Remembering Marikana: Public art intervention and the right to the city in Cape Town
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Date
2018
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Abstract
This article investigates the role played by cultural initiatives in urban struggles in South Africa, and the emergence of public art to assert the right to the city. I explore how artistic� activist interventions engage an understanding of social justice and the right to the city in provocative visual and performance art. I demonstrate how such interventions reflect Lefebvre�s conceptualisation of the city as a space to be inhabited in an active process, which critically includes its re-imagination.
The paper focuses on creative interventions in Cape Town that confronted the city�s genteel public space with the second and third anniversary of the shooting of 34 striking miners at Marikana on August 16 2012. I argue that bringing the commemoration of the massacre into the public urban space � where post-apartheid Cape Town exhibits its claim to cosmopolitanism � challenges the politics of space in South Africa. I asked, how these cultural initiatives articulate claims through reimagining the city how they engage with the intertwined politics of culture and class followed by both the city and the nation�state, and how the artistic practices contest urban citizenship in contemporary South Africa.
Description
Keywords
Marikana, Cape Town, Public art, Rhodes Must Fall, Tokolos Stencils
Citation
Becker, H. (2018). Remembering Marikana: public art intervention and the right to the city in Cape Town. Social Dynamics, Article in Press.