Movement as Settlement
A terrain can only be owned in as far as it is occupied, and this is attained by naming and mark-making. This mark-making is our cultural intercourse with the landscape.
The renaming of places in contemporary South Africa and the accompanying polemics confront one with questions such as: By what do we know a place? What is our relationship with a specific place? And, above all: What does it mean to yearn for a place?
My work is primarily concerned with the experience and continuous rethinking of place. In my work, “place” becomes a passage, a temporary station, a now-place. It is marked for temporary meaning within the context of a journey which itself can be the only true destination.
For the postmodern human, which by definition is increasingly displaced, it is possible to find a new home someplace in thought, a “spiritual” place which, like a road, stretches in all directions and where movement itself becomes a settlement.
Road maps, road signs and signposts are elementary tools which help travellers to understand their relationship with place. But this relationship is at best never consummated. In these new works I play with the relationships of naming; the physical and metaphysical interwovenness of travel, place as point of departure and destination, and finally, landmarks as “mindmarks”.
Jacobus Kloppers
2003
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