Vice Versa

October 07, 2025 - October 12, 2025

Snowflake building, Potchefstroom

A group exhibition curated by Gwen Miller at the 2025 Momentum Aardklop Visual Arts Festival.

Watch how viewers interact with the kinetic sculpture, Floor Uprooting Device V, at the Vice Versa exhibition.

Artist statement

Emma Willemse

Floor Uprooting Device V 

The artist’s book on this mechanised stand is constructed from discarded parquet floor blocks sourced from the gentrified neighbourhood Woodstock in Cape Town. Marks of residue visible on the wooden blocks are significant reminders and verified documents of the previous installed floors. The act of opening and closing this book evokes the action and sound when wooden floors are ripped out of their roots when homes are demolished.

The floor of a house maps the inside spaces of a home, it defines the spaces where people experience their most intimate moments.  By retrieving the floor blocks and inverting them in this book, I attempt to re-connect to these experiences. Like Laura U Marks, I maintain that objects “are not inert and mute but they tell stories and describe trajectories” (2000:120), and that their meaning and significance resides in their physicality, their materiality and their tactility, in the same way “as habit stores memory in the body” (2000:121). 

Marks, L.U. 2000. The skin of the film: intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses. Durham: Duke University Press.