Wandering around the Mother City between November 21 and 24 you could be forgiven for thinking you are hallucinating, because you will hear voices floating up from manholes.
Kim Gurney of Guerrilla Gallery has curated a piece called Cape Town Under: The Third Voice which will feature Pauline Theart’s voice echoing around the tunnels under the Castle.
This is just one of many performances which form part of a Gipca symposium titled Land. The four-day-long “event of reflection” is meant to interrogate the relationship between land and art.
Comprising performances, visual art installations, public lectures and discussions about land, territory, ownership and art, the event comes as we reach the end of marking 100 years since the intro-duction of the Natives Land Act.
Director of the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts, Jay Pather, said the event was about creating a space to talk about how artists interact with issues around land.
It isn’t just about whether a play directly addresses an issue like restitution or a history of dispossession, but about asking a question like “how do you measure the effectiveness of a performance?”
“What do performing artists think about land and how do they embed these ideas in their work?” Pather asked.
“Can the politics of land make us rethink where we stage our work or who we engage with as our audience?” he added.
In addition to being subject matter, the spaces used to present the various performances and installations are also of either historic significance or are contested spaces.
The opening night discussions and performances will take place around the Prestwich Memorial with works choreographed by Tebogo Munyai and Jazzart Dance Theatre’s Jacqueline Manyaapelo to be performed in the Memorial grounds. Opening night festivities will feature screenings of Bones Don’t Lie, Don’t Forget and Where Time Stands Still, directed by Kim Munsamy and Sebástian Porras.
During a visual art display called Terminal – curated by Jean Brundrit, Svea Josephy and Adrienne van Eeden Wharton – street poles will display photo-graphs by a range of artists, from Berni Searle to Lindeka Qampi.
People will be encouraged to voice their opinion on What Does Cape Town Mean to You? when Leonard Shapiro takes to the Grand Parade on Friday afternoon with chalk and space to write.
Ismail Farouk and Nicole Sarmiento have arranged walking tours of Bonteheuwel and the Cape Town cbd to reference where people live versus where they used to live and to highlight how a lack of infrastructure affects us.
This contrast is brought into even sharper relief by the recent service delivery protests and the tour could provide an insight for those who take municipal amenities for granted.
Amy Soudien’s installation around the Slave Lodge – Trajectories – will see her trace her heritage in sand around the outside of the building, highlighting the ephemeral nature of artwork.
These are deliberately foregrounded to highlight the tenuous link between land and ownership of land, “who has the right to own land?” being the big question.
This question is also raised in a series of performances in the City Hall by Swiss performers Martin Schick and Laura Kalauz. They will perform Halfbread Technique on the Friday and CMMN SNS PRJCT on Saturday in the main auditorium.
The city hall will also host several installations which touch on issues such as homelessness. These include Emmy-nominated Phillip Miller’s mixed-media installation Between a Rock and a Hard Place, which uses the research he did while creating his recent opera, An Anatomy of a Mining Accident.
The highly contested Rondebosch Common is the subject of Elgin Rust and Katherine Spindler’s Common Garden project, which will be installed at the entrance of the city hall.
A series of films curated by Nicole Sarmiento and Ismail Farouk, including Rehad Desai’s Miners Shot Down and Heidi Grünebaum and Mark Kaplan’s The Village Under the Forest, will also be screened at the city hall.
Haroon Gunn-Salie’s Witness will be installed on site in District Six, while a discussion panel considering displacements will be held at the District Six Museum’s Homecoming Centre (6.30pm on November 22), and includes input from Joshua Williams (University of California, Berkley) and Ismail Farouk (African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town), as well as a presentation by artist and theorist Rael Salley about his recent exhibition, Vistas.
“The thrust of the event is about land as reflection, the effectiveness of art and the place of art in the midst of all these questions.
“Can the politics of land make us rethink where we stage our work, or who we engage with as our audience?” asked Pather.
• Admission to Land is free, but booking for the events at Prestwich Memorial, the District Six Museum’s Homecoming Centre, Iziko Slave Lodge, City Hall and the Land and Erasure tours are essential. Certain installations will also feature walkabouts with the artists, so for full programme details, consult www.gipca.uct.ac.za. To book, contact [email protected]