With this video installation for the exhibition ”Mud Muses”, CUSS shows how the housing structure in Johannesburg, South Africa expresses a failure where the state, three decades after the dissolution of the apartheid system, has not managed to free itself from colonial thinking. The poor continue to be relegated to substandard housing units in the city’s outer areas. Peri-urban slums, a product of ''The Group Areas Act'' during apartheid are informal settlements situated on the edge of the city nearest to mine dumping sites where chemical sludge and irradiated waste cause problems. The tangle of cables visualizes a situation where people arbitrarily connect themselves to the city’s electricity grid, a dangerous and illegal activity run by ''izinyoka'' or snakes in Zulu. In the authorities’ anti-izinyoka campaigns, people are literally depicted as snakes who, under the cover of darkness, carry out their ”evil” acts. Communicating with folk demons hides the fact that the situation is more about poor infrastructure and politics than monsters. The dysfunctional city becomes a battlefield for a kind of everyday mythology.
