Wolff Architects highlights Bessie Head, Sol Plaatje and the poetry of flowers at Dakar Biennale

The work of artist Ilse Wolff meditates on the writings on Bessie Head and Sol Plaatje to engage on land rights and collective memory. Titled Summer Flowers the video and sound installation uses flowers as a symbolic and intellectual thread that drives the contemplation in a poetic manner. The work is set in Head’s home built in 1969 in Serowe, Botswana, now a national heritage site. It is in this house that Head wrote her landmark book, A Question of Power and this is thematically linked to the work of Plaatje in his book, Native Life in SA and Head’s commitment to land through her community garden project, Boiteko.

Summer Flowers is part of the central exhibition, On s’arrêtera quand la Terre rugira (We Will Stop When the Earth Roars) at the 15th annual Dakar Biennale which started on November 7 and ends on December 7, featuring artists whose work transforms environmental crises into powerful calls for action.

Wolff, representing Wolff Architects, tells us more about the work.

Summer Flowers is a poignant meditation on land and memory through the works of Bessie Head and Sol Plaatje. What sort of place does the work come from?

The work comes from a place of a deep appreciation for the works of these two great minds. We wanted to pay homage to the work that they have left us with in the form of their many books and actions. Plaatje’s Native Life in SA is as much a record of emotions of people that have lost the land due to the Land Act of 1913 as it is a keen record of the times. When Bessie Head first encountered this book, she described it as a work of “flaming beauty” as well as the missing historical link in the history of land and loss that she has been in search for. Summer Flowers is an attempt to put these two in close proximity and their work in close relation.

What did you set out to do with it?

Summer Flowers set out to continue the work of Bessie Head and Sol Plaatje. At the beginning it was not clear (it is still not) but I knew that continuation of whatever I learn from the process would be important. Continuation of deep thought, continuation of compelling storytelling and continuation of advocating for spatial justice.

Flowers as a motif in the work facilitate a push and pull between decay and renewal, demolition and resilience with land as a grounding theme. What did the process of working with flowers symbolically and intellectually reveal? 

The name “Summer Flowers” came from the fact that Bessie Head initially wanted to use that as the title for her novel A Question of Power. Summer Flowers sounds like the name of an innocent book about a garden so I guess she went for something a bit more direct and unambiguous, but we will never know. During the process I also learnt that there exists another novel called Summer Flowers by Tamiki Hara. He wrote the book in 1947 to document the days in which he witnessed and survived the Hiroshima atomic bomb attack. He returned from Tokyo after visiting and placing fresh flowers on the grave of his wife, who had died the previous year. The book was translated to English in 1953 and it may be the reason Bessie Head gave up the name for her novel. I would never have learnt about Tamiki Hara’s loss nor his book had I not engaged in the process of working with flowers. 

How does this work reflect the ethos of Wolff Architects? 

This project reflects our ethos of working across disciplines. We recognise architectures’ complicity with oppression and we have developed both a critical distance and a critical intimacy with architecture as a discipline. By critical distance we mean that we analyse, recognise and distance ourselves from the violent ways in which the discipline co-operated with mass media, extractive capitalism and despotic political regimes in order co-produce spaces and environments that facilitate and emerge from states of violence. It is this ongoing practice of critical distance from the discipline of architecture that brought us closer to developing a critical intimacy with architecture and to rather embrace how spatial practice may be of service and work alongside other human and ecologically centred disciplines such as black art, literature, music and film. It is for this reason that our work is always transdisciplinary, and the outputs come in various forms — film, exhibitions, publications and conceptual art — always thinking place, space and freedom.

How else can architecture facilitate conversations around land, dispossession, community, memory and healing?   

Architecture and those interested and working in space and design, can use their place in the system to work towards solidarity against oppression, apartheid and genocide.