Someone argues with the bouncers, a child begs those in line, a dealer offers marijuana, a young woman yells to a friend across the street.<\/p>\n
Yet not too far away from the De Beer Street turbulence are inner city roads that only a few hours earlier were a knot of activity.<\/p>\n
Congestion dissipates with the daylight and these streets are left empty, creating a cavern in which pedestrian footsteps echo, and drivers move seamlessly from one near-redundant traffic light to the next.<\/p>\n
The night has a different rhythm, feel, and aesthetic to the day.<\/p>\n
This \u201csecond city\u201d, academic William Sharpe once said<\/a><\/strong>, \u201ccomes with its own geography and its own set of citizens\u201d.<\/p>\n We occupy space differently at night.<\/p>\n Yet so little attention has been given (both within academia and without) to the multifaceted articulations of place, power, atmosphere and identity that constitute Johannesburg after dark.<\/p>\n Scholars of urban studies are increasingly acknowledging that the discipline, and indeed the wider imagining of cities, is characterised by nyctaphobia: A fear of the dark, and relatedly, the night.<\/p>\n As is so often the case, it is artists that are giving us a creative language to describe and engage with that which was once impenetrable.<\/p>\n Elsa Bleda\u2019s recent \u201cNightscapes<\/a><\/strong>\u201d exhibition is one such example. The young photographer\u2019s arresting images capture the serenity, mystery and other worldliness of Johannesburg by night.<\/p>\n A primary impetus for her work lies in the century-old Rupert Brooke quote that \u201ccities, like cats, will reveal themselves after dark\u201d. Nevertheless, urban residents are all-too-often strangers to the night.<\/p>\n Darkness often comes with a web of seedy associations \u2013 of terror, shadow, deviance, abandonment and impenetrability.<\/p>\n There are anxieties about criminals using the night as camouflage, about the vulnerabilities of women, and about the dangers of poorly lit roads.<\/p>\n And indeed the dark is often charged with ambivalent possibilities.<\/p>\n On Friday, October 14 slices of Braamfontein\u2019s night-streets, including The Orbit Jazz<\/a> <\/strong>club, were torched amid turbulent protest: sites of play incidentally colliding with those of fierce, volatile struggle.<\/p>\n Darkness can also awaken the imagination, offering atmosphere for transgression, abandon and fantasy. Social anthropologist Julia Hornberger<\/a> said<\/a><\/strong> of Johannesburg dusk:<\/p>\n Going forward into the night is like going backwards in time. Chipped corners on balconies heal, cracks in the plastering disappear \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The night is a time for dreaming, for graffiti artists, for activists, lovers and dancers.<\/p>\n Paradoxically, darkness is often the necessary backdrop for glistening electric illumination, with all the associations of developmental modernity and consumptive excess.<\/p>\n Indeed, despite the ways in which electricity blackouts have brought Johannesburg residents into new encounters with the dark, much of our urban night lives take place amid a superfluity of light technologies \u2013 traffic lights, nightclub LEDs, police sirens or fluorescent towers in the distance.<\/p>\n Light has been a mechanism to claim nocturnal time and territory \u2013 to make the dark habitable, exploitable, police-able, profitable and beautiful.<\/p>\n Curated lighting is so much a part of the nighttime infrastructure \u2013 designating areas of safety, enchantment and surveillance, and then disappearing as day breaks.<\/p>\n Braamfontein\u2019s after-dark nightscape is marked by the multi-coloured spectacle of the Nelson Mandela Bridge overhead, abrasive car lights, flash billboards and flickering neon. Again in New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850-1950<\/a><\/strong>, Sharpe tells<\/a> <\/strong>us:<\/p>\n \u201cLike a city, night has a history. And the two come together explosively with the spread of artificial light.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n A recent event, “Alight<\/strong>\u201d<\/a>, saw artists and designers launch audiences into a series of encounters with electric light in the night.<\/p>\n There was a maze of illuminated blocks that responded to touch.<\/p>\n Also, a net of sparkle strung to the ceiling. Lasers sketched silhouettes across a cement wall. There were glowing balloons and networks of interactive video technology.<\/p>\n On the darker side of the Juta Street intersection, it connected audiences to Johannesburg\u2019s nocturnal city and promoted a sense of place through play, light and music.<\/p>\n But what \u201cAlight\u201d also achieved, in my mind, was to make explicit the infrastructure of our nightlives, which rather than being assembled from bricks and mortar, is more tangibly a composite of sound, darkness, illumination, and moving bodies.<\/p>\n Ever been to a nightclub during the day, without the darkness, the music, the ambient lighting or the intimacy of the crowd?<\/p>\n It feels like a non-place. So much of our attachment to nightclub spaces is made from bodies in motion, set to carefully curated sound and light-scapes, all of which disappear at dawn.<\/p>\n In urbanist AbdouMaliq Simone\u2019s words<\/a><\/strong>, we might begin to see \u201cpeople as infrastructure\u201d.<\/p>\n Human practices, the absence or presence of others, in the city gives places particular contours, creates obstruction or permissiveness, and alters the look and feel of a place.<\/p>\n Moving through Johannesburg\u2019s night city, particularly as a young woman, has meant adopting particular protective sensibilities. But it has also opened up alternate ways of knowing and encountering the city and its practices.<\/p>\n In the realm of the urban night, artists are exposing the dearth of academic language and imagery, prompting us to research and collaborate outside our conventional bounds.<\/p>\n They are showing us how much of human life goes unnoticed, while most of the world sleeps. This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a><\/strong>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is what’s going on after dark.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":220,"featured_media":108897,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[677,17704,7048,22963],"class_list":["post-108893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","tag-art","tag-conversation","tag-johannesburg","tag-night"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/220"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Fear of the dark<\/h3>\n
![\"dj\"](\"http:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/DJ.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nAfter-dark nightscape<\/h3>\n
A nightclub without the music and lights<\/h3>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/counter.theconversation.edu.au\/content\/66697\/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic\")
<\/p>\n
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