WITS WAM events related to Satellite Cities exhibition
Recent series of walkabouts and a seminar which was held recently at WAM at WITS as part of the Satellite Cities exhibition. This event was co hosted by the WITS City Institute.
The events were comprised of a “drop in drawing” workshop, a family “talkabout” and workshop (both led by Leigh Leyde) and three walkabouts were held by Svea Josephy.
(2 for the public and one for students and academics as part of a day seminar and workshop programme).
This workshop was intended to pose questions around representation, architectures/ structures and the land in South Africa today. It looked at the particulars of place, spaces that stand in for places, 3rd spaces between places and places that don’t exist. It asked questions about the representation of spaces of modernity, trauma, violence, how to excavate memory from the land that stubbornly will not reveal its history, but also looked to ordinary places and stories linked to place and space in South Africa today. The symposium took Svea Josephy’sSatellite Cities as a departure point for conversations about photography, writing, architecture and film in relation to geographies of the city, those affected variously by everyday apartheid, war, migration and conflict. The Satellite Cities exhibition is concerned with the urban landscape through an investigation into places named after sites of conflict and war. (see catalogue attached).
Linked to the trauma of apartheid, conflict and war, we are interested in questions about the past, yet simultaneously we are also concerned with the narratives of the future and how young writers, scholars, artists and photographers weave the past into the present.
Following two decades of democracy in South Africa, there are questions about how the past keeps moving into the present, and persists to be part of the future. These lingering pasts and desired futures have created spaces for new identities and new ways of seeing (Fleetwood, Josephy & Ractliffe 2015)
In this workshop we examined the geographies of space and place and how these relate to the themes above, particularly those of how ordinary landscapes of cities are depicted, thought of differently and narrated in writing. Papers and by Svea Josephy, Timothy Wright and Noeleen Murray and an article by Jill Weintoub on Tower of Babel project which was presented by Cynthia Kros were pre circulated and presented.