Homing In: Nomusa By
Paradoxes of the City
Makhubu
“[The city is] spectacular in the most oppressive sense of the word” - David Harvey 2005 When asked: “Do you feel at home here?” participants to a discussion held in relation to White Curtains exhibition at Michaelis Galleries responded by saying, “we come here to work, we can’t expect it to be like home,” or “if you’re not happy here, then go create your own, alternative spaces.” These two responses, one seemingly defeatist and the other appealing to resourcefulness, have been on my mind since then. The first response is significant in many ways because it forces us to think carefully about the socio-economic politics of the distinctions between home and work. It triggers the image of busses and taxis full of people who travel distances daily to work in the city, to make the city and then leave. It triggers the image of those who work in other people’s homes and those who sanitize the ‘spectacular’ city. It also reminds us that under neoliberal capitalism, ‘home’ is not a social concept but rather it is space as commodity. Home, as real-estate private property, therefore symbolizes contours of systemic social exclusion. Neil Smith’s (1992: 58) apt observation about homelessness shows the exclusionary nature of home as bought private space. Evicted from the private spaces of the real-estate market, homeless people occupy the public spaces, but their consequent presence in the urban landscape is fiercely contested. Their visibility is consistently erased by institutional efforts to move them elsewhere to shelters, out of buildings and parks, to poor neighborhoods, out of the city, to other marginal spaces. Evicted people are also erased by the desperate personal campaigns of the housed to see no homeless, even as they step over bodies in the street. This ongoing erasure from the public gaze is reinforced by media stereotypes that either blame the victims and thereby justify their studied invisibility or else drown them in such lugubrious sentimentality that they are rendered helpless, social gumbies, the pathetic Other, excused from active civic responsibility and denied person-hood.
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