Hoover #1, from Milnerton Market, 1999-2009, floated and framed in with black aluminum

I have roughly 40 square portraits of Milnerton Market Hoovers in my archive. 

Whenever I see these discarded sucking machines, I imagine the moth-eaten Persians whose dust particles they no longer attempt to coax from the warp and weft. I also imagine instructions being barked around the lounges.

`Gou nou!' which means '`Hurry up!'

'Nou nou!' which means '`Very soon!'

I guess one might find these two examples operating in tandem.

Apparently an Afrikaans TV hostess described the point at which the guest was due to arrive at, as '`Nou nou, nou'.

Back in the day, when I was trying to coax writers to contribute to the book, I approached an academic from what was then the Rand Afrikaans University and asked if he'd supply some text on 'Reduplication in the Afrikaans Language' which is the term describing saying shit twice. More often that not it's used to describe the speaker's heightened emotional state.

He seemed curious, but precisely what the connection between the Hoover photos and the reduplication was seemed lost on him.

I remember saying that the connection was not dissimilar to The Grahamstown Flower Arranging Club using Cliff Richard as a soundtrack to their public flower-arranging events(as opposed to the AGM or a rabid meeting held ex temporere to shift the balance of power within the board).

 2009-For the last decade, David Southwood has been observing, participating in, and photographing the Milnerton flea market. In that time, he has seen subtle changes in one of the many ‘grey zones’ of Cape Town, where a growing number of peripheral characters—mainly poor whites and recent migrants into South Africa—seek to earn a living through trade in second-hand goods. Milnerton Market has emerged from Southwood’s intense engagement as a powerful record of a single community on the fringes of a society in flux.

On one hand, Milnerton Market simply bears witness to the hodgepodge life of things. But on the other, it explores the implications of the redistribution of resources by a new democratic government in the early 1990s, a process that did very little to alleviate the destitution of many. The geographic and symbolic ‘in-betweenness’ of the site of the market—it is not sea, not city, not industrial, not prime property—and of the vendors themselves, perched on rickety deck chairs, suggests an uncomfortable unity of political rhetoric and acceptable public memory.

Frame size: 48 x 48 cm

Print size: 42 x 42 cm

Please contact me for other size options and prices.

This edition 1/4

Archival Inkjet on 300 GSM Hahnemuhle