It’s 7pm in Cape Town’s Company Gardens, and in the dark a crazy procession is wending it’s way past parliament. There must be about 1 000 Capetonians of all hues marching down the tree-lined avenue, causing the squirrels that inhabit the fauna to scurry for cover.
It’s Saturday night and this is the weekend’s headline event of the bewilderingly strange Cape 09 — Cape Town’s second biennale. The core of the parade comprises children from the city’s middle-lower classes. They’re holding high white banners and cutouts of dinosaurs, glamour girls with big afro-hairdos and Japanese masks.
At the helm is carnival artist Trinidadian Marlon Griffiths in a beanie and a khaki green windbreaker. I stop him to ask about his feelings for the shadow play he has designed (there are people delegated to shine torches through the cutouts onto big white mobile cloth screens), but Griffith is frantic. ”Children just don’t do what you tell them,” he says.
It seems like a lot of Cape 09 has come into being this way — designed around the uncertainties of communal participation. This rambling art adventure is taking seasoned artists, new curators and their unseasoned township collaborators into new and roughly defined spaces. Take Beninese activist and artist Edwige Aplogan’s work Thank You Driver that will see specially written and printed newspapers placed in minibus taxis. The content will be set in a South Africa 50 years hence and the newspapers themselves will be placed in the body of a Beninese mock-deity (the country is known for its historical bronze, godlike figurines).
In this way Aplogan, ”hopes to get people talking to each other on taxis.”
On a dank day visitors were taken on a sample ride with Aplogan and new curator Lerato Bereng to Khayelitsha. The deity was positioned, like a perspex Bhuddah adorned with little Christmas lights, between the driver and his front seat passenger. We sat on frayed, wonky seats while Bereng told us about the commuter culture of the city that crosses geographical boundaries.
At Langa taxi rank sound artist James Webb will broadcast commuter instruction (”Ladies and Gentlemen, everything is fine”) from across the globe in 30 unfamiliar languages that will no doubt heighten the alienation of the throngs while giving them a sense of belonging to the greater, global commuter experience.
Our junket began at Cape Town’s main Metrorail station. We were told that here the famous Beninese artist Meshak Gaba, whose work parodies fashion, will in the coming weeks make an intervention. At unpredictable moments suited gentlemen will appear on the station concourse. Each will be holding a framed suitcase inside of which there will be placed objects that symbolise some of the world’s great beliefs and horrible conflicts: holy texts, crosses, a Star of David and a United Nations flag.
Further down, in the station subway leading to a shopping mall, a trader called Jean-Claude, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, sits in his huge spaza that sells everything from sweets to a row of loud television sets. Here, on these televisions, the biennale is showing a series of films loaned by the Dutch One Minutes Foundation. As indicated, each work runs for 60 seconds and, while the foundation runs successful festivals in major capitals, ours will make a small indent in the routine of its Cape observers.
On Lookout Hill, a cultural centre in Khayelitsha, curator and critic Anthea Buys has placed a collection of common plants in makeshift structures. The First Official Provisional Fynbos Museum of the Greater Khayelitsha Area will look like a garden-in-planning. Perhaps someone will snatch a plant or take some planks for firewood; at any rate Buys’s garden is destined to disappear along with the other interventions that make up Cape 09 biennale.
No wonder Cape 09’s director Mirjam Asmal-Dik has called her event Convergence. In the end the works, and I have described a few of the full programme, will be remembered for occupying a place where art doesn’t always go. They will indeed converge with their surroundings.
This weekend Langa will host So Who is Brenda Fassie?, at the late pop star’s old high school. The learners will do their favourite Fassie hits while the backstage make-up routine of the girls will be televised to the school corridors.
All the works show artists getting out of the gallery space to situate their work somewhere where it will gain from the authentic.
For programme details go to www.capeafrica.org