March means it is time for the Infecting the City public arts festival which brings art out of the galleries, museums and theatres onto the city’s streets. What’s different this year is that several curators have created the routes, rather than leaving it up to one person to manage. Diverse ideas around how the public engages with art and public spaces makes for a variety of works.
Each curator has a statement of intent and some routes have a name, like Farzanah Badsha’s Route C’s What We Deserve (which reminds us that as incumbent as it is on artists to create brave and innovative work, we the public have to create spaces for them work in).
Badsha cut her teeth curating contemporary visual arts exhibitions for the Africa Centre and originally trained as a historian, so she always considers what a place used to be, as well as its contemporary use.
Programme C is a daytime programme, so how people move around the city had to be considered when choosing the works.
“The art audience who come particularly to Infecting the City are important, but really it is the people who use the city on a day-to-day basis to live and work and travel who are the audience that I had foremost in my mind when I was thinking about how I was going to put this together.”
Like, deciding to put The Braid on St Georges Mall was deliberately done to maximise the number of people who would cross or walk alongside the two artists weaving grass and found objects into a plait.
Route C reminds us that artists cannot make art without the audience and in the case of public art, the audience is the public: “You have more responsibility as an artist and curator because you are essentially deciding what people are going to see and they have a huge amount of autonomy because they can walk away, and they do, but you are also putting things into their space that they use on a day to day basis.”
More than half of the 12 art interventions are ongoing during the festival, like The Man in the Green Blanket which reminds us that Mngcineni Noki – the man who has become a symbol of the Marikana Massacre – was not just a visual shorthand, but also a person in his own right.
The day programme is from 12.30pm to 5pm, so the final event on Route C – master storytellers telling us about a side of Cape Town we don’t even know exists – is from 4pm to 5pm on the Station Forecourt through which people move when they are leaving the city.
Route D is entitled Exorcising the Ghosts, taking place mostly around the Company Gardens which has always been a contested space where people have and still encounter each other in conflict, labour and shared leisure.
Performances range from dance theatre on the traditional stage at the Hiddingh Hall (Themba Mbuli’s Trapped) or Jazzart Dance Company dancing in front of the Iziko Museum (Melting Truth) to the more voyeuristic Living Room Dancers at 6 Spin Street.
This last performance challenges our perceptions about private and public spaces, though it is deliberately presented as part of the festival, the dance can only be fully appreciated when the audience members use binoculars to watch the performers behind the windows.
• Infecting the City, March 9 to 14. Check www.infectingthecity.com for the full and exact schedule.
Mbothwe is telling stories in uninfected parts of the city
Infecting the City route curator, Mandla Mbothwe, was determined to use the public art festival to remind people that Artscape is a theatre space for everyone. Appointed creative manager at Artscape last year, Mbothwe is a firm believer in first naming his work, to give himself a theme to work to.
March 10 and March 11’s Route B is Crossing Over and Round About.
“That’s our life, we cross over and we go round about. We embrace our circumstances and sometimes we have to go around them or break them. The purpose of the entire journey (of route B) is to create, when you watch and go on it, a feeling that it’s one place, seemingly fragmented, but it takes you into different spaces of your life, and the place itself,” explained Mbothwe.
He doesn’t just think in terms of physical space, but also “the spiritual space where stories are being elevated or resurfaced”. He thought of two places which rule the city, but remain unaffected by the public arts festival.
The Civic Centre may be where the rules of the city are enforced, “but Infecting the City hasn’t really infected that space, they are quite secured.
“Then Artscape. It is a heartbeat because it practices art and stories. Infecting the City is about stories being made to be known to people who might not go to the theatre. So, let’s introduce them to this building where they have paid people to do that.”
Route B starts with Slinkie Love outside the Train Station Concourse. The 6m slinkies have their own story to tell, falling as they do, in love.
“For 90 percent of the people who come through there, public displays of affection are taboo, but them seeing pipes, it’s something else. So, we’ll start with that international theatre group, and after that…”
Artists wearing gigantic puppet masks will wander around the spaces, both as inadvertent guides to the next artwork and as a performance themselves. The Lost Couple will be joined by other performers who are going about their business, but attracting stares wherever they go.
Performances previously presented in traditional theatres include Mzokuthula Gasa’s Ababhadisi - The Conductors (which successfully debuted at last year's Baxter Dance Festival) or a new work from Figure of Eight Dance Collective (We Left).The importance of ritual and the place for diviners and prophets is explored in Khosi, while Andile Vellem brings together differently abled performers in Un-Mute to deconstruct what it means to dance.