Cape Town artist Tyrone Appollis was forced to stand by this week while council workers demolished his sculpture depicting the 1985 ‘Trojan Horse†shooting of coloured student protesters.
The demolition of the offbeat sculpture — a landscape broken by shards of gravestone — reportedly followed a call from a Cape Town council official to Appollis asking him whether he had ‘space in his yard†for the work.
Appollis, and others, are adamant that his work has merit. Anger has been expressed that the council has destroyed one monument to the incident — in which two children and a young man were shot dead by police hiding in a Casspir — while it erects another.
A new monument has been commissioned officially and will be dedicated on Heritage Day, September 24, a kilometre from the site of Appollis’s work. It was commissioned in May when the Human Rights Media Centre won a tender in partnership with the Cape-based AGG Architects and Development Planners.
Appollis spent much of this week drumming up support for his work, repeatedly phoning the media and circulating a letter written to the council by the Human Rights Media Centre expressing sadness at ‘the manner in which the artist and his work have been handledâ€.
The letter claims the sculpture does not interfere with the centre’s plans for a new memorial and that Appollis’s work is ‘a footprint in the recovery of memory of the massacreâ€.
In desperation, Appollis faxed an emotionally worded poem to the press exclaiming: ‘The day they broke my sculpture, my wife stitched my tattered soul.â€
Appollis’s work, for which he was paid R3 000, was unveiled in 2000 by Finance Minister Trevor Manuel and former justice minister Dullah Omar.