Paper short abstract:

The paper considers how an image of rebirth, political and aesthetic, is mobilised in the disputed restoration of the Eyethu Cinema in Soweto. It does so by considering the futures cinema engenders and how the cinema's temporal layers both underline and complicate projects of urban renewal.

Paper long abstract:

"Eyethu was uterine. Warm and liquid in there while outside the wind howled across Mofolo Park, carrying cries with it." (Lesego Rampolokeng, 2017)

Eyethu was a cultural institution of Soweto in the 1970s and 1980s and, as Rampolokeng offers it, a temple of doom and solace. One of the few African-owned cinemas in apartheid South Africa, Eyethu remains, some thirty years after its closure, a place that evokes both decay and nostalgia. Providing terrain for futures beyond apartheid and for the making of a community project under the apartheid's guise, Eyethu represents the possibility, albeit fragile, of the public, political potential of cinema to reemerge in projects of urban restoration. Even when facing the threat of its building being substituted by a shopping mall, Eyethu remains forward-looking, a cipher of promised African renaissance and a reminder of the valences of cultural heritage. For this reason, the paper contends, it is a privileged site for charting figurations of transformation and change, and the mobilisation of a past political aesthetic in the present. The disputed time of Eyethu, one that works for or agains its own rebirth, allows us to reconsider African Renaissance from the vantage of Mofolo Park, not as a broad historical schema, as Bhekizizwe Peterson puts it, but, using his words, through "the synchronic layers and complexities that often underscore, and sometimes call into question, the seemingly uncomplicated forward-moving sense of temporality and social transformation." The paper proposes alternative Eyethu rebirths, on the threshold of the cinema's 'second coming'.