CHRIS THURMAN | Atlas of Uncertainty puts migrant experience into perspective

For a few decades now, social scientists have recommended that to prepare for the rest of the 21st century the world needs to learn from the metropolises of the Global South. Of course, phrasing it in this way implies that “the world” is constituted by the Global North — the former or soon-to-be-former imperial centres of Western power: Europe and North America. Numerically, of course, “the world” already mostly lives in Asia, Africa and South America.

Some of China’s futuristic megalopolises seem to gesture towards a hi-tech, high-density, sustainable but somewhat soulless model. Yet factoring in resource scarcity, climate crisis, geopolitical instability and the shifting ground of economic activity, the more common mode of urban life globally — neither utopia nor dystopia — is likely to be closer to the combination of function and dysfunction, or formality and informality, seen in our continent’s major cities. By 2050, they will collectively have a population of 1.4-billion people.

The curators of Atlas of Uncertainty: Transforming African Cityscapes affirm that this urban population boom is not “a shift at the margins” but “one of the great sites where the future is being made”. To appreciate “the density, motion, contradiction and improvisation of urban life”, they contend, we need new conceptual frameworks, new methods of analysis and, indeed, a new vocabulary: “The language used to describe African cities — failure, disorder, ungoverned, problematic — arrives already tired.”

Atlas of Uncertainty, which comprises an art exhibition as well as a book and a digital platform, “starts with the proposition that African cities are not behind the curve but ahead of it”. Cities such as Accra, Nairobi and Johannesburg “do not offer warnings from the edge but ways of seeing what is already coming into view” as uncertainty becomes our “shared global urban condition”.

The exhibition’s installation at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Origins Centre (until July 3) is apt. Located on the edge of Braamfontein, not too far from Berea, Hillbrow and other hubs of migration to Johannesburg, the Origins Centre — primarily a museum of evolutionary studies, archaeology and anthropology — reminds us that human beings have always been on the move. The project is bolstered by academic rigour, drawing on data and nuanced theorising. Yet, through the art works displayed, it also emphasises how urban life resists description or containment by measurement, calculation and mapping.

This productive friction is demonstrated by the items included in Corridor of Cartography, which emerged from a partnership between the Centre for Spatial Research at Columbia University and the Market Theatre Foundation’s Windybrow Arts Centre. One set of maps provides a visualisation of the journeys followed to and from the three focalising cities of Johannesburg, Nairobi and Accra, including a colour-coded representation of distances travelled. But that doesn’t tell the story of migrant experience, which is more effectively conveyed through the annotation and decoration of a Hillbrow street plan by young people who live in the area.

A different approach to conveying the many dimensions of “transient” life in Jozi is adopted by Boitumelo Motau, whose Windows into Berea invites viewers to look through and walk between the hanging canvases depicting various street scenes.

A number of the artists engage with the topics of migration and mapping through their own experience of travel and exile. Amy-Leigh Braaf focuses not on displacement but on “future trips … dreams, desires and long-term visions”. Her work Stitches of Soulscapes subverts the distortions of the Mercator projection that have served the Eurocentric imagination and instead celebrates how “global and local routes” can be “held within the body” of those who have followed them.

The exhibition does not, however, romanticise the migrant experience. The collaborative piece You Will Find Your People Here shares the testimonies of women who have come to South Africa: they are tales of resilience and aspiration but equally of violence, loss, disappointment and alienation.

As works by Bongiwe Phakathi and Candice Kramer further demonstrate, these are the subaltern lives that cartography fails to render — ways of being in Johannesburg that Atlas of Uncertainty brings to the fore. In the weeks ahead, I’ll write more about how artists in the exhibition engage with everyday life in Nairobi and Accra.