The Dept. of Some Affairs (Vol. I)
Mixed-media installation, Michaelis School of Fine Art.
(Full catalogue of the exhibition available here)
The works selected for this exhibition have clandestinely – if not miraculously
– made their way through the murky waters of bureaucracy. The artist – a French national – is persona non grata in South Africa. In bureaucratic terms, this means he has been declared an “undesirable” person, in accordance with Section 7(1)(g) read with section 30(1); Regulations 27(1) and 39(1).
How did this happen? The answer, if it exists at all, is probably stuck under a
dusty pile of files, in a non-descript room, at the end of a long corridor, in a large administrative edifice inaccessible to the public. Or maybe it isn’t; who knows?
In South Africa, The Department of Home Affairs (DHA) is a “notoriously inefficient state bureaucracy charged with managing immigration as well as domestic identity documentation” (Hoag, 2014: 411), and an obligatory point of passage for everyone living in the country. This common “bureaucratic experience” is nevertheless the visible aspect of a much broader and complex system, the inner workings of which are highly opaque.
Bureaucracies embody a strange and terrifying paradox: the inscrutability of
power. In South Africa, the DHA is a case in point. As a government bureaucracy, it perfectly illustrates Veena Das’ definition of the state as “a form of regulation that oscillates between a rational mode and a magical mode of being” (Das, 2004: 162).
Indeed, though bureaucracies theoretically represent rationality and order, their opacity and arbitrariness renders them as illegible – “magic” – entities. What happens within the bureaucratic realm is therefore always invariably imagined, fantasized. From an outsider’s perspective, bureaucracy is as much a fiction as it is a reality.
The works presented here are an attempt to materialize this mysterious
bureaucratic “magic”. They form part of a broader project entitled The Department of Some Affairs, conceived as the inner psychic realm of an imaginary bureaucracy, cut-off from the world, paranoid, xenophobic, and hallucinatory. The work engages with the ambiguities and complexities of bureaucratic alienation, through the staging of an immersive space, at once alienating and alienated.
In this dark and mysterious bureaucratic world, it has become increasingly
difficult to distinguish between rational bureaucrats and the invasive “aliens” they are precisely trying to eliminate.
Das, V. 2004. The signature of the state: the paradox of illegibility. In Life and words. Descent into the ordinary. V. Das. Berkeley: University of California Press. 162–183.
Hoag, C. 2014. Dereliction at the South African Department of Home Affairs: time for the anthropology of bureaucracy. Critique of Anthropology. 34(4): 410-428.
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