What is the ecology of the postcolonial city, and what are the possibilities for the rehabilitation of this ecology? This paper seeks to answer these questions via an examination of Ivan Vladislaviæ’s representation of the ecology of the postcolonial city, in this case present-day Johannesburg, via his deconstruction of linear temporality. Vladislaviæ’s art deconstructs time in the viscerally experienced present: the narrator embarks on a taxonomy of the palimpsestic materiality of this postcolonial city by walking the streets, exposing the history of human and ecological exploitation upon which the city is founded. However, this intensely populated present is not merely historical, but is also a “suspension” of singular history, what I want to call a transhistorical moment, in which the past is revealed such that it may be accepted, reinterpreted, laid to rest, ensuring the possibility of a new future. There have been many apprehensions of transhistorical time: Eliade calls the sense of sacred time that constitutes human religion illus tempus, Latin for “that time” or “time of origins” (The Sacred and the Profane); Einstein’s space-time continuum is similar in its non-linearity; Bloch and Febvre’s longue durée prioritised long-term historical structures over events; Heidegger’s Being and Time argues that conscious being is determined by a sense of temporality. Vladislaviæ similarly suggests that a transhistorical sense of “seeing time whole” exposes both the histories and possible futures of the present, a sense and technique which is vital for new ways of living.