There Is No Place Like Home

A Conversation between Simon Gush and Alejandra Labastida

Alejandra Labastida (AL): I saw the video again and so many of the questions and paradoxes that have been floating in the earth’s atmosphere in the last months are condensed there, not only in your script but in the visual dialogue between the rooms of your apartment and the streets outside your window in downtown Johannesburg. But the specific predicament you found yourself in at the beginning of the crisis is so charged in so many levels. By having to decide where to live the lockdown you had to decide between your family and country, and other active relationships of care and love. You talk about some kind of nationalist inception you were not aware operated in you and that pushed you to choose the care of the state. Suddenly your life decisions suffered a change of scale. I think what we are living is very much a problem of scale. The story we tell ourselves changes completely if you are thinking about preserving yourself, your family, the population of your country, the economy of your country, and the scope goes all the way to the survival of life on Earth. And since stories, as Donna Haraway insists, is the actual way we carry on with each other, in what scale were you mainly operating to make decisions?

Simon Gush (SG): I will try to narrate a little of how the experience unfolded but I am not actually sure of the order of how things happened. One of the results of lockdown is the collapse of a sense of time. When I decided to leave Mexico, South Africa had a mild lockdown. Our number of infections were still very low. I had no idea what I was going back to. The first few days I was jet lagged and rushed around getting food and supplies. This first week was hard but I was ok, adjusting to the situation. I spend a lot of time at home working and it didn’t feel so different. I was reading about the violence of the police and military in the newspaper and they were visible in the streets but I had not processed the implications of that yet. When I arrived back I had decided that after flying through New York I should put myself in a quarantine for two weeks and not leave the house at all. By the third week I had begun to see the glimpses of the violence, now on the street outside my window not just in the newspaper. When I finally left the house to the shops I saw first hand how hard lockdown and the economics of it was hitting the people in my area. At the same time I was beginning to feel the weight of loneliness. I was feeling what it meant to be isolated from a relationship of care, to be cared for and to care for someone else. I became convinced that lockdown had to end, the damage was too big, we would just have to deal with the virus. I felt certain about this until I spoke to my parents. I had spoken to them before during the lockdown but I suddenly felt for the first time incredibly worried about them and their vulnerability. The impact of that conflict, of wanting lockdown to end but wanting my parents to be protected, broke my ability to narrativise what was happening, to understand what I was experiencing. I did and still do instinctively want the state to fix this, to guide and lead us through this, even though I know that is asking too much. The police are incapable of the task, and the government knew there would be violence. It was easier to be certain when I scaled things down to a single problem. But the moment cracks in my certainty emerged, the contradictions became visible and I spiralled outwards. As you suggest the scale becomes too big to process and I felt overwhelmed. Making this film was a way for me not to resolve the problems in my mind but to acknowledge how overwhelming they are.

AL: Thinking about situated specificity (again Haraway): even if we are sharing a health crisis the context of each country, the conditions of the lockdown are very different, could you share the specificity of the South African lockdown? There is also the temporal difference of the movements of the epidemic. In a way a part of the world is living in our future and we in your past. Although the pressure from high level of intricacy between our economy and the American economy is pushing authorities to start talking about easing the lockdown we are still in the centre of the storm. How is the dilemma between the health of the economy and the health of the workers operating over there? After the collective joy, how are you living getting back to life? Is there something you want to tell us or you would tell your past self living in the highpoint of the crisis?

SG: All the numbers and statistics we read are by country, borders are closed and the responses of governments are different, as result our understandings are nationalized and our senses of hope or dismay are adjusted accordingly. It is difficult to imagine another country’s experience. In South Africa it was predicted that we would be devastated by the virus because of the large number of immunocompromised people, the lack of the water and sanitation, and the cramped conditions of housing in poor communities. But we have been lucky. Our numbers remain low compared to other countries, even those with similarly hard lockdowns. Here lockdown has been particularly strict. Sales of alcohol were banned and in the beginning even exercising outside was against the rules. Like Mexico there is very high unemployment here and the economy has a huge informal component. This means that lockdown really hit hard here. The problem of economy versus health is very present and I think is still far from being resolved.

       Even though very little actually changed after we opened up a bit a few weeks ago, the stress of the lockdown had been so intensely felt that the celebrations after the announcement were amazing. I think just the sense of things changing and moving affected people here in a big way. We will open up more again tomorrow (June 1st) and life will change again, we will move to something resembling what it was before. I can feel that the collective mood in my area and of my friends has lifted again. These moments of collective joy are so important in this state of individuation and isolation. It is hard to know if we can sustain the openness and it is quite likely we will move back to stricter policies in the cities, which are the hotspots of infection. But we are moving into a new phase where we will be learning how to live with the virus as part of our lives and everyday experience. If we do go back it will be hard and I am not sure I would be any better equipped to cope this time.

AL: Your work has been focused on the relationship between work, work-ethic, subjectivity and land from the perspective of Southern Africa, but lately you have also started to think about care and reproductive labour. In the video, that concentrates mainly on describing your current situation there is an interruption: a remembrance on how you, as a child, managed to delay the return of your mother to work. You also make a difference later on between productivity and paid work. A recent article from The Guardian, stated very clearly what all us mothers have been fearing: that one of the consequences of this pandemic “is a potentially long-term constricting of women’s lives to the domestic sphere that will undo a century’s worth of progress that women have made in claiming access to public life,”[1] while at the same time respond to the demand to maintain our levels of “productivity” under these new work conditions. How did this experience brought insights into this new line of work you are investigating?

SG: Reading particular feminist critiques of work, especially Kathi Weeks and Silvia Federici, really was important for my thinking. What is so interesting about this kind of critique is that it questions the idea of work itself. In South Africa, work is the primary form income distribution, it is central to subjectivity, it is a colonial imposition that forcibly erased local forms of organising labour and life. It structures social inclusion yet we have massive unemployment. There is an absurdity there. I think we have to question the ideological construction of work and this means looking at what it excludes and what it erases. Central to this is questioning the division of reproductive from productive labour.

       It was actually in Mexico in 2018 that I gained new insight into this problem. I had just finished a research trip for a project about land dispossession and restitution in South Africa and I was occupied with thinking about forms of the maintenance of life outside of the waged labour when I arrived. During the set up for my show at Ex Teresa Arte Actual, After the End of Work, both the curators, Virginia Roy and Helena Chávez Mac Gregor had recently had children and were now dealing with returning to work. Virginia’s daughter was only a few months old and a constant presence at the installation. I was talking to them both about work but also about maternity. Those conversations helped me to really understand care as work. The conversation with Helena is now an ongoing project and although I was alone during lockdown I was at the same time in a dialogue about pressures of dealing with children and work.

       I think one of the very real problems right now is that the site of work has changed but not the structure. Spatially work and life have been collapsed and as a result it is now much harder to separate life from work but this is not integration. Rather work can now even more easily subsume life. At the same time in the context of this collapse it is mostly women who are taking on additional work of care. I am frustrated by the conversations that ask what can we learn from working from home and how can telecommuting and flexible working hours be integrated in how work is organised in the future? What we should be asking is how did we accept this structure of work and the division of labour for so long?

AL: …and how symptomatic, precise and symbolic from your government to choose Workers Day as the first day of the easing of lockdown. Thank you, Simon.

[1] Moira Donegan, “This pandemic threatens to undo what generations of feminists have fought for,” The Guardian (May 21st, 2020). Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/21/this-pandemic-threatens-to-undo-what-generations-of-feminists-have-fought-for, accessed May 31st, 2020.