to explore university grounds behind closed doors
(especially with your fiance as tour guide).
After a brief period of unrest and various student protests in 2016-2017 in South Africa, various universities, like the University of Pretoria, ramped their security up and essentially closed their gates from the outside world. Other universities, like Stellenbosch Univerity, are embedded in the town and cannot do this. The risks of having their doors open, especially during protests, are always worries.
My fiance recently took me on a tour of the University of Pretoria campus, in which she personally took me to all of the beautiful and artsy places.
I want to share with you this journey, this adventure inside of the city, taking beautiful and historic turns. At the end of the post, I will speculate along with some of the others if the University has a Rembrandt painting!
So, please join me as I take you along with this journey behind closed doors!
Blending Nature and Architecture
It is a fact of life that we modern humans are stuck in concrete jungles. This is not always the case, but for many of us, the sight of nature has become a privilege and not a day-to-day reality. But at the University of Pretoria Hatfield campus, they have tried to blend the two.
A bit of historical background, the people who "founded" the cities of Pretoria and Johannesburg were obsessed with Jakaranda (Jacaranda mimosifolia) trees. It has become a big attraction, the streets lined with the most beautiful purple flowers each spring. The problem is that most of these trees lining the streets are non-native species. Besides this point, the streets are always beautifully purple this time of the year.
The campus, built in the early 1900s took this opportunity to blend the buildings in with these newly planted trees. More than a hundred years later, the trees stand proud and tall between the buildings, creating a surreal beauty for the students (who probably do not see this beauty because of their worries about writing exams!).
Or maybe it is just my disposition or attitude to look up, to see beauty in the mundane, to try and brighten my life irrespective of my situation.
Either way, the blue sky with the most beautiful trees seemed beyond art and poetry to me. I delighted myself in the beauty of these surroundings.
But besides the blending of nature with the architecture, there is also the blending of old and new. The old buildings stand beside new ones, brutalist and cold contrasting with the textured old warm buildings. Always in conversation, the past tries to exist beside the present, the future, the new. Is this not the story of our present, with the past always trying to creep back and influence the future?
Let us not get too philosophical this quickly!
I could not help but take some "strange" (that is, artistic) photographs of the buildings, and I think the students who walked past me thought that I had gone mad. Remember these buildings are behind closed doors (gates), there are no "tourists" walking here.
The old buildings house mostly art and historical pieces. It amazed me just how many pieces of historical art and works the campus housed. There are about 5 different buildings, or museums and art galleries.
And my fiance and the other students can see these beautiful pieces for free, yet no one really visits these places. They are too "old" and not "cool enough", or the students really just focus too much on educating themselves through books and not art...
And then, Blending Art...
The campus is full of different art pieces. It really is stunning to see how much they do for the students, to make their surroundings beautiful and not just a place of study and learning.
It is easy to forget that one's surroundings tremendously influence how one learns. Besides the beauty of nature and the architecture, as noted above, the various pieces of art decorating where most of the students walk can have a very subtle yet meaningful impact on the students' psyches. I know it did on mine!
Art plays such a big role in life, yet we never really pay attention to it once we become familiar with it. Because I am not used to these pieces, I saw them with a new eye, and my fiance who did the little tour with me, saw it with new eyes as well. Art, like nature, provides life with new colours, with a new lens with which to appreciate life as not just something biological necessitated by the drive to survive, but something we need to appreciate and experience at every moment.
And then, I again heard that I am not allowed to take photographs of the art with my DSLR camera... (But somehow it was fine to take photographs with my iPhone!) Sadly, my phone was stolen recently, so I lost most of the photographs of the art on the inside of the building, but this is my fault for not backing up the photographs...
But as I always do, I snuck my camera in, and I took some photographs of the art pieces, including the supposed Rembrandt (the last photograph below).
Walking in the hallways I felt like a student again. My campus does not really have similar buildings, as we are integrated into the city, the buildings feel like normal buildings. But here, alongside the students, in halls that look like university halls, looking at art, I again felt like a student!
I was again struck by the feeling of awe, and jealousy. The students did not know what they missed, what they had at their fingertips. I would sit for hours on end staring at these artworks if I could visit them. I would draw the various sculptures and think about the complexities of life.
Yet the halls of the art galleries and museums were empty. The fiance and I were the only people...
Photographs of Some Art
As noted, I "stole" some photographs of the art with my camera (sadly, the ones on my phone are now gone for always...).
The university houses three (or more - I lost count) museums, with various pieces of historical artefacts, from local and indigenous pieces to world-historical pieces.
They house the most extensive and exhaustive exhibition of gold found in pre-colonial African societies, and gold pieces found throughout Africa. The number of pieces is mind-boggling (and sadly again, I lost the photographs...)
But mixed along all of these pieces, are the modern artworks, which create a beautiful contrast between what once was (the past) and what we have today (modern minds contemplating our own fallibility and mortality.
Here I share some of these "stolen moments".
Is This a Rembrandt?
The debate whether the painting on the right is a Rembrandt is not just a local small gossip story. At first, when my fiance told me about this, I thought she made it up, or that it was just hearsay; what is the chances that a local university on South African soil has a Rembrandt, and why would they even have one?
Besides my quibble, I soon found myself in front of this painting, and what an experience. I could not believe my eyes; even if it was not a "real" Rembrandt, what would it matter? The aura and feelings of standing in front of this painting swept me away.
I was awestruck by its beauty. Its size was small compared to the other paintings. Yet its centrality in the room took away from all of the noise in the background. It stood out as the piece in the room.
What does it matter if it is authentic? The mere presence of it in the room silenced all of this background and static noise.
Postscriptum
In the end, I left changed. The amount of art that we saw was staggering. There is more art than students. Jokes aside, the day was beautiful and the art life-changing.
My fiance got an overdose of her favourite art, Pierneef, and I followed her like a student a lecturer. She took me to all of her favourite places and we enjoyed the brief moment of being students at the same university.
But like all journeys, it has to end.
I hope that you enjoyed this journey with me, and that I could change your view of universities in South Africa!
For now, happy and safe travels, and keep well.
All of the musings and writings are my own, unless hyperlinked and stated otherwise. The photographs are my own, taken with my Nikon D300.