Minor Alterations: Lisette Forsyth

Day Five of The Lockdown Collection (a project to support South African artists) showcases an emerging work by Lisette Forstyth, "Minor Alterations." As in many of Forsyth's works, painted figures are superimposed over archival documents. In this case, a middle class black woman stands  in three quarters profile turned away from us; on her hip is a young girl in a striped dress clutching her, wearing adorable heart-shaped glasses. The background, visible through the woman's back, is a set of housing floor plans, along with a letter, in the upper left, addressed to municipal authorities requested permission to alter the house.

The artist, who has been working on the work since the lockdown began, writes, "this a reminder of how-like the application—we are currently subject to the rules and decision so the state. The close confines of our homes force us to look deeply at our intimate relationships and recognize that we are all in this together, and like children we all feel vulnerable and have a need for reassurance.”

The title, "Minor Alterations," is of course ironic. In the face of an unprecedented viral threat, as much of the global population is confined indoors and facing massive economic disruption, the alterations we need to make to our daily routines and emotional orientations are hardly minor  The blueprints anticipate the work of physical construction, disrupting all aspects of the household, and this is perhaps evocative of the coming work of reconstructing society once things get back "to normal." As noted in the artist's statement, the ostensibly private domain of the house is infused with the power of the state, which now has confined the entire national population into their homes.

Lisette Forstyth, Mnor Alterations, 2020

There is a kind of visible parallelism between the house floorplans and the closely bound bodies of the mother-child couple. This seems entirely appropriate given that most of the global population is having to fit itself into the narrow confines of their abodes.

Anthropologist Tom Beidelman has observed that it is through our bodies and our homes that we come to grasp the most elusive aspects of our sociocultural order.   This point is a corrective to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: our house does not provide a precise map to how our culture is organized; rather we live in a world, which we know first and foremost through our bodies and our abodes, that is rife with contradictions--tensions we must  creatively navigate through all strages of our lives. At the moment, our individual and collective challenge is to thread our way through a maze that is still emergent, retaining compassion for our loved ones and for others, while remaining as safe physically and biologically as possible.  The mother, tenderly clutching her daughter while gazing at plans which may or may not be approved, is thus a perfect avatar for all us, as we anxiously step forward into a labyrinth that remains under development.