At first encounter, the object depicted in the sculptural installation is not quite familiar. A basket, a cage? Its origins or its use are not clearly evident in its design. However, the physicality stimulated by climbing through the hole into the space, coupled with the human proportions of the transporter, gives the viewer some clue as to its use.
This object, a so-called ‘human transporter’, caught Baker’s eye when she revisited the East London Museum; the first museum she ever visited during her childhood. It was there that Baker found photographs of the strange contraption, used to transport settlers down the side of the large ships before the completion of the turning basin in the East London harbour. Intrigued by these objects as mobile containers of both people and histories, Baker embarked on an archival journey through East London’s settler history, as well as that of her own family (who became well known in the wool trade), using the human transporter as a material frame.
Baker employs a historiographic mode with a strong narrative, approaching the project through what curator Dieter Roelstraete, in his text The Way of the Shovel: On the Archeological Imaginary in Art, refers to as ‘history-telling’. He identifies methodologies such as ‘the historical account, the archive, the document, the act of excavating and unearthing, the memorial, the reconstruction and re-enactment’ as particular to this approach, many facets of which are employed in Wrecking at Private Siding 661.
After engaging in extensive research in East London, no clues beyond the photographs presented themselves to the artist. Even experts on settler or maritime history had seen few examples of such an object, heightening its curious appeal. Rather, this jerry-rigged object was born out of necessity within this particular location, and is thus testament to a very specific moment in a South African settler history. Consequently, the basket acts as a time capsule of sorts, mediated via the archive and the artist’s imagination. As not many historical documents or detailed sketches on the basket exist, the artist’s recreation – partly from photographs and partly from the imagination – exists ‘in translation’.
Based on Baker’s description, the object was then remediated through the specifications given to The Blind Society of Cape Town’s weavers. After being aged in the South African sun and water, the transporter then followed the sea route back to the ‘old country’ when it was shipped back to London to be installed at Wapping. By creating this pseudo-historical object, the human transporter takes on a mythical nature, a strange lost ark brought back via a chain of archival documents and imaginative mapping.
'Wrecking at Private Siding 661' places these two narratives – that of colonial migration to South Africa more broadly, and Baker’s more specific personal history – side by side, though they remain distinct stories. The basket and bottle move between a sense of the historic and the staged, while the presence of the documents inflects the human transporter with a bureaucratic aura. As an artist working in a similar research mode, I can identify the challenge of presenting such archival material: There is the constant lure of history, bound up with the potential for nostalgic presentation strategies and the tricky combination of found material and imaginary narratives.
Recent performative interventions around the site and object of the exhibition – like Baker’s The New Arrivals Project where viewers re-enacted what settlers could have felt when arriving on new ground – have interwoven past and present, communal and individual history to create something else entirely. Baker's human transporter shuttles similarly between modes, inviting viewers to reactivate the historical object as prop to an elusive present.
Bianca Baldi is a South African artist currently based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. See her website: http://www.biancabaldi.net. For more about Bridget Baker, visit http://www.bridgetbaker.co.za.
