PLATAFORMA
Plataforma is the waiting, the interval between the end of apartheid in South Africa and something else, not yet achieved but promised too long ago.
Prasa, the passenger rail agency of South Africa, a state owned enterprise and its operations division, Metrorail, become the platform for the comments from the encounter with the everyday challenges of commuting between home and work in the city of Cape Town.
Corruption and greed in the South African government has allowed billions of rands of public money to be stolen, resulting in the destruction of a service on which many rely as the only means of transport to work, school and a source of income.
The lack of safety and reliability, due to lack of maintenance, leaves thousands of people stranded for hours daily or riding unsafely on gutted and dirty trains that when finally arrive are insufficient for the amount of people waiting.
The platform becomes a space of angst and frustration, with the silent announcement, the crackling of static, the cold tracks, the empty horizon and the uncertainty as the start and the end of every day.
Reading the captions to Ernest Cole's House of Bondage one sadly acknowledges that, in the last 60 years some things haven't changed much.
Plataforma is also the fast motion: of wheels, feet, bodies, thoughts. The meeting of eyes, of compartments, normally divided into the ripped leatherette cushioned “metroplus” and the stripped down, broken, hard plastic of the dangerously overcrowded third class.
The window, with its messages and possibilities: a frame, a composition, a filter, a veil with graffiti, stickers, scratches and dirt.
On a lucky day, 25 minutes to and from downtown, on the cape flats line, every working day and sometimes on the weekend.
10 stops, 5 days a week, 11 months a year while trying to make sense of certain complexities and contradictions, present in South African society.
Plataforma is a dynamic link between the music playing on the headphones and the stills of a daily route on a reel, fleeting scenes set by circumstance and chance, unfolded in the less than 30 seconds between sliding doors and a whistle.
It's a register of ideas, a notebook of impressions, an essay full of quick and blurred sketches.
