Thinking through the visual: Cinematic practice as a productive site of epistemic inversion

This article considers ways in which multiple expressions and interpretations of Johannesburg can best be understood when processes at the fringes are articulated through creative/artistic practices. Often these expressions are in languages or forms that seek to challenge dominant or pre-determined forms and give rise to modalities that are determined from within the (artistic) communities that occupy fringe spaces. This article suggests that the methods of artistic research enquiries are viable modes to read three contemporary South African films – Driving with Fanon (Mokwena, 2005), Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon (Matabane, 2005) and I Mike what I Like (Mistry, 2006). It further investigates how the forms of these films write an alternative vocabulary of selected African cities, which might be expressed rather than simply represented. Following Sarat Maharaj’s idea of visual art as knowledge production, this discussion considers these film case studies as epistemic engines/contraptions and explicates the attended questions of artistic research as a mode of enquiry. Second, in reading the formal and discursive moves offered in these films, this analytical description mobilizes Achille Mbembe’s modes of self-writing in order to develop techniques of reading and writing that are characterized by aesthetic openings and encounters, a kind of reading and writing characterized by intersecting encounters between diverse fields of knowledge(s) and epitomes. Finally, the analysis tentatively locates artistic practices in the case studies within the broader frame of the decolonial, suggesting that the representational strategies present in the film case studies can be read as entry points in conversing with Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang’s question of thinking about what decolonization means, what it wants and requires.