Land and Erasure I and II

This collaborative walk and spatial intervention through performance, sound, poetry and alternative forms of collective mapping took place under the rubric of a public art festival put together to commemorate the centenary of the 1913 Land Act. The LAND festival, put together by the Gordon Institute of Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA), now known as the Institute of Creative Arts, in collaboration with the African Center for Cities at the University of Cape Town and the District Six Museum.

This work was a collaborative effort put together by the following artists: Nicole Sarmiento, Ismail Farouk, Nadine Cloete, Lucy Campbell, Toni Stuart, Shelley Barry, Ferdinand Van Tura, Sabelo Mcinziba, Kim Munsamy, Sebástian Porras and Colin Meyer.

To think about land in the present moment is necessarily to think beyond fixed categories, binaries and notions of private property, land tenure or sedimented mappings. Questions of land are imbricated in bodies, movement, memory, migration, forced displacement and removals, and therefore deeply historical. At the same time, commemorating the 1913 Land Act calls for taking on the legacies and logics that continue in the present, and manifest in forms of social injustice, institutionalized violence and historical effacement.

In this walk, more ceremonial than focused on the gaze, we take the liminal and itinerant, memory and displacement, the silenced and buried, the living and the dead, as starting points for opening the spatial literacies of the cities we inhabit.

Land and Erasure I Bonteheuwel

Bonteheuwel, as part of the Cape Flats, was conceived as a township for the relocation of people who were forcibly removed from places such as Sea Point, District Six and Diep Rivier. Today, Bonteheuwel, like most of the Cape Flats, continues to exhibit the spatial and social legacies of the Group Areas Act, as disinvestment and municipal neglect fail to address the basic needs of residents. It is also an important site of resistance. We visit this space considering the layering of time, the idea of landscape as archive, and dialogue with silenced histories in the making of the present.

Land and Erasure II Central City

In the central city land comes at a premium. It is a scarce resource and foundational to questions such as who can live in the city, whose desires are accommodated in the city, and the city for whom. These elements manifest in the built environment, in modes of visibility and invisibility, as well as in the quiet dynamics of movement, networks, connections, formality and informality. In this walk we visit ongoing processes of “regeneration” in the name of culture and design that is taking place, in the context of the deep inscriptions of time that often are effaced.

Collaborating artists: Nadine Cloete, Colin ‘Boesman’ Meyer, Lucy Campbell, Toni Stuart, Ferdinand Van Tura, Nicole Sarmiento, Ismail Farouk and Sabelo Mcinziba