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Wake up, this is Joburg!!!

17 October, 2014 @ 1:00 am - 2:00 pm SAST

WAKE UP, THIS IS JOBURG: ORDINARY TO OUTRAGEOUS ETHNOGRAPHIES OF URBAN LIFE, is a series of ten photobooks by Tanya Zack and Mark Lewis about the city we hate to love but do anyway. Wake up, this is Joburg tells the stories of ten ordinary, interesting, odd or outrageous denizens of the city of Johannesburg.

The series is published by Fourthwall Books (www.fourthwallbooks.com or www.facebook.com/fourthwallbooks). Note:  A limited number of the four titles will be available for sale at the Brown Bag at R150 each, cash only.

Tanya Zack will talk to some of the stories of intersections of particular lives, livelihoods and spaces that make up the first four titles in this series. These are:

Skop: S’kop  takes readers into a disused parking garage in the inner city, where cow heads are being chopped. It explores the informal business of chopping cow heads the stories of ‘the butchers and traders and entrepreneurs who have made this business uniquely theirs, speak of the hardships of their work in the meat trade and the occasional rewards of making it on their own.

Zola: Under the Mooi Street off-ramp is an overflow rank for taxis waiting between peak hours to ferry people between the inner city and Zola, Soweto. Here entrepreneurs cater all day to the needs of drivers from an array of mobile and stationary stalls, selling food and snacks, socks, window wipers, mobile phone attachments and bumper stickers with messages like ‘You also drive like shit so fuck off’.

Tony Dreams in Yellow and Blue: In the nondescript working class suburb of Turffontein, which has always hosted migrants, a restless outsider artist is at work transforming his home into a veritable castle of lights, turrets, murals, manikins and stairways. He is an obsessive collector of ‘waste’, but also an entrepreneur whose property is home to 17 rent-paying households.

Inside Out: This is a story of low-end globalisation—of food and other commodities traded and retailed informally across South Africa’s borders by people using the same principles as multinationals, but with no formal credit or banking facilities.

 

Tanya Zack is a town planner. Her major areas of focus have been in housing research and policy development, community participation and evaluation of large scale development projects. She has worked within local government and as a private consultant, both on policy work and in practical projects. She has a close relationship to Wits University where she obtained a PhD for work on critical pragmatism in planning. Tanya grew up in the inner city suburbs of Johannesburg.Her current interest is in the narratives of entrepreneurs working in the Johannesburg CBD.

Image credit: Mark Lewis

Details

Date:
17 October, 2014
Time:
1:00 am - 2:00 pm SAST
Event Category:

Organizer

Liza Cirolia

Other

Theme
Location

Venue

Davies Reading Room
Room 2.27, Environmental and Geographical Science, UCT
Cape Town, Western Cape 8000 South Africa
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