Fine Art:
GÂST
MEDIUM AND DIMENSIONS
Custom-created perfume with dead Covid 19 cells, Glass, metal, plastic, vinyl, perspex, LEDs and wood. Dimensions variable, 2021.
CONCEPTUAL STATEMENT
Certain state responses to Covid-19 have evoked an olfactory echo of an older and far more odious trauma for the most disenfranchised communities in South African society. Susan Levine, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cape Town, has noted that “The violent and punitive enforcement of curfews and … lockdown … [is] deeply reminiscent of curfews that constrained, dehumanised and criminalised black Africans … under Apartheid.”
Associated Press photographer Jerome Delay put it more colloquially: “There are … ghosts floating around”.
Gāst – which meant a “spirit” or “soul” – is the Germanic etymological predecessor of the word Ghost. Our perfume, which was created using specially-selected notes to reference an older generation, contains dead Covid-19 cells. This work was named Gāst, in part, to raise questions about the nature of the ghosts to which Delay referred.
How was their presence experienced, for example, among the witnesses to the fatal shooting – with an Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Police shotgun – of Sibusiso Amos on the veranda of his Vosloorus home in March of 2020?
Over a year later, riots that began as a result of cynical political manoeuvring devolved into what was termed the “worst civil unrest since 1994”, when the abject poverty first engineered by colonial oppressors – and now exacerbated by lockdowns necessitated by the pandemic – finally revealed itself to be unendurable. But so too, some might argue, did the spirit of callousness and greed that seems to stubbornly accompany so many in positions of power, regardless of the era.
