Churchill Madikida studied Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand and is artist and curator in Johannesburg, South Africa. He did many solo and group exhibitions in South Africa, Senegal, USA, Germany, Norway, Sweden and France and won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art 2006. After training in museum curatorshop at the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, Paris, he was Collections and Exhibitions Curator of Constitution Hill Museum in Johannesburg for several years and co-curated or curated many exhibitions and worked as an art facilitator:
Personal Affects: Power and poetics in contemporary South African art, Museum for African Art and Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York, 2004;
Mapping Memory, Constitution Hill, 2006, Art Facilitator;
HIVSA, Memory Box Project, Baragwanath Hospital, 2006, Art Facilitator;
Nelson Mandela Museum, 2006, Biennale Art Award Selector, Port Elizabeth;
Gandhi in South Africa, Constitution Hill, 2006, Collections Curator.
Speaker at Session 2: The Museum as a Site of Narration
Our Challenge as Curators
As curators of this new prison museum, we faced several challenges. The history of the prisons had neither been recorded nor archived when Number Four still functioned as a prison. The prisoners who had been held in one of the four prison buildings were not allowed to record their surroundings in any way. There are only three archival photographs of Number Four taken while it was still in operation and a couple of paintings of the Women's Jail that were done in secret. Many of the artifacts associated with prison life, like the keys, locks and uniforms, had been stolen in the years that the site lay abandoned. So there was no collection that we inherited as in a conventional museum space. The ruins of the prison buildings – powerful as they are - were our only exhibit.
Gathering Stories
Our first intervention was to bring back those who had been imprisoned here to afford them the opportunity to give material form to memories made fragile by the passage of time. We wanted to try and understand the changes that have taken place in the physical environment of their incarceration and to help them explore the difficult process of remembering. The vast majority of prisoners had been in the jail simply because the colour of their skin meant that they had transgressed one of the many discriminatory laws of the day. There were others who were thrown into jail for directly participating in political activities against apartheid. And then there were those who had committed crimes, although we were soon to learn that the line between political prisoners and so-called ‘criminals’ was sometimes difficult to draw, given the nature of the criminal justice system under apartheid.
There were several challenges in these initial workshops. The first was to locate the ex-prisoners because there was no register of prisoners to which we could be referred. Once we had found groups of former prisoners - mainly political prisoners to begin with - many were reluctant to dredge up the extremely painful memories that the jails evoked. Some refused to participate because of the horror of their experiences. We ended up working with specific groups of former prisoners – women political prisoners from the 1970s and men from the early 1980s, for example – and through oral history and life history processes the story of the jail slowly and painfully began to emerge.
As curators, we relied on these former warder and prisoner testimonies to understand the rhythms and workings of these places that had occupied such a central place in the psyche of mainly black people living in Johannesburg under apartheid. The exhibitions that opened Number Four and the Women’s Jail in 2003 and 2005 respectively, relied on these prisoner testimonies to give visitors a sense of the history of the buildings and the horrific conditions that prisoners of all races, but especially black people, were forced to endure. This was our first intervention on the site and the exhibition narrative was almost entirely first person – presented both in text panels, audio recordings and audio-visual presentations. This approach felt appropriate in honouring the people who had been incarcerated in the jails. It was quite literally a way of restoring the voices of those that had been silenced throughout the decades of apartheid.
Deepening the Process
From the inception of Constitution Hill, our curatorial intention has been for the exhibitions to grow and develop as new layers of information emerge and as we find ways to grow the collection. Given that we now had a basic understanding of how the prisons had functioned, we wanted the process to become more focused on the prisoners’ intimate experiences and for them to work with their memories to produce objects for display that would tell their stories to visitors in direct and cogent ways. We were keen to explore mechanisms through which memories that have been deeply suppressed or perverted could be legitimated in the public realm with the former prisoners completely in charge of the process. We were also keen to explore new languages and new material forms in which to express and represent these memories. We wanted to find ways to ensure that potentially ordinary objects – like cans of back beans or a jersey – became animated in the museum space.
We asked former prisoners to take photographs of the jail, to draw their experiences and think of objects associated with their memories. We believed that these techniques would provide powerful physical prompts facilitating the exchange of knowledge and empathy. We anticipated that, through this process, memory would be given a unique form, determined by a strongly autographic process.
The Objects and their Stories
The objects and their stories that resulted from these workshops formed the basis of an exhibition and a book. Many of the objects will be incorporated into the permanent collection. The presentation for the Sites and Subjects Conference will show images of these objects and will give insights into the stories they tell.
The presentation will conclude that this thought; the creation and birth of an object, by the storytellers themselves, is a unique way of giving life to a museum experience for visitors. It is the basis of developing a museum of conscience and a living space of remebrance.
