11am-11.20am
1. Deer Park (area of natural beauty, from where a river once flowed down into the sea) – introduction to the tour and the collecting of small stones that travelers will take with them, on a journey that initially follows the path of the sweet river.

c. 11.50am-12.05pm
2. Archives on Roeland Street – short ritual followed by the drinking of Buchu Water

c. 12.20pm-12.40pm
3. The Darling Street/Buitenkant Street corner of the castle – short ritual followed by a presentation about traditional healing

c. 12.55pm-1.15pm
4. The KHOI SAN TAKE-AWAYS AND SIT-IN – A concert of traditional Khoe music, a rest and some light refreshments

c. 1.35pm-2pm
5. The Strand Street Medicinal Garden – opposite the quarry – A short ritual followed by the planting of herbs and a short demonstration from a Khoe herbalist

c. 2.10pm-2.30pm
6. ‘Gallows Hill’ on Somerset Road (a former site of execution and torture) – A short ritual followed by the closing address

The tour ends here! A taxi will be provided for those who have parked at Deer Park, but are unable to walk the whole way back.

For those wishing to join the tour at a later date or catch a small part of the route, the best bet is to meet at the take-away at c. 1pm (hopefully a tiny bit earlier but these rastas do like to talk). Some people may leave us here too.

Two years ago, Johannesburg artists Landi Raubenheimer and Paul Cooper visited Yeoville, a tatty, bohemian suburb neighbouring on Johannesburg’s inner city. Their attention was momentarily diverted by a large, dissonant notice board that had asserted its right to exist on a bare stretch of wall facing onto Rocky Street.

“Walking alongside it one could skim over snippets from people’s daily existence,” recalls Landi, who is also a researcher at the University of Johannesburg. The various assertions, utterances and queries affixed and inscribed onto the wall included: requests for accommodation and employment, numbers for money lenders, offers for the sale of physical objects and bodily pleasures, details on religious counseling, and other more singular statements of human existence. “What we found interesting is the informality of such spaces, and the visibility of voices, each unique and each looking for something,” says Landi.

Wishing Wall, Landi and Paul’s contribution to Infecting the City, represents a distillation of this initial encounter. Installed on the corner of Adderley and Hout streets, Wishing Wall is “a large fluid physical wall space” (Paul) onto which passersby can affix their thoughts and responses. Roughly five metres in scale, Wishing Wall is a hybrid of a variety of existing and familiar forms: community noticeboards, online blogs and impromptu sites of mourning. It is also a site-specific artwork. More subversively, it could also be viewed as a manifestation of Johannesburg’s unfolding urban logic in Cape Town, a city arguably faced with a complementary, but ultimately different set of urban dynamics.

“As artists we will be mediating public interaction with the actual wall,” she adds. “We see ourselves as facilitators, guiding the development of the installation through specific activities. On any given day we may decide to limit our interaction with the public to asking them one specific question or inviting individuals or groups to engage in a singular, focused activity, and recording their responses as drawings and sketches… In a sense we are allowing the public contributions to the wall to become the raw material that we use to shape and alter the installation as it develops.”

While the project retains many attributes that are relatable to the Yeoville wall, like all artworks Wishing Wall is the product of multiple causalities and events. Paul, who heads up the critical studies programme at Greenside Design Centre in Johannesburg, explains. In 2008 the pair submitted a proposal for participation in the 2009 Joburg Art Fair. “Landi had in mind a project called Wish that derived from the wall we encountered in Yeoville,” says Paul. “We decided to develop a project in response to the crass commercialism of the art fair, which would have involved the collection and installation of stuff generated during the actual fair.” The pair’s somewhat critical proposal was rejected.

At the same time as this was happening, Paul was also researching worship and mourning sites in places as physically diverse as Jerusalem, Buckingham Palace (at the time of Lady Diana’s death) and Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch (at the time of the pop star’s passing). This and many other tangents, some research-based, others simply experiential and related to living and working in a city, informs what Paul describes as Wishing Wall’s “ritualistic focus around transformation enacted through interventional strategies”.

But how, if at all, does any of this relate to what the two artists do in their own practices?

Landi responds: “To my mind what Paul and I are doing with this project is not so different from our own daily artistic practices. When one is involved in creating any artwork one begins by gathering material and reference, which is essentially mediated into an eventual artwork. The Wishing Wall is simply a public representation of this process. It is not a new idea, just an informal and open-ended approach to the concept.”

