Arts initiatives still to come to fruition
I HAD the opportunity of becoming involved in an interesting briefing at the Red Location Museum auditorium. The subject was further infrastructural developments: a 1 000-seater amphitheatre accompanied by a limited amount of housing in the Red Location cultural precinct.
The panel conducting the briefing comprised Rory Riordan and Zwai Mgijima, of the Dojon Financial Services, and Jo Noero, of Noero Wolff Architects, the architectural firm also responsible for further infrastructural developments there. Irna Senekal facilitated the procedure.
The briefing was followed by an exciting walkabout in the Red Location Museum, the newly built digital library and art gallery. Riordan did the briefing in the open air, taking us back to the days when the original corrugated iron houses of Red Location were fully functional with sunny township scenes.
The history from the mid-1970s was familiar as I grew up and still live in nearby White Location. I also found his storytelling to be very relevant as I reminisced about this particular community and the days we used to play there as kids.
To honour the background history of all this, the gallery has preserved and installed a chip off a corrugated iron block of houses from the original Red Location in its foreground compounds as a welcoming signifier.
To me it already looks like an installation work of art.
We also had the opportunity of being walked through the interiors of the two new domineering infrastructures.
The gallery is a superb concrete, glass, steel and wood building with a high ceiling and welcoming spacious white walls on the right hand side of the red carpeted corridors, giving an ultra modern atmosphere leading to the middle of the gallery. The centre space is a square area with multiple intersections.
Eight larger than life-size screens are suspended from the ceiling as alternative hanging walls besides the actual walls. Hopefully actual works of art will be hanging soon inside this magnificent exhibition space.
It has an arresting monumental mixed-media version of Picasso’s Guernica, executed by a Keiskamma project, inside the small front hall facing the double glass and steel doors. The Keiskamma Guernica is of the same scale as Picasso’s original – 3.5m tall and 7.8m wide – and is a homage to individuals who suffered from HIV/Aids related diseases and died as a result.
The interiors of the library contain the archives, executed in thin strips of local pine, and steel galleries all neatly constructed in a long interior with a visible strip of light that exposes the blue skies right across these thin interiors.
The introduction of a plan to further carry on building the amphitheatre, without any indication to a specific day when the gallery and library would open its doors to the communities, instilled in me a sense of trepidation.
On April 18, an emotionally challenging article was published in The Herald, written by Mongezi Ncwadi, in which he poured his heart out, questioning the palpable decaying of the Mendi bottle store, as it keeps casting a stalking dark shadow that looms over the centre of New Brighton (“No action on arts centre”). There has been news of the Mendi bottle store’s revival as an arts centre for more than 10 years, with picketing and wall murals, of which I was also part, taking place on its grounds as a means to raise attention for its re-opening.
Unfortunately all these attempts folded and fell dead flat on official ears.
There is still a pulp frothy rumour that a budget to get it running is stuffed somewhere. Unfortunate- ly you never really hear where.
The grand opening of the George Pemba Art Gallery gave much hope for a sustainable platform of artistic growth, expression and representation, especially for the youth, but then again this much crucial hope gradually slipped back into a much-lamentable, deafening silence.
The current deluge of delinquency is a result of the absence of centres that offer permanent platforms for knowledge, reason and positive expressions. Here the alternative so often becomes superficial, and the reason that shebeens have taken the centre stage of modern township life.
The township youths have suddenly turned sad, with swollen grey faces just before they can even celebrate their 21st birthdays, always with staggering, unbearable thirst and energy to party that encourages the much younger girls to dabble in random sexual activities and younger boys in petty mindless crimes.
All this makes a mockery of what human life should be.
The struggle is no longer grappling with something from across the railway line, it is in the neighbourhood!
Nevertheless, there is an increasing presence of white project con- veners, from up-market suburbs of Port Elizabeth, doing the good work of initiating sustainable centres of learning under cliched Xhosa names in the townships. I just hope that some township opinions were harnessed in an advisory capacity when concepts behind these projects were developed.
Our work does not receive attention from the conservative mainstream, or from progressive audiences who purport to be our allies in the struggle for an independent, sustainable artistic growth and representation within the townships. Support from institutions is specifically lacking.
Let us hope that these world class structures (Red Location Library and Art Gallery) dumped in our backyard will not haphazardly mimic the Mendi bottle store route and continue to occupy well needed living space without proper acknowledgement of, and functional relationship with, the communities they purport to serve.
If this is not addressed, the narrative of mediocre stereotypes and negative stigmatisation inherited by the township front will continue to stalk, mock and stifle these communities.