This video provides a glimpse of our multidisciplinary and collaborative ‘walk’, which formed part of the public art festival ‘The Exuberance Project’. The Exuberance Project was a three-day public art festival and exhibition, convened by the Gordon Institute of Performing and Creative Art (now known as the Institute of Creative Art) and ‘the names we give’, in collaboration with the Centre for African Studies and Michaelis Gallery.
In this performative, embodied, visual, aural/oral installation and site-specific intervention, we walk spaces of the city of Cape Town’s Central Business District. Through spectral landscapes that recall a past as much passed as lived in the present, we bypass memorialized sites that form part of the matrix of heritage tourism towards less visible ‘sites’ that form part of everyday urban street traffic and that blend into the cityscape often without any form of historical marking and sense of broader orientation. Walking with stories submerged in the land and with more than human allies on this journey, we intervene in the violence of the present and the many forms of erasure that make up the cities we live in.
These spaces we visit and mark through our intervention include: the arches at the crossroads between Keerom and Burg Street; the space between the Slave Lodge and the Groote Kerk on Spin Street; Hiddingh Campus; the disc in the middle of the road on Spin Street, built on the ‘Old Slave Tree’; and the alleyways between the Old Granary and the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (on Buitenkant and Longmarket). Visiting spectrality using performance, poetry and audiovisual interventions, we walk in dissonance with linear notions of space and time in order to engage our multiple and layered senses, to listen to silences, trees that once stood, bodies that dream and plants that ask permission and build a bridge between worlds. These spaces and routes are physical reminders of an erased history and layers of disavowal this city is built on/with. We temporarily interrupt these spaces and temporalities to create moments that are out of joint.
This work was a collaboration between Nicole Sarmiento, Memory Biwa, Tazneem Wentzel, Toni Stuart, Tracey Rose, Jethro Louw, Dylan Valley, Bradley Van Sitters, Lucy Campbell, Alaa Hourani, Ferdinand Van Tura, Monwabisi Xhakwe, Mawande Zenzile, Justin Davy, Weaam Williams, Naafia Kocks, Dani Swai, Sara Gouveia and Prune Martinez.