To post your wish, or chat to Landi and Paul, go down to the corner of Adderley and Hout streets, Friday 11am – 3pm, and Saturday 11am – 1pm.

– Sean O’Toole is editor of Art South Africa magazine

The Free Flight Dance Company, founded by Adele Blank in 1987, has taken an advocacy role. This loose collective of dancers has choreographed work at a time of HIV/Aids information fatigue, and a seemingly complacent public discourse in South Africa. The dancers are determined to continue a public dialogue with Windows into a World.

Sannette van der Mescht, the producer, says they researched true stories and interpreted them with dance and text. The audience encounters: “Paula, an infected sex-worker trying to support her children; Sidwell, a taxi driver who has lost his sight but found the voice to bring peace to others; Susan, a professional dancer who has accepted her status and looks towards a bright horizon”.

The dancers aim to capture the “immense reality” that HIV/Aids is for these ordinary South Africans. The narratives further push the “transcendent radiance of the human spirit over adversity”.

“Our messages are very clear. We want to inform the audience that it is easy to get HIV, but also that it is not a death sentence. There is hope. You can live a long and healthy life if you have HIV, but by acting on correct information you can also prevent it if you don’t have it,” says Van Der Mescht.

“Our performance is not all doom and gloom. We have tried to keep the balance between saying that there is hope while not saying that it’s okay or cool to have HIV. We perform to an audience in which there are people who are living with HIV. So we want to be very careful about the messaging.”

The United Nations Population Distribution Fund (UNFPA) initially funded Windows into a World as a means to promote HIV/Aids awareness messages to young people in Khayelitsha and Gugulethu. Mescht says these performances targeted vulnerable youths while the company also aimed to develop audiences.

“We take theatre to people who won’t get a chance to get to established venues in the city,” says Van Der Mescht.

When they performed in the township, they had a voluntary mobile clinic and they teamed up with Partners in Sexual Health and the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation to provide free information sessions and HIV tests.

“Some of the audience walked to the clinic after the show to find out their HIV status. We need more people to know their HIV status so that they can take care of themselves and prevent the virus from spreading.

“But we also need to deal with the stigmatisation of HIV/Aids. We found youth that didn’t want to go for TB testing because of the stigma that if you have TB then you also have Aids,” says Van Der Mescht.

Apathy, complacency or misinformation; these are the challenges that come with talking about HIV/Aids.
One pensively wishes that Free Flight dances its way through this noise.

– Yazeed Kamaldien is a freelance journalist

She may be one of the youngest artists at Infecting The City (ITC), but as far as pushing boundaries goes, visual and performance artist Lerato Shadi is no stranger to difficult and uncomfortable situations. In a piece, titled Mmitlwa, Shadi wrapped her entire body in masking tape, and then painfully unwrapped herself.

“I remember not being sure if I’d make it out,” she says.

Originally from Mafikeng, but now based in Johannesburg, Shadi’s interest is in durational-based ritualistic pieces exploring time and its effects on the body.

Her projects have included being elevated on a plinth in an office space while constantly blowing up balloons for six hours. In 2008, she collaborated with cutting-edge South African band, Blk Jks, on an episode of Headwrap.

Shadi laughs. “I put my head in a bucket and sang. And we jammed.”

The ITC concept resonated with ideas she had explored in her own work.

“My first experience of real racism was in Cape Town, when I was still studying Hospitality Management in 2000. I felt this segregation – which is part of what the theme [Human Rite] suggests. In a way it was like coming back to Cape Town to exorcise whatever demons I had, and it’s growing on me now.”

On the research process conducted late last year, she says, “It was informative; and there were some things I didn’t know. It helped speaking to the people of Cape Town and getting to know them as they tend to be quite reluctant to let people in.”

In the time away, between research and commencing work on the festival, Shadi was busy working on an exhibition currently running at the Goethe on Main gallery in Johannesburg which exhibits two mentally and physically strenuous pieces titled Mosako Wa Sepione (A Circle of Mirrors). In Selogile, Shadi knits in one spot sitting in the Lotus position constantly for seven hours.

“Even though I was busy with this exhibition, I reflected a lot on what we saw as research for the festival.”

Shadi says of her collaboration on Meet Market (presented at Church Square): “It has been challenging because we have four different personalities and egos. But it’s been a cool process and I doubt any of us thought that it would be easy . . . It keeps changing and I’m working more on the conceptual element. Collaborations are always interesting. The space we’re working with is packed with history that is very heavy.”

– Atiyyah Khan writes for The Cape Argus