IO MAKANDAL

In February 2023 I displayed Watermelon: iteration #2 (the first I did in Berlin 2018) at the Goethe Institute, Johannesburg as part of the Entangled Intimacies exhibition curated by Rory Thomas. With all the significance and symbolisms that the watermelon holds, the idea was that the fruit would be exposed to the natural atmosphere in the gallery space and the decomposition process would be critically observed and monitored. The fruit was in the part of the gallery which was also the thoroughfare from the public facing section of the institute to the administrative offices.

Within a matter of days some of the staff members of the Goethe made a complaint about the artwork and asked for it to be removed. Myself, the curatorial team and the Goethe staff in general engaged in a philosophical debate around why, how and when it should be resolved. The response to the artwork is a part of the piece, for me. The reflections I challenged and contemplated were (some) society’s reluctance or inability to look at or be with death and dying, to contemplate our own death and dying and the relationships thereof.

Who gets to demand, who has choice and liberty, who is tolerant? Who is or is not perturbed? Who resists? Who persists? Who is entitled to and who listens? It brought these questions to the fore.

In the end, after an explanation and statement of the piece, I was asked to remove the piece from the exhibition as it was offensive to some of the staff. The entire debacle was dubbed the “melon drama” internally and however “deemed a success in engaging the topics of entangled intimacies”. Furthermore the entire ordeal, in light of the last year has a whole other layer to it. I will leave you to make the connections to the irony of this “melon drama” at the Goethe institute Johannesburg in 2023.

In 2011 I wrote these words:

“The world is wailing,
thudding,
surreal,
real,
we resist returning”
They still ring true.

The cycles and process of matter from one form into another is intrinsic to decay and dying and I’m interested in my relationship to that. It is one of the reasons I work with compost as a methodology and metaphor for living and dying on Earth – as human and more-than-human.

The exhibition was titled Entangled Intimacies. This being the framework of the entire exhibition, I was interested in presenting works that challenged our relationship to the more-than-human world of which decay is a part of. Other works in the exhibition presented soil compost in clay pots, a drawing on the windows of a human cell in Vaseline that slowly smelted out of form and a rolled up natural fibre carpet that had once had grass growing through it under a UV grow light.

The works of mine in the exhibition were very much “alive” with organisms and very much collaborative in the making of the work. It was a living changing experience. The curatorial team knew this and approved it.

Watermelon: iteration #2 was a part of it and positioned in the thoroughfare area of the Goethe Gallery, one would have to pass by it if walking through the gallery space into the private work space of the rest of the Goethe institute offices.

My understanding now, is that there is the Goethe Institute gallery cultural programme and the Goethe Institute language centre as two entities. My understanding was that the staff who work for Goethe institute, but who are not involved in the cultural programming of the gallery, didn’t know what was going on in the gallery and were particularly upset and concerned with the work and were not communicated with or perhaps did not have an understanding of the exhibition framework. Although my work was approved by the curators and cultural programmer, the general staff didn’t know what was going to be exhibited. Initially, I attempted to engage with this as a commentary and asked for people’s reflections on what they saw in the work. They wrote notes on pieces of paper and stuck it onto the wall. This gave me some insight into what people thought.

Some were genuinely curious and interested in watching it over time, while others were horrified and disgusted and took offence. The discussion and engagement became a part of the artwork. The dynamics were interesting to me – to observe who took offence and felt they could demand their own rights to have the work removed and who remained silent. What were the cultural differences in reaction and opinion given that many of the staff are not all South African.

Eventually, due to the fact that the curators and myself did not want to be held responsible for anyone claiming it was a health risk, we took the decision to agree with the requests to remove it from the space before the end of the 6 weeks long exhibition. We removed the work 1 week in. I took the watermelon, that had been slowly smelted out of form with the heat of the sun, home and composted it – generating soil for other works. The material and matter is cyclical.^{[1]Editor’s Note: What Io Makandal has written here is revealing because it ties in with the analogous experience that Steven Cohen had recently in Cape Town where the staff of the IZIKO National Gallery staged a protest about his work that had been cleared by curators and management as much as two years before the show. The similarity is very telling; working class people are still invisible to the art world and art institutions in South Africa. They are not considered worthy of being included in information sharing about any shows, never mind the potentially divisive or “shocking” ones.}