FLY_OVER

FLY_OVER is a multi-channel video work resulting from a series of ‘video sketches’ filmed while driving on the De Villiers Graaf elevated highway in Johannesburg, South Africa. Filmed over an extended period of time, the camera is deployed as a tool for observing or scanning the highway and the movement it produces. The work is an attempt to understand this concrete and steel manifestation of civil engineering in relation to the city that it passes around and through.

More commonly referred to as the double decker highway, the De Villiers Graaf flyover has its origins in aspirations for Johannesburg that came with a Post World War II, gold-boom, Apartheid South Africa. In this work, the structure of the flyover, its layers, concrete beams and apertures are used as prompts for speculations on the city that it bypasses; its grid and its design as a fantasy of modernism that persists even if it is a modernism that is morphed and twisted in peculiar ways, leading up to its present state of evacuated capital, hijacked buildings and failing infrastructure.

Credits

2024, 10 bit Digital video, Multichannel, Installation variable, Loop

Cinematography and editing

Zen Marie

Sound Design

João Orecchia

Live Score

Mpumelelo Mcata

Line Producer

Naadira Patel

Additional Camera

Earl Abrahams

Camera Assistant

Thanduxolo Mwelase

Location Crew

Admire Ncube, Richard Machanda

Zen Marie

Zen Marie (b. 1980, Durban South Africa) lives and works in Johannesburg.

Zen Marie is an artist, filmmaker, and educator based in Johannesburg, South Africa. His practice and research engage video, film, photography, performance, and writing, using site-specific and relational processes to critically explore power relations within spaces.

Marie holds a PhD in fine art from the University of the Witwatersrand (WITS), an MA in cultural analysis from the University of Amsterdam (with distinction), a BA in fine art from the University of Cape Town (with distinction), and is a past participant of the prestigious “de ateliers” programme in Amsterdam.

He has collaborated on feature films with filmmakers such as Lindiwe Matshikiza (One Take Grace) and Mpumelelo Mcata (Film Festival Film), and is currently working with the rock band BLK JKS, on a long version of a video installation that has already been shown at the WITS Art Museum and the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

Marie is senior editor of the journal for creative practice ellipses […], which he founded in 2015, as part of an ongoing project to promote creative and disruptive approaches to research processes and outputs. This work is further sustained in his commitment to WITS School of Art, where he has taught since 2009 and is currently head of department.