Launch Photos

(click for more photos from Saturday's launch)

World shift

After not much sleep we left Wits at about 7.15am. At site, Robyn and her volunteers were unpacking her street sign from its shuttering. We had a list of things that still needed to be done. Gareth put up the no-dumping signs and started on erecting the mattress springs, though Guy took over from him so that he could do the beercrate panels. Guy, Robyn and I intermittently cut up and stuck the fake grass under the swings. A little bit of last-minute painting was done. At about 10am people started arriving. We were delighted to see Lone and Melinda drive up and then our families started to appear. I fetched Thuli, our traditional healer, from the market along with her sister and daughter and installed them upstairs. The choir kids who had been knocking about under the beady eye of their choir mistress got into position and we began just before 11am. The burning of the imphepo required my reluctant participation. We were pleased, though, with the idea of cleansing and new beginnings that this ephemeral ritual symbolised and the gentle, poetic echoing of the smoke that must have risen from this structure 31 years ago. Our three brief welcomes from Kwelemthini, Abedniago and Mr Cindi worked well to give the proceedings a slightly formal edge (the idea had been to have more relaxed festivities in the afternoon but a more solemn feel in the morning). We had also hoped that representatives of each of the main stakeholder groups would take some kind of public ownership over the beerhall by speaking. I was glad we’d decided that none of us should speak as it might have come off as being self-indulgent and self-congratulatory and in many ways the success of the project is really out of our hands by this point. Tseleng, our MC, forgot to announce the good news that it was 99% certain that the council would put lighting in the beerhall. (A barrage of phonecalls to Warren Mathers over the course of the week had resulted in an answer that his department would definitely reconnect the power and that they were sure they could also cover the cost of the lighting, the price of which they were waiting to hear from the civils department.) Then began the procession past the paired projects to the chess park. At ours, we asked KIbas and his friends to say a few words as just before the crowd had arrived they’d been saying that this project should be replicated elsewhere in KwaThema and in other townships, but when it came their turn to speak, embarrassingly Kibas just thanked us for what we’d done. Kasia and I had done our best to improve a space, acknowledging and appreciating fragile local economies and methods – but I still felt that all of out attempts to think about alternative ways of making and improving spaces should be seen as interim ones only that must one day soon be addressed properly by the authorities and thus superceded. I believe there is a risk in idealising the largely non-material, spontaneous infrastructures of townships because this amounts to sanctioning lack and inadequate provision, notwithstanding the fact that these are often accompanied by richly creative survival strategies.
The chess park looked spectacular – and the contest was in full swing. It was at this point that I realised that Khula hadn’t been at our site at all in the morning (and he wasn’t to come back to it in the afternoon). The formal proceedings seemed to be weighted towards the site on which they happened, which was quite sad and the chess park’s builders got a mention for their superb work but our subcontractors didn’t. Back at the beerhall, the planned programme of performances was wrecked by Lunga’s faulty sound equipment – we had some music but none of the nine singers and dancers could perform. It was a perfect, windless day, the first we’d experienced in KwaThema, and so kite flying was eliminated, though a few boys did bravely try. The basketball was at least a success with the prizes going to the professionals, friends of the guys whom Lawrence and I had found on Thursday. The music and activity, and perhaps mainly the swings, attracted a huge number of children from the surrounding areas. I had envisaged that the launch would involve adults as well as children but very few attended, despite lots of promises – perhaps they were as intimidated by the children as we felt! We were inundated with delirious small beings running up and down the stairs, queuing for the swings, and generally having a marvelous time. They were quite scary when it came to the handing out of snacks and coke, but a couple of teenagers appeared from nowhere and fiercely kept them in line.
In the late afternoon light, the red coke crates glowed. It struck me that we might have succeeded at setting out a stepping stone towards a redefinition of this area. We had certainly captured people’s imaginations – by the end of the seven weeks, we were being stopped regularly by passers by to find out what was going on and to discuss possibilities for the beerhall’s future. Its value seems to have suddenly been recognised by residents. It felt as though the beerhall, once invisible, had taken on a symbolic charge (although the strikingly iconic building always had a great power) and I hoped, perhaps naively, that the boy’s power salute might speak to people of action and agency. The visual language we used in the end might be seen as a combination of local methods and materials with an urban, modern twist to illuminate a giant piece urban furniture. There was probably very little about our scheme that spoke to logic or functional need, despite what the Germans had said about the finiteness of our design and its relationship to high modernism – it combined a single practical element (the balustrade) with memory, whimsy, porosity. It allowed for contingency and change; it did not fix meaning.
The whole area was littered with cups and peanut packets by about 5pm and not many of the kids were interested in helping to clear up. Once Lunga switched off the music, though, and Thabang announced hometime for the children, there was a little more peace and the ANCYL guys started up the party again. After re-erecting the danger tape to protect the grass and generally tidying up, we retired to Stan’s for a much-needed drink and some left-over vet koek with the chess park guys. A congratulatory sms from Lone came as a nice surprise. After persuading the poets, Lawrence, Mpumi and Tseleng, to do their thing since they hadn’t had a chance earlier, we had a raucous time making up bad poetry together.As I write this, I feel as though my world has shifted, that things won’t be quite the same again. I have learned so much about so many things. New possibilities for practice have been opened up. I have become more enchanted than ever with the dynamics of group work. It will be strange not to spend every free second thinking about KwaThema.

