Picture Post #52 - The Township

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Hastily boarded-up window 
at New Rest, in South Africa's Eastern Cape

It is hard to know where to begin, describing the township here.

Many houses, the doors or windows have been taken. Including the neighbour's, twice. Severely damaged through crime, he put in reinforced concrete frames. It did no good. They made off with his ceiling, plumbing, and much of the plaster, too. Every second house, broken glass is replaced with broken boards, carpet tiles, plastic.

A resident came round yesterday. Someone tried to batter down his door, he said, when he was in bed. The door was ruined, but they didn't get in. He armed himself. Then a sergeant came round. If they found someone dead on his floor, he said, he would go straight to jail. My host sleeps with a loaded rifle next to his bed.

A few nights ago, criminals mounted a vast raid on a group of townships, including this one. I had two locks on my car damaged. A friend had a window smashed, too. The same day, in front of me, a man flew off a pickup truck which swerved recklessly to avoid potholes, and those are filled with water from broken pipes. He hit the tar at speed, and lay motionless in a storm gutter. I was the only one to help him, and was astonished that he could (slowly) get up, although he was bloodied all over.

Plastic waste tumbles down the hillsides, and recently carved ravines scar the earth. People are gaunt, their teeth are out, their clothes are ragged. Even the neighbour came begging for bread.

Picture Post #34: Watching the Tide

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'


Posted by Tessa den Uyl and Martin Cohen

Photo credit: students of  A Mundzuku Ka Hina, communications workshop. Mozambique

From the plastic on the lower right corner, moving to the left, arise a man and woman, both with one hand touching their face and each with one arm posing on their leg, the diagonal movement flows into the blankets behind them out of the picture. This ‘line’ creates a certain ‘zone’ in which we seem to stand in front of a threshold.

Our eyes may enter ‘the gate’ ‘guarded’ between the two seated persons and the boy standing on the right, to look into a ‘dark’ space where people gather in a circle and diagonally expand to the left into another lateral diagonal line. The composition is as if we are introduced carefully in a gathering, ‘a zone’ we cannot truly enter, we glance at something that is far from us, almost secret.

The picture invites us to regard it from a distant point of view where, at first sight, a kind of picnic, a déjeuner sur l’herbe, slowly changes into something that is far more remote. And yet, this is how some people survive, these rubbish dumps are their home and their daily reality -- along with intoxication and poverty and helplessness as the other side of the coin.

And yet, there is something inspiring about the picture in the posture of the two person’s in the foreground and the boy: the impression is that of creating a ‘gate’ in which the ambiguity of contraries, that in ancient times was certainly seen as an essential element in speaking truth, yields to a logic of the inevitable raising problems that come with more recent social, industrial and political conditions, one in which words have to search for an adaption between truth and oblivion.

Thus as with many such terrible events that happen in the world, we hear about them, we see images, but it is not our skin. The observer, the spectator has a very protected stance

Last week in il Bairro di Hulene, which is the neighborhood of shanty homes raised around the lixeira (dump), seventeen people died under a mass of refuse that detached itself and slid down from the dump pile. Six houses and seven shacks were destroyed including a small ‘press’ that was there to crush the plastic and cans.

What Would Happen If 3-D Printers Could 3-D Print Themselves?

Posted by Matthew Blakeway

“In the future, [the human species] will refuse to put themselves at the service of pirates. They will become what I call transhumans – who will give birth to a new order of abundance” ―Jacques Attali.

The French philosopher and economist Jacques Attali* predicted in the 1970s that the music industry would collapse. Within twenty years, he was basically proved right. If something is freely or cheaply replicable, then economic theory predicts that its value will trend towards zero. Ever since we were able to record our friends’ vinyl LPs on cassette, the ability of musicians to earn a living from recorded music was doomed – and so it turned out to be. Musicians today earn less and less from selling recorded music. I myself, as a writer, am acutely aware that it is getting harder to make a living, even in a world where people are reading more.

Now Attali is making the same predictions about manufactured goods. 3-D printing, while it still is a relatively new technology, opens the door to being able to scan a wide variety of objects into a 3-D printable file and e-mail it. Many manufactured products may become infinitely reproducible, their value trending towards zero. It has already been done, if only experimentally. We already have 3-D printed musical instruments, camera lenses, weapons – even 3-D printed refrigerators and cars. It isn’t inconceivable that we all will be able to upload 3-D printable files for such items which we can print at home and assemble Ikea-style. We could then tweet the link so that everybody else can have one.