I’ve watched too many horror films to be entirely alone in the Katutura Community Arts Centre.
It’s a Sunday, two guards have let me in to look at the Cota exhibition and, though our voices bounce off the gloomy walls cheerfully enough as they hand me a key card at the entrance, the minute they leave, the silence becomes solid and every step I take towards the upper gallery seems like a knock on haunted wood summoning ghosts, ghouls and the ghastly.
Though I know I’m alone, by virtue of being told as much and looking around to behold no one I can see, I feel pretty sure I can hear footsteps.
Footfalls almost matching my own. But a little late around the edges.
So I stop.
Abruptly.
With my heart pretending the pounding of feet as I strain my ears to hear what I know is not there.
Naturally, there is nothing and no one except the building stretching out around me with room after room filled with nobody and air and odd ideas captured on pages and in sculptures.
Though being alone is often comforting to me, today it somewhat unsettles as I think of how many places there are to haunt and hide. And for no reason, other than an over active imagination, I feel certain that there is someone somewhere. Watching me.
Waiting until I have left the building to rummage through drawers and in cupboards in remembrance or raid.
Infuriatingly, I feel afraid. I clutch my belongings more tightly, click my tongue and the sound echoes back at me as though I’m simply haunting myself.
I’d like to go home but I haven’t looked at the art.
I’d like to call out and negotiate some kind of truce with the thing that is making me stay rooted to the spot but my throat has gone dry and my wits won’t let me talk to thin air. At least not when it seems as thick and as threatening as it does today.
Vaguely I notice that my hands are shaking. My camera is gently hitting my thigh as it dangles from my wrist and I realise that I have been standing stock still for long enough to feel foolish.
To calm myself, I check my phone.
A BBM is glowing bright blue and red and I feel less like I am in a Stephen King novel once I check my Facebook and read an update so normal and so insipidly about the soccer I feel sure I live in a world without the stain of the supernatural.
Still, the place seems sinister.
There is art everywhere but it doesn’t hide the fact that the building looks like an institute for the criminally and otherwise insane. And it doesn’t disguise the idea that its aura seems dark and diabolical and that, at a particular time, on a certain kind of day, there seems to be a pervasive presence floating through the halls which is sent skittering into the eaves the moment the place is populated by its cacophonous cabal of creatives.
Eventually, I make it upstairs and a let out a little scream when I see a circle of heads arranged in a semi-circle on the ground. Grinning and glowing as the light from the window brings them to life just as some old pipes start clanging overhead.
Sculptures.
12 of them. Grey. Rising up from the floor like zombie busts bent on giving me a heart attack at the tender age of twenty-something.
After that I am calmer.
I inch closer and laugh in one of the sculpture’s faces until I don’t know who is grinning more sinisterly at whom.
Some ice melts and makes cracking sounds in my water bottle and it sends me scampering away from my bag sat in a corner while I regard the work of Tafadzwa Gatsi, Sunya Beukes and Lesley Tjiriange.
I feel afraid again but I carry on taking notes and photographs.
I map out a mental escape route in case a psychopath intent on robbing, ravaging or worse lurks quietly in the shadows and I carry on taking notes and photographs.
Finally, I have finished.
I have looked at every piece in every eerie corner and when I get to the security doors in the front of the building I see the N$6.50 I remember putting down on the counter as I reached for the key card from the guard.
It is still there and I laugh because when you can leave money out in the open and find it right where you left it almost 40 minutes later, clearly, you are in the safest spot in the city.
