Nessun Dorma (None Shall Sleep Tonight)

Performance with Rheinald Moagi and Khotso Tsekeletsa and 4 CSS Tactical Security Guards
Joubert Park in front of Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg.
2 hours

7 x A2 Ink Jet Prints on Archival Paper
1 x video piece.
Photographs by Chris Saunders
Video footage by Gwydion Beynon and Adriano Giulio Giovanelli

The performance was re done and the prints exhibited at the Dray Walk Gallery in London in November 2008.




Nessun Dorma is a performance commissioned for the exhibition The Worlds Most Dangerous Ideas. The work took place in Joubert Park, which adjoins the Joburg Art Gallery in downtown Johannesburg. The park is a particularly dangerous place in the city a crime hotspot, a no-go zone. The work addresses issues of safety, security and fear, which are very pertinent in South Africa at the moment. Increasingly, people living in the wealthier northern suburbs of the city are employing private security businesses, with names like Claw Security and CSS Tactical, to protect themselves. On almost every suburban street, a guards hut and a man in uniform on patrol. In addition to this, houses are fortified by electric fences and equipped with alarm systems, video cameras and panic buttons. This is not eccentric or unusual. This is what we do. And at night, when we go to sleep so well secured, we are, most of us, still afraid.

I am interested in the tension between being relaxed in ones own home and, at the same time, being on guard there too. Sleeping in a bed of roses fenced off from the gallery (and the rest of the area), in one of the most dangerous parks in the city (and maybe the world), I enact what I do each night in my own bedroom. I am guarded by four CSS Tactical Security guards while I read the wonderfully optimistic book Don't Panic: A Book written by South Africans for South Africans, which reminds me to keep hope alive within me, before I doze off into dreamland. On my left side I have The Faber Book of Utopias. Before I go to sleep, two opera singers sing the Puccinis aria, Nessun Dorma, the English edition of which is translated as None Shall Sleep Tonight. The gates to the park, which had not been opened in over five years, were opened to the public that night and audience members could enter the park.

This performance is about the spaces we guard, the spaces we share, the spaces we avoid. It is a public investigation of the personal, of how we feel in spaces we like to think of as our own. (Do we feel fearful at home? Where and when do we feel safe?) We have become used to the way that we live because habit creates familiarity. These precautions guards, fences, panic buttons make sense because more and more they seem to be matters of necessity in order to stay safe, and even alive, in the city. But I am saying let us not become too used to this bizarre way of life. Let us become aware of how we are living. I do not give any particular solutions to the problems, but the work highlights the potential to shift the viewpoint, to prompt the imaginative process towards other possibilities and other perspectives.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Performance art
• Anthea Moys
• Joubert Park
• Johannesburg Art Gallery
• Johannesburg