Terra Nulla: Reclaiming Space, Place, and Power in Contemporary South African Landscape
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the official end of apartheid in 1994, South Africa experienced a shift in the dialectic triad of space, place, and power that was inherently linked to the land. Consequently, this dramatic change also ruptured the trajectory of South African landscape art. Hence, at the turn of the century early colonial painters appropriated the South African land as the empty space from which to begin the colonial narrative. Yet, in the mid 1980s black township artists used painted landscapes as spaces of imagined homelands and in the contemporary context the land was reclaimed as an ideological force field ubiquitous with traces of politics, economy, and ecology. This paper primarily focuses on works by the artist William Kentridge, who maintains a central focus on landscape in both his drawings and films. Using a deliberately outmoded expressionistic style, Kentridge employs traditional mediums to renegotiate sites of memory, while highlighting the contradictions of representing landscape as a neutral space. Arguing that landscape is an active rather than passive entity, this paper analyzes the layers of history hidden within dehistoricized spaces, and the role of the artist as mediator between the ephemerality of nature and historical amnesia. Situating the artist within Homi K. Bhabha’s conception of the Third Space, an interstitial site between the oppressor/oppressed and colonizer/colonized, Kentridge’s identity as a white, but Jewish, artist places him within a ‘double bind’. The artist’s unique space consequently determines the places he paints, and the personal memory he inscribes over sites of collective history.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".