A HALF BUILT HOUSE
Telling stories about the past, our past, is a key moment in the making of our selves - Annette kuhn: Family Secretes, 2002
A Half built House is an unusual piece of music, simultaneously expressing and inducing nostalgic and futuristic visions. The voice track, a monotonous recital of numbers, and a crackling that resembles the acoustics of vinyl records evoke strong memories of early radio broadcasts of the countdown for a space rocket start in the 1960s or some kind of digitized identification numbering in historic science fiction scenario. In a very special way the music acoustically creates a link between connotations of the past and the future. This song by the Scottish band We Were Promised Jetpacks, released in 2009, inspired Musa Nxumalo when working on his series of family photographs.
The beginning of this project dates as far back as the year of the song release. It is the expression of the desire for a sense of belonging, an investigation into the nature of family ties, of family realities and family as an idealized construction. The work was driven by an urge to trace his roots, to gain an understanding of the past that would help inform the present and imagine a future. Or, to stick with the image, to come to terms with the half built house and set energy free to build a new one. I have seen the work in progress in different stages and diverse forms. First, combined with the road trip in search of the homeland by tracing family migrations, visualized as a kind of mapping. A selection of old and new photographs visually conveyed this time travel.
Nxumalo later continued the quest by reconstructing a family album using the typical patterns and shapes, with captioned photos sometimes cropped or framed in ovals. This endeavor remained unfinished because he became aware that the transformation of the (re) search into a quotation of family album aesthetics remained primarily ornamental. Nxumalo and I discussed how family photos as tangible objects have their own aesthetic presence, how their surplus of meanings may sharpen or blind the gaze, how difficult and important this work is to him - as memory work and as artistic process.
Over many years the project ran alongside Nxumalo’s other works and subtly informed them. His family photographs new as much about his relatives as they are about their Soweto neighbourhood (before and just after the end of Apartheid) and about friendship, common spaces and ways of living, topics Nxumalo explores creatively in his other bodies of work. The series Alternative-Kidz, also debate feelings of belonging, togetherness and loneliness between friends and in communities. All his works strongly coney the photographer’s gaze and an autobiographical element. Yet the issues at stake transcend the personal and become generational, as well as their very specific time and space - Soweto Johannesburg in the 2010s. While some of the questions related to youth in search of their own path are universal, Nxumalo’s photographs are firmly rooted in local and socio-historic conditions.
The family photos in A Half Built House are carefully collected fragments of a family history, showing staged portraits, moments of joy and playful encounters, but also revealing losses and voids - for instance the absence of the father. As South African photographer Santu Mofokeng states in his seminal project The Black Photo Album, the images may not be unique but the individuals are.
While the provenance and production date of the photos from the grandparents generation are mainly unknown, an itinerant photographer took most of the photos of Nxumalo’s mother, aunts and uncles, and his siblings in Emdeni. The visual language is simple and traditional: the subject, be it an individual, a couple or a group, is captured in the centre of the image and framed quite narrowly.
The pose taken are classic: mother sitting sideways on the grass or leaning against a motorbike, uncles smoking and posing in small groups, children lined up from biggest to smallest with the baby seated in front of them. The images are in fact poignantly familiar.
But it is not only the composition, also their materiality, the specific texture of the print, the soft contrast and slightly fading color negative film, that are charecteristic of family photos as a genre in the pre-digital era.
It is a fascinating quality of photographs that even when looking at somebody else’s personal pictures our own memories can kick in and we get lost in sounds, smells, tastes, even feelings and stories.
Family photos, just like other historical photographs, only become meaningful when we find an angle to read them, which is often only after someone has given us some context. What is it that makes us interested in photographs of distant relatives who we barely - if at all - know? Do we really want to learn more about the person depicted, or do we rather look for links to ourselves, something that might explain, why we are who we are and why we look the way we do? Reconstructing the family history is an active construction of one’s identity and positioning not only in the family structure but also in a community and the society at large.
The photos that are presented here show signs of the time, evident in the posture of the subjects, the fashion and the surroundings, and in the state of physical decay of some of the prints. The presentation is deliberately simple, the individual photographs are sensibly arranged on a white background, numbers are only textural element (collecting the recital of numbers in the song). These elements signify a turning point in Nxumalo’s work; the end of a long inquiry, the process of gathering the photos from family members, the exchange of stories and the recollection of memories. This process is exemplified in Annette Kuhn’s quote that introduces this essay, “telling stories about the past, our past, is a key moment in the making of our selves” (2000)
As I turn the pages, I suddenly see that the metaphor of a ‘half built house’ does nor so much denote deficiency but rather the state of being in process. A metaphor that communicates a sense of unique charm and beauty.
- Katrin Peters-Klaphake, 20215