Abstract
Stellenbosch University (SU) would not have been established in 1918 without the financial contribution support of Jan Marais (born 1850), who made his fortune in diamond explorations in the Northern Cape, South Africa. A statue was erected of Marais in 1950 on the Jan Marais Square, also called the Rooiplein (Red Square), the central gathering place at SU campus. The current Visual Redress project on the SU campus aims to redress spaces and remove hurtful symbols such as plagues and statues, but also to contextualise those symbols that remain on campus. The Marais statue has been on the list to be contextualised for four years, but because of its sensitive nature, this process has not been completed. The history of Jan Marais as the benefactor of SU on the one hand and on the other hand Marais’s diamond explorations that were done on land that was taken from indigenous peoples, employing cheap labour for his enrichment, make this a complex undertaking. Therefore, the statue’s past keeps haunting the present. In this research, we draw on Derrida’s concept of hauntology, where things that seem to be dead, such as statues, continuously haunt the present. We created a cartography of the statue and its surroundings by exploring the material qualities and historical and current written documents and interviewed people who were directly affected by this history. By drawing up a cartography and understanding the complexities from different perspectives we hope to take this project further.
Presenters
Elmarie CostandiusAssociate Professor, Visual Arts, Stellenbosch University, Western Cape, South Africa Gera de Villiers
Postdoctoral Fellow, Visual Arts Department, Stellenbosch University, South Africa Leslie Van Rooi
Student, PhD, Stellenbosch University, South Africa, Western Cape, South Africa
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
The Arts in Social, Political, and Community Life
KEYWORDS
Visual Redress, Hauntology, Statue, Stellenbosch
