Possible City

By VISI BLOGGER Pieter-Ernst Maré and lemon.decor

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If you ask Johannesburg residents what it is about the city that makes them stay amidst all the daily stresses of a "newish city", it would be the underlying energy it possesses.

It's impossible to capture the energy force in words and it’s something that you can only experience once you've settled here and taken part of the city life. There's a constant drive for success - a desire for more, contributing to a city with great expectations, one that keeps remodelling its face.

To understand this, one has to look into the past. I asked lemon.decor to do a range of photos of Johannesburg for the Alive Architecture gallery. They spent a lot of their time at the Museum Africa and managed to get some phenomenal photographs from yester-year that haven't yet been published. The range is called Possible City.

Ronelle Pienaar of lemon.decor explains:

"There's no other city in the world that's so anxious to shake off the memories of its early origins." - Herman Charles Bosman
"Fragments neither close nor open meaning: they may mean anything except wholeness, except certainty." - Lionel Abrahams

"These are visual fragments of "what was". It's the bringing forward, the resurfacing of something seemingly insignificant (in this case) yet inherently part of this magnificent place. It’s of a distant Jozi that we’ve never seen and will never truly understand. It represents those buildings, people, memories and, more recently, names that have been "stacked away in the archives", erased from our maps and from our minds in order to "build a new future". It appears that the way we deal with our past and current problems are through a massive act of deconstruction - dare I say "forced removal"?

"In a city that shape-shifts so often, you feel the need to frantically collect, capture and put on display,  before the next metamorphoses begins, and before the next "great vision" will capture us all. In Jozi, very little has been permanent throughout the past hundred years. Very little of what our ancestors have built or produced is still on display for ourselves and those to come to view and treasure.

"Yes, we live in an ever-changing world and there are certainly stories that we’d rather forget, but even among the most tragic of events that Johannesburg has seen, there were elements worth keeping and worth remembering. Surely by forgetting these very unfortunate events, by starting on a fresh canvas again and again, we risk making the same mistakes over and over?

"What does it do to the identity of a city when its roots keep getting trimmed?"

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