Vabvakure

Importantly, by using a Shona word, Machona allows the branded ‘foreigner’ to take power over the naming of his condition. The apparent estrangement is submitted to the subject’s own language, and its system of logic and cosmology. So Machona avoids the pitfalls that G.A Heron outlines in his introduction to Okot p’Bitek’s poem Son of Lawino: 'There is a grave danger that with the tool of language they will borrow other foreign things.'

But there are other charms in Machona’s work. Apart from the twin presence of the sentinel astronauts, there are two flags mounted on heaps of salt-like mounds of sand and a short film of performances projected onto the gallery’s back wall. The biblical inference of Lot’s wife turning into salt for looking back at the city of Sodom is almost unavoidable here. This seems to heighten the meanings inherent in the exhibition since Machona’s work is also an ex post facto aesthetic treatment of the 2008 xenophobic attacks visited upon non-South African nationals. Through the curatorial notes that accompany the exhibition, Machona declares his belief that forms of cultural mediation such as visual and performance art can offer insights into social trauma and potentially resist the intolerance and violence associated with xenophobia.

To this end, he has found a way of using the African tradition of masked performance, re-imagined with an Afro-Futurist motif, to shape his work. The artist subtly invokes 'Nyau', a type of masquerade or masked performance that originates in Malawi. The masquerade is understood to be a potentially subversive form of performance employed by the Chewa of Malawi while living as ‘foreigners’ in Zimbabwe and other diasporas. It was used to confront xenophobia and negative stereotypes associated with their identity as foreigners.

Machona’s masquerade deploys his 'foreigners' in space suits like visitors from another world. Their suits are meticulously made from decommissioned currencies, in particular the Zimbabwean Dollar notes that have comprised many of his works to date. Old South African bank notes with the head of Jan van Riebeeck are also used in some instances – further adding to the idea and discourse of foreignness. The afronoauts enter the firmament with the prefix ‘Ndiri’, meaning ‘I am’ to each of their roles in their estranged world. In the works they perform the acts of ‘Ndiri barber’, ‘Ndiri barman’, or ‘Ndiri cross border trader’, occupations normally performed by foreign nationals, and here assembled into the video loop that illuminates the gallery space.

Machona’s Afronaut motifs are comparable to UK-based Spanish photographer, Cristina De Middel’s work. De Middel, in 2012, produced a picture book of ‘Afronauts’ inspired by her discovery of the 1964 Zambian Space program. The award-winning photographer used the afro-futurist theme to battle the foreign western media stereotypes of Africa as an essentialized site of war and famine. Machona uses it to deal with how Africa copes with its own internal diaspora, displacements and estrangement.

Gerald Machona’s 'Vabvakure' is on at Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg until July 05, 2014