TOP STAR (2023)
Johannesburg is built on gold. The mine dumps to the south, east and west of the city made visible the hidden labour that gave rise to its wealth, concentrated and reflected in the social, economic and human geography.
The mines have long closed and the dumps have all but disappeared, reprocessed to extract the remaining precious ounces of gold and other minerals. But, mine dumps represented not just the physical waste, but also the symbolised discarded miners living in their shadow, still breathing the dust from deep within the bowels of the earth.
Contradiction and ambivalence—the key tensions that operate within this work—reflect that exact tension in the once familiar form of the mine dump. Yes, locals living in Jo’burg and other South African mining towns had a kind of love-hate relationship with mine dumps. Their colossal ugliness was almost an embarrassment; ugly proof of the greedy extractionist urge to relieve Mother Earth of her precious metals and stones. And yet, it was also an ugly badge of honour, a reminder of why the entire world would pay so much for the natural treasures of South Africa made possible through the work of underpaid, underground men.
Furthermore, there is also a dark side to the symbol of the mine dump. Coalbrook or much more recently Jagersfontein, remind all those who have ever lived in the shadow of a mine dump that the extractive industry can present just as much danger above ground as below it.
The immediate starting point for this new work is the Top Star drive-in that crowned a mine dump on the city’s southwestern edge of the city, an iconic if rather dilapidated part of Joburg’s industrial heritage and identity, before it too vanished as the dump on which it stood was slowly devoured.
Joburg’s forgotten past, the ugliness and the beauty, are reflected in this piece—Top Star, a reminder of the joy amidst the bleakness. Plastic waste, consigned to those other dumps, is reimagined growing, emerging, creating, shards of colour emerging from the grim detritus of extraction, the Top Star on the mine dump.
On another level it could be read as a kind of joyful memorial; a “monument to the unknown miner” or, indeed, those “civilians” who lost their lives in mining’s above-ground tragedies.
