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Public Art and the Power of Place

Cape Town Library Cnr Parade and Darling Streets, Cape Town

start again the new road at dawn. yesterday’s road has led to yesterday’s destination. today is a new chaos. a new journey. a new city. needing new paths. and new standards. Ben Okri - The Ruin and The Forest Cape Town remains stubbornly segregated, with a large portion of the population living in undesirable conditions. Access to resources is still skewed towards the formal art market based in the City Bowl. Despite this, there are numerous people engaging in critical and creative ways of re-articulating the potential of the city through art. Increasingly, public-facing art is playing a central role in imagining a free, inspired and inclusive reality. Public Art and the Power of Place, initiated by the African Centre for Cities at UCT, with support from the National Lotteries Commission, emerged as an experiment in finding new ways of representing and interconnecting with socio-political urban issues in Cape Town. It involved supporting seven public art projects in Cape Town’s townships in 2015. From Khayelitsha to Bonteheuwel, optimistic and determined individuals explored the significance and impossibilities of place outside the City Bowl. The ACC is excited to invite you to the closing event of the project at the Cape Town Library (Corner Darling and Parade Streets), where the stories and reflections of these projects will be used to ignite an open and constructive conversation about the present and the future of public art within the context of Cape Town. Through dialogue, workshops and an archival exhibition the two-day intervention builds a platform for a collective exploration of publicness. An African Centre for Cities project with guest curators Valeria Geselev and Naz Saldulker. See the attached programme, check out the Facebook event or contact powerofplace@uct.ac.za for more details. PoP_Programme_18July   FUNDED BY: The NLC relies on funds from the proceeds of the National Lottery. The Lotteries Act guides the way in which NLC funding may be allocated. The intention of NLC funding is to make a difference to the lives of all South Africans, especially those more vulnerable and to improve the sustainability of the beneficiary organisations. Available funds are distributed to registered and qualifying non-profit organisations in the fields of charities; arts, culture and national heritage; and sport and recreation. By placing its emphasis on areas of greatest need and potential, the NLC contributes to South Africa’s development.

Integration & Ideas Festival

Guga S'Thebe Washington Street, Langa, Cape Town, South Africa

The Integration Syndicate is a three-phase project that started off with a series of nine “episodes” over the course of 2017, which explored the obstacles and solutions to social-spatial integration in the Cape Town metropolitan region. From these episodes, in which a closed group of academics, activists, public and private sector actors participated, five provocations were developed that represent five potential springboard ideas to create and facilitate greater socio-spatial integration. During the first half of 2018 the five provocations were presented to focus groups of stakeholders for critical input to further shape the ideas. Now the next step is to take these five ideas to a broader audience with a public event, the Integration & Ideas Festival. Integration & Ideas Festival programme You are invited to join us for the Integration & Ideas Festival WHEN: 26 July 2018 TIME: 08:00 to 17:30 WHERE: Guga S’thebe, Washington Street, Langa, Cape Town RSVP: Please complete the form here to RSVP for this event. If you have any queries please send an email to integration.syndicate@gmail.com    

Exhibition: ‘this image may contain’ by heeten bhagat

The Quad, The Arena Theatre Cape Tpwn

Join ACC's PhD candidate heeten bhagat for 'this image may contain' - a visual articulation of research in speculative indigeneities on Wednesday, 21 November 2018, 18:00 at The Quad, The Arena Theatre. The aim of this doctoral research was to attempt an interdisciplinary approach to search for registers (and absences) of indigeneity through a close reading of the 2017 Independence day celebration, held at the National Sports Stadium in Harare, Zimbabwe. The focus of this study was motivated by two distinct elements from the event: The first is a banner that hangs over the official entrance to the performance arena, that declares – ‘ZIMBABWE WILL NEVER A BE COLONY AGAIN’. The second element is a fragment from the president’s address to the nation at this ceremony, which proclaims, "…..we can now call ourselves full the masters of our destiny". This works on show constitute the concluding articulation of this research journey into notions of speculative and speculating indigeneities.

