57th AICA International Congress Johannesburg : Diary Entry

Johannesburg, the city of gold, begins for me in colours, but the colours carry weight. The red ochre earth is beautiful only at first glance; look longer and it resembles something bruised, overworked, exhausted. Even the green grass that pushes through it feels less like hope and more like stubborn survival. It is late October and the jacarandas soften the streets with their violet haze, a borrowed beauty that made me recall Mexico City and, faintly, Portugal. But here the blooms feel strained, almost brittle. These trees demand more water than the land can reliably give, echoing the old colonial logic; take what you need, drain what you find, move on before the consequences arrive.

Daily life unfolds under these pressures. Much of it feels improvised, patched together with weak tape, strong will and a weary familiarity with systems that rarely work as they should. Choices are thin; sometimes non-existent. The broken infrastructure that turns the simplest act, like opening a door, or cooking an omelette, into an exercise in patience. The dysfunction stops feeling exceptional; it becomes the atmosphere. And in that atmosphere, people learn to adapt not out of resilience alone but out of necessity, because the alternative would be to stop altogether.

My own days feel weary too. I find myself making do in ways that remind me just how thin the margin for error is here. I left Charles’s USB cable in a cab; and lost a treasured pen given to me by a dear friend, a friend I somehow managed to lose as well and who I sorely miss.

Downtown carries this weight more visibly. Life and decay sit side by side, indistinguishable at times. Improvised market stalls cling to the edges of derelict buildings left to rot since the apartheid years. Structures abandoned by those who could leave, inherited by those who couldn’t. Wending through them is not poetic; it is a reminder of structural abandonment, a scar that was never meant to heal. People sleep where they can, work where they can, speak where they can. Communities persist, but their endurance should not be mistaken for consent to the conditions imposed on them.

Then there is the other Jo’burg. The one that works very hard to pretend it belongs elsewhere. Behind high walls and barbed wire, in manicured suburbs that mimic London’s more sterile corners, wealth floats above the city’s fractures. The enclaves of footballers and their branded wives feel like a parody of glamour, curated to the point of emptiness. This other Jo’burg resemble Canary Wharf without even the pretence of public space: all glass and gates, a version of the city that refuses to acknowledge the soil it stands on.

The 57th AICA International Congress: Re-imagining the Global South - Art, Gender and Identity unfolds against this backdrop. The conversations feel urgent precisely because the power structures under critique are not abstract here; they are visible in the landscape, in the architecture, in the distribution of safety and risk. Re-imagining and re-defining the “Global South” term, challenging Eurocentric frameworks. These are not lofty academic exercises but necessary attempts to confront an art world still structured by old hierarchies; dismantling the hegemonic and racist notion of art shaped by a singular and exclusionary Eurocentric gaze. A rehearsal of possibilites. Jo'burg sharpens these debates: a city marginalised by global systems yet overflowing with creative resistance.

The first part of this year Congress, the UNESCO Women in Art in Africa Seminars deepen this tension. Artists, curators and academics from across the southern half of the continent gathered not merely to theorise, but to expose the fractures left by European humanism. A humanism that historically excluded most of the world. These women - Fadzai V. Muchemwa, Renee Mboya, Shonisani Netshia, Laura Ganda, Syowia Kyambi, Georgina Maxim, Usha Seejarim, Gladys M. Kalichini, Lindelwa Pepu, etc. - spoke of a new humanism built from lived experience, from domestic realities, from the violence of patriarchy and the burden of survival. They discussed the deliberate erasure of archives and oral histories, a strategy of colonial power designed to ensure that the colonised could not later demand accountability. Making me to recall Joy Gregory’s work recently shown at the Whitechapel Gallery as being a tip of that discussion. In such conditions, art is not a luxury; it becomes the only remaining form of resistance when politics fails or refuses.

The second part of the Congress was dedicated to the papers selected through AICA International’s open call. The epistemological hierarchies embedded in the European gaze became particularly evident across the panels on Confrontation, Race and Gender, and related themes. Rachel Cecília de Oliveira’s paper, “The Eye is the Origin of a Visual Tradition,” made clear how the so-called “Global South” perceives this gaze: fundamentally “constructivist,” rather than allowing for an Afro-Atlantic symbolic reordering beyond Western syntax.

Her argument immediately brought to mind the Royal Academy of Arts’ recent exhibition on Brazilian modernism. In Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism, half-century later, again, Brazilian modern art was framed through the familiar repertoire of European and American metaphors, reducing its complexity to the same predictable narrative, no matter how diverse or plural the voices actually are, have been, and will be in the world. All in all, Britain is still trying to tear other voices apart.

The Congress multiple possibilities for conditions, open by the different presentations, for conceptual and cultural relationships, also permeated the conventions used to explain the overwhelming number of exhibitions in the UK featuring so-called “African” artists - some of whom have never set foot on that vast, plural and profoundly diverse continent. Too often, their inclusion appears to hinge merely on the artists’ colour of their skin or the convenience of a gender label. Clearly, no criticism or critique or criticality. Beyond those two reductive conventions, entry points, their works are left suspended in a conceptual vacuum, awaiting for an engagement that never fully arrives. The same Eurocentric, hierarchical gaze is evident in much of last year’s commentary on Pedrosa’s selections for the Venice Biennale’s main exhibition. Regardless, moving on…

Mary Sibande’s studio visit, for instances, sharpened the contradictions further. Her work holds both pain and possibility, exposing the fault lines between history and imagination, oppression and reinvention. Standing in her workspace felt uncannily aligned with the city itself: a place shaped by extraction and inequality, yet occupied by people who insist on creating, reimagining, refusing to disappear.

Jo’burg is not an easy city, nor does it pretend to be. Its beauty is conditional, contingent, always shadowed by the cost at which it comes. You find it in the red earth, the broken pavements, the jacaranda petals that fall like unwanted confetti, and the brief laughter that manages to rise despite everything working against it. Here, resilience is not a romantic virtue; it is a daily negotiation with (colonial and postcolonial) structures that would prefer people to remain silent, invisible, or gone. It is a way of being because there is no other option.

The concept of the “Global South” mirrors that idea of Jo’burg: a city left behind, abandoned by a racist culture in which everyone who remains must adjust, survive and carry on with their lives, regardless of what is happening or what is being demanded by the singular, historically European gaze. The term functions much like the city itself; the term ‘Global South’ is a convenient category created from the outside, flattening complexities into something legible to the centre while obscuring the lived realities of those within it.

In Johannesburg, as in much of the so-called Global South, resilience is not celebrated; it is required. It is the quiet labour of making life in a place repeatedly misread, commodified or dismissed. A disfunction that I lived while in Mexico, and perceived in the Eurocentric perception on the Aztecs, Zapata, Rivera and Khalo local structures of visual culture. And yet, beneath this imposed narrative, there is a multiplicity that refuses to conform: voices, practices and histories that exceed the frame, that challenge the tidy definitions shaped in Northern capitals. Voices like those from the first part of the Congress and from Mary Sibade and her Southern African contemporaries.

To walk through the city is to see how people continue despite, and often in defiance of, the frameworks that seek to define them. Jo’burg unsettles the vocabulary of the “Global South” precisely because it exposes the limits of that terminology. Like the city, the term carries scars, distortions and silences; but it also contains possibilities for reimagining what lies beyond the old hierarchies, should we - the European - choose to listen. Do we?

Johannesburg, November 2025

© Rui Gonçalves Cepeda