Thursday, June 08, 2006
Train Church
Article here by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen on the work of photographer Santu Mofokeng. One series of the photographs document church services held in unusual places; in this case a commuter train in South Africa. An extract from the text:'The itinerant churches were partly a response to the strains of commuting forced upon millions of South Africans: the rising in the dark, the long journey to places of work, the return home late at night. One simply had no time to go to church.
But apart from their purely practical import, the train churches may also be seen as an attempt to appropriate the in-between of the journey to and from work, to recast the repetitive hardship of commuting in spiritual terms, or, at the very least, to create a space for the rituals of worship within the constraints of forced movement. The spiritual atmosphere of the train is both a release from and a reminder of oppression.'
(Ta to Haunted Geographies)
