12 august 2006
7:00 for 7:30pm

> A Room of Her Own

A Performance by Leora Farber
in collaboration with Stangelove
to mark the launch of the
Dis-Location / Re-Location Project

Images

Produced by myself, Leora Farber, in collaboration with the South African designers Strangelove (Carlo Gibson and Ziemek Pater), 'A Room of Her Own' forms part of a three-year project titled 'Dis-Location / Re-Location', the fulcrum of which is a national traveling exhibition scheduled to tour to seven South African Museums asof May 2007.

The performance constitutes a space within which I explore my relationship to and identification with South African British colonial history and its current personal and public residues of identity construction. This is achieved through negotiation of my identity as a white, middle-class Jewish female of British descent, living in the Pan-African, postcolonial environment of Johannesburg.

Being second-generation South Africans of immigrant descent (Italian and Polish respectively), Gibson and Pater share my ambivalent feelings of 'displacement' and 'belonging' in relation to Johannesburg. This ambivalence is embodied in a particular range of their clothing which features throughout the project. This range grafts together Victorian dress conventions (e.g., corsets, wide skirts), African (e.g., tanned cowhide) and contemporary materials (e.g., parachute fabric) to produce a hybrid style which grafts together Eurocentric and South African tribal references.

The reference point for the stage set is the main bedroom of the Sammy Marks Museum, Pretoria. The Victorian museum
is a site which has conceptual links to the content of the project. The entrepreneur, Sammy Marks arrived penniless in South Africa in 1868. His background as an immigrant Jew from Lithuania whose humble beginnings in South Africa
as a peddler, may be likened to that of my grandparents, who, as Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, began their new life in South Africa as general dealers. His immigrant status parallels broader postcolonial concerns of the diasporic, immigrant and migrant communities that form part of the contemporary Pan-African, polyglot nature of South African society.

Using my body as metonym for myself and Bertha Guttmann - a Jewess brought to South Africa from Sheffield to enter into an arranged marriage with Marks - the performance references South African Victorian colonialism, with its emphasis on defined gender roles. Its musical score, which moves through South African historical referents to the present, underscores the critical interface between Bertha's colonial experience of South Africa and my postcolonial experience thereof. Whilst Bertha's experience characteristically attempted to retain Anglicized customs, morals, behaviours and values combined with a re-establishment of these in terms she might have considered as applicable to an alienating environment, my postcolonial identity, like that of many South Africans, is underpinned by hybridity.

In this work, as in as others that form part of the Dis-Location / Re-Location project, Bertha's bedroom becomes a charged space of self-induced transformation; a private space wherein I/she perform/s a series of physical and psychologically transformative acts upon my/her body, using the historically 'feminine' activity of needlework as my/her medium. The physical room might be considered as a metaphoric 'transitional space', wherein unpredictable outcomes may emerge from the grafting of diverse materials and cultures to give rise to new identity formations.

Leora Farber, June 2006