Andries Fourie:
The Indigenous Tourist
Artist Statement
My work concerns itself chiefly with the issues of memory, identity, tradition and cultural hybridity in South African culture.
As an Afrikaner (a white South African of Dutch descent) I view the present through the lens of a complicated, even contradictory, past. After three hundred and fifty years in Africa, Afrikaners are still torn between seeing themselves as European colonists or Africans. It has been said that white South Africans are tourists in their own country. I see this sense of displacement and confusion as an opportunity to critically examine my ethnic identity, my people’s traditions, and their troubled history as the architects and enforcers of apartheid. I do so because I believe that South Africans must come to terms with the past while at the same time acknowledging that their individual ethnic identities are in fact an amalgamation of indigenous and imported elements, many of which are shared with other groups. Afrikaans traditional music, for instance, is heavily influenced by British regimental music of the late 19th century, and the spiciness of our traditional foods bears testimony to the influence of our female Malay slave-ancestors. Similarly, the Afrikaans language contains several Khoi and San words, and we obtained our knowledge of traditional herbal medicine from the Bantu tribes with whom we also share a reverence for land and cattle, as well as our nostalgic desire for an idealized agrarian past. In a sense I see my work as a kind of cultural “archaeology” that investigates the origin and context of both old and new traditions, and looks at the way in which they can either inhibit or enable adaptation.
I am interested in the dynamic cultural amalgamation that results from the contact between traditional, predominantly rural, African culture and the westernized modernity of the city. The fluid cultural mix that results from such an encounter is far more interesting to me than any romanticized notion of cultural purity which seeks to fix a culture in an unchanging state of suspended animation. Culture is a vibrant, shifting and changing force that defies our impulse to freeze it in time like an artifact in a museum. I am fascinated by the hybrid, the subaltern, the improvised. I see this reflected in South African taxi culture, barbershop signs, Township music, the linguistic mix of Tsotsitaal, and the wire cars that black South African children make and play with. I suppose that I am drawn to these examples of cultural blending because they expressly contravene the rigid, patriarchal prohibition against “mixing” cultures that was so important to the segregated society I was raised in.
I am also fascinated by the way in which identity, memory, and tradition intersect with landscape and a relationship with the land. As the descendent of many generations of farmers, I am interested in the way South Africans define themselves through their connection (nostalgic or current) to the land and to indigenous plants and animals. This connection is both a commonality we share, and a source of much of our conflict. We are defined by the land, which shaped our languages, our histories, our traditions and our cultures. In my work about land, landscape and belonging, I attempt to approach the relationship of both individuals and cultures with the land while avoiding the pitfall of viewing it through the lens of ethnic nationalism. My work aims to acknowledge the fact that the land to which I feel a profound connection, and which has made me who I am, is contested, and is an important part of the identity and memory of those who were dispossessed of it.
Artist
Andries Fourie
