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Between the map and the empire, we make each other human again

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Nonzuzo Gxekwa is a photography-based artist living and working in Johannesburg. She was born and raised in eMnambithi, KwaZulu-Natal, in 1981 and came to Johannesburg in 2006. Her new retrospective publication is a meditation on Johannesburg, its space, people and practices. Nonzuzo’s work is the most contemporary in a radiating and long tradition of South African photography. It is a tradition whose ways have been illuminated by lighthouses such as Alf Kumalo, Ernest Cole, Andrew Tshabangu and many others working against particular sets of constraints and responding to particular sets of needs and sensibilities. Nonzuzo’s response to the call of this tradition is a redeeming and generous dialogue concerning Black people, deviance, love, and necessity. In this publication, Nonzuzo presents the Johannesburg CBD as a site and a subject that is well practised at being home to the ambitions, beliefs and desires of Black people against every intention of Johannesburg’s cartographers and ar

This article is more than 3 years old ‘In that empire, the art of cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single province occupied the entirety of a city, and the map of the empire, the entirety of a province. In time, those unconscionable maps no longer satisfied, and the cartographers’ guilds struck a map of the empire whose size was that of the empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following generations, who were not so fond of the study of cartography as their forebears had been, saw that that vast map was useless, and not without some pitilessness was it,

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