CONTESTED SPACE LIFE OF A PLACE
Infecting the City 2017 – celebrates its 10th decade with two dynamic young curators at the helm, writes Robyn Cohen
WHOSE city is it anyway? For a decade, Infecting the City Public
Art Festival has ignited intense and critical conversations on the streets of Cape Town and its surrounds – with artists working in multiple disciplines – such as theatre, dance, visual arts and music.
The festival coincides with Freedom Month – April, and the issues of freedom and identity have always been at the nub of the festival.
The 10th edition of ITC is on from April 5-8 and is headed by dynamic co-curators Khanyisile Mbongwa and Leila Anderson.
They are passionate about activating Cape Town (physically and emotionally) into ”a more open and inclusive city.”
The festival is a collaboration between the Africa Centre and the Institute of Creative Arts (ICA – formerly Gipca). It is free.
Anderson: “We have 18 different productions. The programme is focused on daytime city routes, with one evening route.
“We’re hitting the lunchtime action: the Cape Town Station, The Golden Acre and weaving through the inner city. We have specifically focused on compact, busy zones. We hope to surprise people on their break and pop up at unexpected places on their daily paths.
“It’s a super exciting to feed into the multiple identities of the city – and make offerings to the people that use its streets, taxis, trains, squares, malls and walkways .
“The routes are about people following their curiosity and surrendering themselves to a journey. In the mornings we have fascinating workshops that are about inciting creative action and unlocking the desire to get involved – rather than just observing from a distance…”
Mbongwa: “I come from a collective background – and this informs my curatorial practice … There is a sense of healing that happens when efforts are made to create a space of co-habitation – when… the singular perspective is not enough.
“It is not necessarily about diversity – as diversity has come to mean the rest of the people who are not white. It is rather about a plurality/the collective…
“As curators we occupy the same spaces… I am a black woman and Leila is a white woman – and we are looking at how the history of South Africa informs our identities.”
Anderson: “A lot of it (curating process) is conversation: conversation while walking. We move through the city and let it speak.
“There is often an expeditionary feel to curating in public space that I love. You are out, observing and drawing connections between artist’s visions and the life of a place.
“Everything is always moving and changing. Khanyi and I divide things up organically and we’ve got each other’s back, so it gives a 360 degree feeling of oversight.”
Mbongwa: “The decolonising context has been at the centre of works within the ITC context long before the collapse of the rainbow nation façade…This year we see works which open the wound and allow us to see it for what it is. For example Mandla Mbothwe’s work reminds us of Ukuzika KaMendi, bursting open the collective amnesia in our selective memory. iNdoni Dance piece looks at iKhaya (home).
“The majority of black South Africans don’t own land; don’t have title deeds for RDP housing and are grappling with the inheritance of forced removals. Home as a place of safety and peace becomes a contested space. Yazeed Kamaldien’s work, which engages with District Six, unpicks the residue of forced removals and the complexity of both the emotional and economic currency. Mandla Mlangeni’s piece (a jazz set playing South African jazz standards and his own compilations) – explores the relationship between the taxi rank and the city – how the influx of black labour travels through the city as commemoration, protest, resistance, dreams, hope, possibility.
“The work allows us to immerse ourselves into the taxi rank not as spectators but as bodies that are encountered by the space as a living organism feeding the city. It is the space that encounters the viewers – and asks: ‘who are you’?”
The majority of black South Africans don’t own land; don’t have title deeds for RDP housing and are grappling with the inheritance of forced removals