HALF ART
CHRIS THURMAN: The other side of the Windybrow: a place of visionaries restoring an almost lost art
I arrived at the Windybrow Arts Centre in a state of mild trepidation. This was not because, as people sometimes say, it is in a dodgy neighbourhood. The precinct, on the border of Hillbrow and Doornfontein, is like much of Johannesburg: in a state somewhere between repair and disrepair, with opportunity and poverty, beauty and grime not so much coexisting as mutually informing each other. On any given day, the people of Jozi are doing what people do – heading to work, coming home, shopping, doing chores and resting. All this should go without saying, but the pseudo-anthropological way in which visitors talk and write about downtown Joburg can be so exoticising, so painfully condescending, so faux-glamourising, it somehow seems necessary to affirm (misappropriating the title of Athol Fugard’s play) that people are living there.No, my nervousness upon arrival at the Windybrow was based purely on my own inadequacies. For one thing, local arts writers worth their salt should know a bit...
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