Warp and woof: stalking art from End to End

This article offers an alternative ethnography of Johannesburg by tracking the creation of contemporary art within an inner-city atelier, August House, on End Street and into the world at large (from End to End'). The project informs a study about contemporary art as a vector of value: it sought nodes of transfiguration and their catalysts, foregrounding practice and process. In this assemblage, it aspires towards a cultural biography of things' (Kopytoff 1986). It simultaneously authors an obituary of a particular era in the life of this culturally significant hub: during the research period, the building is put up for sale in a value metamorphosis of its own. This disruption introduces an interregnum of uncertainty that surfaces connections between space and imagination, and flags structural realities operating outside the studio door that help define life inside it. Precarity and how this is variously transformed is key. The initial linear narrative trajectory is upended to become an interwoven cobweb instead, demonstrating through synchronous connections the transversality of its subject matter. The journey to new studios is tracked too, as is the atelier's reconfigured fate, which speaks to other buildings crafting second lives in comparable cities of flux. A concept of middle space informs both method and exegesis, starting at the building's elevators. This twinning of form and content is integral to arts-based research, which believes in artistic practice as an alternative form of understanding and revealing new knowledge.