Lawnbefok: Civilising grass on the highveld

The Wits City Institute will host Jonathan Cane, postdoctoral fellow at the Institute to present this seminar

The central object of concern for this seminar is the South African lawn: a colonial idea and ideal with far-reaching implications for the environment, for the expression of ownership and national belonging. The common sense view of the lawn as a stable, flat, green, family-friendly and apolitical surface is measured against an eccentric archive of real and imagined lawns from the Highveld between 1886 and 2016. The ‘lawn art’ archive includes maps, (photographs of) geographic spaces, intentionally and unintentionally unbuilt architectural proposals, empty spaces on the page and the ground, patterns of lived space, uses and obscene misuses, reappropriations and rejection of spaces on paper and in person. Cane will argue that neither the real nor imagined boundaries which divide civilised nature from the wilderness are able to provide an immutable, safe, impermeable bulwark. The South African lawn, like many other postcolonial landscapes, is muddy, queer and alive, resisting optimistic narratives of progress and growth.

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