A Colander, An Eclipse
On astronomy, ancestry and the incandescent magic of London’s E17, all in the space of a solar eclipse. Taken from our 15th studio missive as Stoep Collective London.
Words: Megan Natasha Ross
No noodles, m’am, just light. This line from Shakespeare's Macbeth,"Stars, hide your fires; let not light see my black and deep desires" comes to mind.
Yesterday my colleague advised that I invest in a good colander. If not for spaghetti, then at least for the solar eclipse.
She didn’t know that astronomy is a deep love of mine. Or that as Her Majesty’s Astronomer at the Cape, my great-great grandfather mapped the southern skies, shifting the family line from Ireland and England to the Observatory in Cape Town, South Africa. This is how it came to be that his descendants — my family — are scattered across Toronto and London, Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Dublin and Barbados.
And Walthamstow.
Imagine my excitement when, upon arriving home last night in London’s E17, I encountered a crowd gathered outside the local Oxfam. From my vantage point at the top of St James Street it appeared that a man was filming the inside of the charity shop. I too am a fan of the Mandela shirts inside, and as I walked closer I made a mental note to pop in to nab one before they sell out. But as the distance between me and the street corner narrowed, I realised that the silver object was not a camera but a colander, and the ‘film’ in question was the solar eclipse in real time, projected on a sheet of blank paper for all passers-by converging on St James Street, Black Horse Road and the High Street.
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At home in E17, the loveliest hood in London!
Our ancestors board ships dreaming of better lives, of safety or adventure or possibility. I can’t pretend to know what was going through my ancestor’s mind when he and my grandmother, Lady Mary, decided to accept an invitation from Sir John Herschel, whose family is intertwined with our own, in effect abandoning a surgical career in London to pursue his love of astronomy in what we now call the Mother City.
In this new life, eleven children in tow, he corrected a previous error made by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille and effectively reproved that the Earth is indeed round, a life’s work for which he was knighted by Queen Victoria, honoured with the Lalande Prize and a Royal Medal of the Royal Society. However, even as a small child reading the historical accounts of his life in the Cape something felt amiss, and as I grew up in 1990s South Africa, a new Rainbow Nation, surrounded by a bevy of decolonially-minded, politically active family friends in the Eastern Cape, I began to question this service to the Crown, and what it meant for us, by then African, to inherit a legacy of imperialism alongside the French, Dutch, Polish, Indian and Indonesian stories in our DNA.
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An image of Maclear, the crater on the moon named in honour of my Irish great-great grandfather; this is taken from Apollo 15
The Royal Observatory in Cape Town, which is where my maternal line sprung from after their move from Ireland, with years spent in London, to South Africa. The family lived here for many years, and my great-great (great!) grandparents, Sir Thomas and Lady Mary, are still buried there.
In my maternal family, stars are stand-ins for currency; celestial bodies are psychic anchors for the self. A lineage braided with a twinned reverence for science and mysticism, for natural phenomena and mathematics, is how it came to be that so many of my cousins and I are writers, filmmakers, explorers, travellers, scientists and surgeons. We’ve been shaped by keen curiosity and a seismic hunger to inhabit the wonders of the universe, an inclination not without its tendency towards melancholy (and madness, admittedly).
Perhaps that is why from as young as eleven-years-old I’ve been making films, heading off on little entrepreneurial ventures (candle sales at KTV Market Day, vintage clothing from my digs at UCKAR (Rhodes University) and Hudson Park’s CCC Day come to mind) and always searching for how to align my work with my vision.
Stoep Collective is that baby now, a world-building studio quite literally made for dreaming, imagining and slowing down. As we narrow our attention on the beauty in front of us: a budding tomato plant, a kitten’s paw, the arc of cumulonimbus across the deep-blue sky, the world slows down. Deeper space opens, time becomes ample, realities shift.
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This is what I’ve always dreamed of, what Chad and I have spoken about for years, both as a married couple and as two entrepreneurs seeing the value in each other’s points of view, and we’re thrilled that from the end of August, the start of autumn and the cooler months (hopefully!), our capacity for fresh engagements has significantly increased.
From the end of August, Stoep Collective is opening limited capacity for a select number of new engagements. If there is a project on your horizon that is after a little more than “just” copywriting — a launch, film, exhibition, studio, brand world or institutional strategy in need of atmosphere, authority and commercial clarity — write to us at hello@stoepcollective.com.
We build narrative worlds and intuitive editorial systems that help serious work be received as such: eliciting desire, inviting curiosity and moving people, numbers and ultimately, entire industries.
