SAVE, a project about public and personal archives, developed during the ten week thematic Surface Residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts. 1999.


SURFACE Residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts.






SAVE
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Found text for my Sentences Series (Journey) often came from the South African "Weekly Mail" (later called The Mail and Guardian), a newspaper that played a significant role in dismantling the apartheid system. I had kept all the years and years of copies, and took them with me to the ten week thematic Surface Residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts.
I was interested in the notion of saving and recording events and images from that time. I did not priviledge any particular content to come to the surface, but allowed random pages to be visible on the outside. Thus, there might be some day-to-day items visible, (advertising, sport, the arts) or some of the horrors of legalized racism such as the lists of names of political prisoners on death row. Each day at the Banff Centre, I put out copies of the newspaper in a reading booth in a public passageway, and installed a video camera behind a one way mirror in the booth to recallß the systems of surveillance and censorship practiced under apartheid. The camera focused on hands, and coincidentally on the feet, of the readers. After copies had been read by the passers-by, I bound the papers individually and tightly into circles that resembled life savers, (or steering wheels) and subsequently exhibited them in plastic bags in a composite work called SAVE. Of particular significance in the back issues were the first images of President Mandela that were allowed to be published since he was "banned" and jailed on Robben Island 27 years previously. At the time of his trial, the only images of him depicted in the mainstream press had shown him as a pugilist (or terrorist). When he was finally released, the world saw his public transformation to a grey haired patriach, who would go on to SAVE the country.