A conversation with artist and director Su Tomesen about her City One Minutes Johannesburg.

Artist and director Su Tomesen from Amsterdam was recently invited by The Bag Factory to come to Johannesburg for three months as an artist in residence. From January till early April 2010 she lived and worked in this exciting metropolis. She talks to Holland Doc 24 about shebeens and the City One Minutes Johannesburg.

“At the start of my stay in Joburg I already got into touch with the phenomenon shebeen,” Su Tomesen says. “I became acquainted with it through the powerful collage ‘Discussion in the shebeen’ by the South African artist Sam Nhlengethwa; a work that gives out a lot of energy. I asked my fellow resident in The Bag Factory Senzo Shabangu what a shebeen was. He told me that it originally meant an illegal in-house bar in the townships at the time of  the apartheid regime.”

The shebeens originated in the sixties and were started by black women who wanted to go into business. These women were - and still are - called ’shebeen queens’. Their riches usually consisted of nothing more than some crates of beer and ‘umqombothi’; homemade African beer. Here, people from the townships came together to debate and listen to jazz. Tomesen: “The term shebeen is a nickname nowadays. I have visited many,  by now of course legal shebeens in both Joburg and Soweto. During these visits I looked at the typical construction, objects and interior.

The idea soon arised to build a shebeen in the exhibition space of the Bag Factory for the closing exhibition of her time as an artist in residence. The goal of the exhibition was to make an installation in which the audience could be a part of the work. “This installation is made with found, borrowed and obtained materials. 20 m2 of corrugated sheets I got for example on the condition that I would bring them to Soweto after the exposition. The next owner would make an extension to his house of them.” The shebeen (see the bottommost image) has been ready for use for eight days. “The audience let themselves go in my work and there were all kinds of scandals; drunkenness, theft and slight racial tensions occurred. I’ve had visitors who had never set foot in a shebeen, and there were people who don’t usually go to galleries. So that became part of the work.”

On the final night the City One Minutes Johannesburg were shown in the installation. “As a resident with The Bag Factory you are expected to realize a project with the local community. Within that scope I made City One Minutes with film students of the WITS University, via Dutch video artist and teacher Jurgen Meekel. I also worked with young artists who worked with the medium video for the first time. Two of the City One Minutes show visitors of shebeens: they can be seen in ‘Muscles around midnight and in ‘MyPresident’ at 3 pm.