The final week

This last week has been a cold blur. On Monday morning the light was clear and sharp as I drove to varsity – the maximum was meant to be 12 degrees and it got even colder on Tuesday. We achieved a huge amount, though, and somehow managed to get to a point very near to the level of completion we were aiming at, though I guess a few loose ends and some open-endedness would not be seen as a bad thing. We got through the week with the help of kotas for lunch which was Gareth’s suggestion and find - they were a good antidote to the cold weather - and with sweet, creamered coffee from the Cindis. It became harder and harder to give tasks to the ANCYL – for some reason I really felt this during this week, perhaps because the pressure was on and I was constantly aware of the fact that everyone needed to be as efficient as possible. The beginning of the week was marred by the fact that both steel deliveries (the long pieces previously ordered from Fleet Steel and the flat and round bar from Mac Steel) delayed January’s welding work. When it arrived, things progressed smoothly with Gareth and January collaborating on a fantastic floating fixture on the stair balustrade. Khula pulled his weight and got going with the lines for the basket ball court. The landscaping also really took shape with the first delivery of crusher stone on Monday proving to us that we needed to address the area on the south east of the beerhall with more grass and stones. When it was complete, we were very pleased with the integration of the scheme into the landscape. Unfortunately over the weekend someone had, according to Mr Cindi, out of jealousy pulled out some of the vygies donated by Peter – an indication perhaps of other claims on the site within the community.
An interesting event was a meeting that I went to on Tuesday afternoon with Mr Cindi and Stan with Tshidi Mohlabane, the regional executive manager of SRAC for the eastern region of Ekurhuleni. They had had dealings with her when she’d been a manager in KwaThema and we went on the pretext that we still hadn’t had the large pile of rubble removed. However, I suspect that their motives were somewhat different as she belonged to the wrong department to do anything about this. Just before we went into the meeting, they told me not to mention the KwaThema Working Group or Kwelemthini or Stuma. Mohlabane was enthusiastic about the project but extremely concerned that we had not gone through the correct procedures to obtain permission for it. I felt that the meeting was a mistake and that there was the possibility of her shutting us down, while Stan and Mr Cindi held that as soon as she saw it she would fall in love and wouldn’t be able to stand in our way! They admitted to me that they wanted someone to adopt the project to ensure its success.
On Wednesday, Robyn started painting the tyre bollards; this little bit of articulation made a huge difference, and Thabang and Lungu completed the job on Thursday. They also helped me to paint the lines across the road between the swings and the trees. In fact, painting got underway in a big way with undercoats being done on the sides of the concrete blocks on the ground floor and the slabs in the landscape out to the north of the building. We also decided to play with the basketball lines, extending them beyond the constraints of the ‘court’. Mr Cindi stepped in to do the undercoats on the basketball backboard. By Thursday morning, everyone had a task, and there was a hum of activity accompanied by loud reggae from one of the houses nearby. At mid morning a man in a BMW sped up followed by a front end loader and an enormous truck. A visit from a bus load of councilors the previous morning seemed to have galvanised someone into action and this man whose company was contracted to the council was sent to help us out. The huge pile disappeared, as did the areas of rubble dumping to the north of the structure, and the lumps of earth at the vehicular barrier to the south, but it took several loads. We replaced the concrete lumps in a more orderly fashion, and Thabang in fact managed to create very low benches by laying pre-stressed concrete beams across the other rubble. This was a great improvement and was later painted, though it turned out to be pale pink the next morning! The bins and no-dumping signs that Guy had ordered arrived. We managed to source crates for our panel from Simon at the Mississippi Tavern on Thursday, getting ten then and there, and having the others promised to us the next morning. We set about working out the details of their fixing and bought the required materials. Fischer sent