MPhil ‘pumflets’ exhibition

Wolff Architects 136 Buitenkant Street, Bo Kaap, Cape Town, Cape Town , South Africa

You are invited to attend the one-night only exhibition of pumflets produced by the students of the MPhil Southern Urbanism. The exhibition is the product of the third iteration of the City Research Studio, which forms the cornerstone of the MPhil Southern Urbanism curriculum. The City Research Studio functions as a laboratory space where students learn to walk, see, smell, touch, embrace, explore and reimagine the city through intimate engagements. City Research Studio 3 was convened by Ilze Wolff of Wolff Architects, who co-founded pumflet: art, architecture and stuff with artist Kemang Wa Lehulere in 2016. According to Wolff the publication series explores the social imagination, stories of neighbourhoods and reflecting on histories of the present. "pumflet’s aim is to publicise research-in-process and to conceive of interventions in space and public culture based on research. It is a collection of conceptual art interventions and a collection of correspondence art practices. pumflet, then, is in a way a continued digging and reflecting on the imagination of the collective, with ideas around restoring some ‘deleted scenes’, consequences of forced removals, hyper capitalist urban development and the impacts of state power of the land and the landless," she explains. Using this methodology students have produced their own pumflets over the course of six weeks and will showcase them on Friday, 23 August 2019, from 18:00 at the studio of Wolff Architect, 136 Buitenkant Street, Bo Kaap, Cape Town. WHEN: Friday, 23 August 2019 TIME: 18:00 WHERE: Wolff Architects, 136 Buitengracht Street, Bo Kaap, Cape Town Refreshments will be served.

EXHIBITION: It all starts with me

The New Lecture Theatre Upper Campus, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

You are invited to a pop-up exhibition and book launch of the Youth, Identity and the City project together with Rosca Warries, Kirstin Warries, Dane Van Rooyen and TPA Youth for Change, on Thursday 5 December from 16:00. It all starts with me is a one-day exhibition based on the African Centre for Cities research project Youth, Identity and the City led by researcher Mercy Brown-Luthango, which engaged 13 out-of-school and unemployed young people from Mitchell’s Plain, Philippi and Gugulethu in a process of self-reflection using photography as a tool. The focus was on the role of young people in cities; how they understand their position, community, identity and location (spatially, emotionally and socially) in relation to the city as a whole, in this case Cape Town. As part of this process, led by noDREAD Productions and their photography workshop design Image vs Truth, each participant was furnished with two disposable cameras to capture photographs of the communities where they live as well as historical places visited in the city. As one of the final outputs of the project, with guidance from Rosca Warries, Kirstin Warries and Dane Van Rooyen, the young people undertook a process of curating an exhibition of these photographs. All the photographs are part of a moving exhibition from the University of Cape Town, for the launch, to Phillipi Village and Tafelsig Library where the participants’ peers and community can engage and encounter their messages and photographs of hope. WHEN: Thursday, 5th December 2019 TIME:  16:00 to 18:00 VENUE:  The New Lecture Theatre, Upper Campus, UCT RSVP: shakira.jeppie@uct.ac.za

Lived experience as a pathway to community agency? Toward new framings of nutrition in urban South Africa

The Nourished Child project took a lived experience approach to understanding how systems interacted in the lives of women to shape their and their children's quality of diet. Central to the project was the development of a range of creative dissemination tools to engage policy makers, and increase community agency. In this presentation Jane Battersby reflects on the process, politics, and outcomes of the project, and the potential of projects of this kind to affect long term transformative change. Ahead of the presentation, you can also view the Nourished Child exhibition in the foyer of the Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building. WHEN | Monday, 15 May 2023 TIME | 13:00-14:00 VENUE |Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT

THE URBAN EVERYDAY – FINAL STUDENT EXHIBITION

APG Foyer, Centlivres Building Upper Campus University of Cape Town

The ‘Urban Everyday’ offers a perspective on city-making that explores agency found in intersecting practices of occupation and adaptation, engagement and participation, resistance and protest, as well as waiting, encountering and imagining the city, its inhabitants and the state. In tracking diverse forms of agency, this framework of urban inquiry explores the substance of the city – its housing and land struggles, experiences of work and strategies to make ends meet, as well as questions of identity and belonging. It also examines how these diverse urban experiences frequently meet, compete with, and rub up against rights, policies, and state techniques. In this exhibition, postgraduate students present their creative reflections on different course themes and grapple with the question of how we can hold structural forces in productive tension with ordinary forms of agency. By focusing on seemingly mundane practices, their works offer provocative points of entry for questioning how we theorize Southern cities and engage in imagining and building their future. Participating students come from the following programs: MPhil Southern Urbanism (African Centre for Cities), MA Critical Urbanisms (University of Basel in collaboration with the African Centre for Cities), MA Urban Design and EGS Honours.