Dreams as R-Evolution 

Dreams as R-evolution is both the catalogue for an art installation of the same name, and a work of art itself. The book is a sumptuously-designed record of an exhibit conveying the work of Durban-based artist, Coral Bijoux, landscaped into the spaces of the Westville Plant Nursery. Among the images that open the book is text by the artist that functions as a poem, a warning, and as historical observation. “When you want to enslave a people, you steal their ability to dream.” Reminiscent of the U.S. Black poet Langston Hughes’ 1951 lyric, “A Dream Deferred,” (What happens to a dream deferred/Does it dry up/Like a raisin in the sun…Or does it explode?), Bijoux’s text prepares us to consider dreaming as an act of insurrection. Rich color photography reveals Bijoux’s suggestively figurative and fanciful work with its tones of menace and restriction, her use of plastic in the contrastingly green and vibrant environment of the nursery, sheets of clear plastic hanging and wafting like ghosts, shapes of little girls with iron grills in their mouths, lounging animals, abstract forms, plastic the artists calls “a toxic material that will not leave us” because it is so difficult to recycle, and the artist herself adorned in jewelry of plastic spoons and formal gown;the plastic is a suffocating artifact of an artificial, threatening, and wasteful social order. At the same time, the way the art pieces are planted, so to speak – among the greenery of plants and trees, curtains of artist-made leaves, figures interacting with soil and green life – creates an ecology of hope. In many ways, this volume contains multitudes, certainly in the population of creatures, spirits, beings, structures, flags, life forms, objects, and mysteries erected by the artist like an imaginary city of dreams and dreamers throughout the installation. The multitude is also evident because Bijoux has opened her art to the observations of several writers and poets who center their voices around possibilities emanating from the work, and their own artistic endeavors. Meditations by Salim Washington, Prof H. Baijnath, Usha Seejarim, André Croucamp, Pralini Naidoo, Malika Ndlovu, Tracy-Lee Easthorpe, Diana Ferrus, Ashraf Jamal, and Bijoux herself offer layers of memory, thought, and history to absorb. Bijoux’s text functions as a guide throughout Dreams as R-evolution, revealing aspects of her life story as the descendant of an order that construed human beings into categories such as “colored” that defined her family and township, her thoughts on the self as a construction, racial justice, the palpability of history in our current lives, our existence as part of the natural world, and the salvation that can be found in dreams.