William KentridgeDrawing for City Deep (Landscape with Miner's Pan), 2019
This Kentridge landscape is a unique, charcoal piece from the latest chapter in his ‘Drawings for Projection’ film series, and revisits the complex remarkable character of Soho Eckstein. First created over three decades years ago, Eckstein made his considerable wealth through mining, and in this film he’s in his retirement returning to the edge of old Johannesburg mine dumps where, because of inefficient mechanical techniques when they were first created, much gold remains in the earth.
There he encounters ‘Zama Zamas’ (illegal, unregistered workers digging and panning in the most hazardous conditions), who are extremely poor monetarily speaking, but industrious and courageous people, eking out an almost-living by literally revisiting the earth underneath the city that was made for, and by, gold. But, in ‘City Deep’, instead of that mineral, they find symbols hewn and cleft from the ground and stone originally mined from miles under Johannesburg (‘City Deep’ was the name of world’s deepest shaft when it was still open), but missed by machines - whilst the treasures these Zama Zamas pan and dig for are symbols and words.
This is not so much an archeological dig as an unearthing of private thoughts, ancient and contemporary symbols and associations infinitely more valuable and lasting than the gold that enriched those who furnished the original Johannesburg Art Gallery with its original Eurocentric artworks. In his dotage, Eckstein is learning about, and from, the Zama Zamas in ways he never allowed himself to risk learning before he retired. When the museum’s walls eventually subside, it’s not so much a destructive act or the routing of a citadel, but an inevitable, natural, necessarily cathartic returning: for him, for his country and his continent. A return to the open African bushveld, and to the earth whose riches built it.
