INFECTING THE CITY. A public arts festival. Curated by Jay Pather, from March 9 to 14. LUCINDA JOLLY previews.
TOWARDS the end of February each year sees Cape Town hosting a plethora of design and art fairs and indabas. Infecting the City is a six day public arts festival of socially-engaged performance and visual arts that usually comes at the tail end.
It’s a time when the communal spaces of the CBD are re -visited, re -engaged with and re-discovered through the lens of performing and visual arts. The city centre spaces are transformed into an outdoor centre where the spirit of real democracy performs across a wide range of diverse art forms free and accessible to everyone who is interested.
This year’s Infecting the City has loosened its boundaries with Mandla Mbothwa and Mandisi Sindo’s Crossing Over And Round About, an integrated performance and installation piece which takes the participants from Cape Town Station to the windswept open spaces of the Foreshore and to the top of the Golden Acre where, under the project title Picturing The City, Rose Mudge will engage a group of artists to produce a series of drawings of the cityscape from the top of the Golden Acre.
Infecting the City showcases “artists as warriors “ for the idea of safety and risk is also played out, given that the pieces are not performed in the security of the white cube of the gallery or the theatre, but rather in the unknown and uncontained areas of public spaces and so subject to unpredetermined reponses.
Associate Professor at UCT and festival curator Pather believes that public art has always been part of who South Africans are in the context of the African continent especially in terms of “our history of public ritual, public protests and celebration. “And that that we are a nation that thinks in metaphors and strong symbols”. The duality of celebration and protest is present in the festival including what Pather describes as “dreamy enchantment moments “tempered with “doses of reality.”
This year’s festival contains many works referencing the Marikane massacre and issues pertinent to parliament, whereas he points out that last year’s World design Capital “was a good example of many ways to try to obliterate history and pay lip service to it, a polite nod to it in a superficial way.” A celebratory homage is found in the piece titled Prayer To The New Moon, inspired by the /Xam poem of the same name by Dia!kwain and performed by New Moon Collective, and protest in Lesiba Mabitsela’s The Man In The Green Blanket which references the Marikana Massacre and commemorates a specific individual, Mgcineni Noki.
Works have been curated in such a way that “clusters of works penetrate a particular issue idea or theme”, but regardless of differences “talk “to each other. A variety of approaches have been included with good balance between spectacular and small works such as Vincent Chomaz’s FeedBack Loop involving little speakers in various parts of the city which pipe the words “l love you-do you love me?” in various languages.
Echoing Rose Lee Goldderg, founder of Performa, Pather believes that performance is so integrated into our lives and the greater African continent’s that “in some cultures it’s almost absurd to do this special public art”. “He suggests that the many interpretations of what constitutes public art has become far more nuanced. “Public art is so many different things to so many kinds of public and kinds of ways of arriving at interaction between public space, city and issues of urbanity”, he says. “We as a city are beginning to get the nuances that exist throughout the world. He believes that we have long gone past the notion that a work of art stands on its own,or is universal, and talks to everybody on same level in the same key.
The festival profiles a strong combination of traditional and robust contemporarity, post-mod Europe and African contemporary post-colonialism. “Some pieces are cool and calm and others show passion” points out Pather. The presence of artists from Germany and a newcomer from Reunion Islands by Soul City will Pather, believes, push some of our artists.
Using the method of catharsis Nadja Daehnke and Ryno Keet unpack the need to belong in Ways of Belonging. The Braid by Hilla Steinart and Eliza Vossgter involves the simple, but binding act of plaiting grass. Look out for the highly considered choreographer Nicole Seiler’s Living Room Dancers, which challenges the notions of private and public spaces. Each dancer inhabits a private apartment which can be viewed by the public with a pair of binoculars.
New changes mark the eighth Infecting the City presented by The Africa Centre. Pather is no longer a one man band. This year the festival is overseen by a large selection and curatorial committee made up of Farzanah Badsha, Nadja Daehnke, Mandla Mbothwe and curatorial intern, Mandisi Sindo.
The festival comes with a symposium, Remaking Place, in which concerns issues about public art involving speakers are raised and the work of finalists for the prestigious International Award for Public Art will be viewed by members of the jury.
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