Curator’s note : Infecting the City 2010
The creative arts are Infecting The City (ITC) for the third time.
Infecting the City is a ‘Public Arts’ Festival: a festival that stages and exhibits high-quality, thought-provoking, boundary breaking works in the communal spaces of Cape Town’s CBD where they are free and accessible to everybody. We want to position the arts literally and figuratively at the centre of society, to redefine the urban terrain as a space of creativity, and to effect social enrichment and transformation through the arts.
ITC is also a ‘site-specific’ Festival: all the works presented relate directly to the site of the Festival – the inner city of Cape Town. Orientated around the theme HUMAN RITE, they speak to our own hearts and heads as Capetonians, asking us to take a deep look at the dynamics of our society, and to creatively envision the kind of society we want to live in.
The programme includes installations that engage with Capetonians and visitors to Cape Town, choreographic works, large-scale performance art pieces and low-key interventions, as well as discussion forums and satellite events hosted by inner-city cultural bodies.
Participating artists come from Cape Town, Johannesburg, Grahamstown, Zimbabwe, China, UK, Greece, Germany, USA, Australia and the Netherlands. They provide a wealth of diverse viewpoints and talent.
The infection that began three years ago is establishing itself in Cape Town, and spreading. Don’t be caught uninfected …
Brett Bailey (artistic curator)
All human societies enact rituals and rites of various kinds. Rituals bring people together, integrate us into communities, and define and reaffirm these communities. They are vehicles for healing, transformation, purging, worship, initiation, thanks giving, mourning or celebrating … some rituals have a spiritual or religious orientation, many do not. Ritual is one of the defining characteristics of human society.
Cape Town is a beautiful City brimming with cultural diversity. It is a City that is about to explode with the euphoria of the World Cup. It is also a City defined by over three and a half centuries of oppression, the marginalisation of many people, and the suppression of their stories and their memories. Our society is marked by inequality, violence and division; deeply scarred by human rights violations.
Infecting The City has commissioned a range of artists from diverse backgrounds to push creative boundaries. They have been asked to respond to the issues thrown up by the theme: HUMAN RITE, and have been encouraged to look deeply at the living organism of Cape Town and to ask: What cries out for transformation or healing?; Who needs to be included in the social fabric of the City?; and how do we amplify and liberate the energy of the CBD – the site of our Festival?
Their mission is to refigure the public spaces of the inner-city as arenas in which we confront our demons and attempt to put them to bed. To seek out silent memories and invisible stories and validate them. To look for what needs to be righted, and ‘rited’. To broaden and deepen the way we experience the world we live in, and to celebrate our fundamental human right to express who we are.
If you have something to say, join the Facebook group and comment and discuss the theme.
