the invisible workings, what we don’t see in the final construction, is as crucial to the work as the final construction, and adds to the levels of consciousness of its language. In the case of Wrecking this approach is acute, the invisible aspect of the construction gives the work a support beyond language, it also offers interesting possibilities for reactivation of the object since it has these layers of history embellished into it.
It was important to add South African history to the cane woven basket, not only as a linear idea, but rather to add conceptual weight to the invisible history of the object. Also, I wanted to create an “authentic” relic despite the fact that I had never seen an actual object, only murky photographs of it. The idea of replicating the historical “unseen” was then taken a step further when weavers at the Blind Society in Cape Town wove the piece for me based on my description and imagined measurements of what I thought the “transporter” might look like in the reality of the 1890s. Once the basket had been aged, exposed to sun and rain in South Africa, it was then shipped as a work of art. The procedures of importing the “transporter” into the UK were followed as with any object that has originated outside of the borders of the EU in this case. Customs charges were paid based on the “value” of the object, and the “transporter” is now British. This bureaucratic return of the “transporter” follows the set trade relation laws between countries, the value placed on the movement and import of the basket, mirrors the colonial settler movement, also referring to contemporary rights of belonging.
Do you think this method of transportation would have been known by the immigrants prior to their departure?
I am not sure that it would have been completely unknown, but certainly unfamiliar. Historians I have spoken to at the British Museum, the Mandela Metropolitan Museum in Port Elizabeth (this museum has an actual basket on display) and at the East London Museum, were unable to shed very much light on its history. However, I am continuing the research into its the design origins. Information in this regard would be most welcome!
Can you tell us more about the forthcoming ‘Found footage festival, in 2012, Bologna’? What are you currently working on within your practice? And what is your methodology in approaching a new project?
Monica Dell’Asta, Associate Professor in Film and Photography at the University of Bologna has invited me to make a new work for the Found Footage Film Festival in Bologna in April. I am working with original 8mm films from the 1940s to the 1970s that belonged to my aunt who died in 2011. I will edit these manually and present the work Prior Passage as a 3 screen film projection work.
My methodology for approaching a new project? I don’t have a defined approach. I am curious about the construction of memory, the actual realization of it, so there is much that I am intrigued by, found through many sources. Given the right moment I begin to research. This doesn’t always lead to an end-point or a definitive idea immediately. In fact, I might have to shelve an idea for a while, in order to get funding for it, or do more research. I work rather intuitively and respond to sources in an imaginative way, so there are moments when I know that I am on the right path for the project, but mostly I don’t have this feeling, so I have to search a bit more.
So what’s next?
I am in the research and preliminary draft phase for The Remains of the Father, a multi-screen filmic project to be realized in collaboration with Bologna based art historian Elisa del Prete in Italy this year. We have been researching the construct of erased memory as a political and social legacy, by exploring ethnographic aspects of the Italian Colonial Project in Africa, a period of Italian history that is offered a cursory position within Italian contemporary historiography.
This year I will also be directing a film project entitled Cosy Nook with my mother and step-father as subjects, a constructed set (a replica of the cosy nook in our first home) with original furniture and objects, as backdrop. Cosy Nook will be shot on 16mm film and is designed as a two screen projection piece.
Thank you very much Bridget!
For more information please visit: http://www.bridgetbaker.co.za/ or http://www.christianferreira.com/ For Baker’s forthcoming projects in Bologna, please visit http://www.nosadelladue.com/
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