an agent to help us install our abacus with chemical mortar and it almost immediately had a group of children playing games on it. By Thursday, Veli’s fabulous mural of the power salute from the 1976 uprisings had been completed and he moved onto painting all the particpants’ names on a beam along the side of the court. We came up with an idea of changing the painted advert ’IT’S MILLER TIME’ on the west side of the building to ‘IT’S YOUR TIME’ or ‘ITS OUR TIME’, eventually settling on the latter – a variant of Kwathema’s ubiquitous speaking walls. Veli did this early on Friday morning in a quite translucent red which gave the impression of it having been there for some time. From time to time groups of kids would appear as spectators and either watch or help – often I pulled out the black dustbin bags and got them to pick up the never-ending stream of litter.
At the Thursday braai, our group felt quite hard done by (as usual?): there was no plan for the snacks promised to our site for the afternoon, despite my having asked whether we had to organise these ourselves and being told we didn’t. Also, Hannah objected to our initiative to have Kwelemthini address the beerhall crowd briefly early in the morning. The promotion of Anthony’s chess academy is indisputably crucial, but it seemed as though this was being done at the expense of our project. On Friday, therefore, we organised that Lizzy would do the catering and Hannah fortunately gave us the go-ahead.
Through all this, our paired projects were progressing too. Kasia had found a builder through the Chess Park called Richard who would work for R150 a day. The previous week we had discussed our ideas and so he began on Monday shifting the large pieces of concrete around and preparing the soil for the paving and slab we were going to throw. On Wednesday, Kasia and I placed the plates that she had got from Liebermann Pottery plus some small blue tiles that I had on the new slab, while one of Kibas’s friends chatted to us about how this decoration was going to attract women to their stall! The whole process of the construction of what amounted to an extended plinth around Kibas’s stall was a very organic, responsive and flexible one, with Kasia and I talking through things constantly and changing things as other possibilities arose. The notion of reusing all the rubble on the site rather than dumping it in another inappropriate place grew out of this so in the end, Richard was commissioned to use the rubble as a hard core of sorts for another screeded slab on the south of the stall, where we placed more plates. The trees were happily planted, though they were looking as though the cold might have got to them. The last touch was crusher stone to form a driveway for the carwash, and a specific request for a spot to shine the cars’ tyres. Towards the end of the week, I was very neglectful of the project in the face of the pressures of the beerhall and I’m afraid that Kasia carried it substantially.
Friday saw Guy and I race around trying to buy the last items needed on the east rand which included prizes for the basketball competition and collecting the donated coke which Robyn had organised for the launch from Nigel. I also, probably rather impertinently, went along to the muti market near Cash Build and found a traditional healer who was prepared to help with the ritual of cleansing the building. On Friday night we sat in Mr Cindi’s back courtyard until 10pm bolting together the panels of red beer crates (and sharing beers) so that they could be erected in the morning. When we left we saw that someone had painted a message in the road in front of the beerhall about fallen heroes.

Street pause progress!!!

Richard, the builder who is implementing our ideas is on our wavelength....he pauses with us when we hesitate and understands our inpromptu thoughts.

When we( Catherine and I) first arrived at Kibas's stall, we had no idea how we were going to integrate our paving and tree idea into the site....

We paced our site, observed and discussed, backwards and forwards until we realized that most of our materials and ideas were staring us right in the face...

The concrete lintols which lay there in an uneven fashion were there for a reason, they are steping stones to the slab and act as a platform for drainage.

We wanted to level these lintols so that they would form a level surface, and add paving to increase the surface area, as the stall has the double function of acting as a shop and a gathering spot for his friends.

Next to the stall is a pile of rubble. Rubble attracts rubish, so this space has naturally become an informal dustbin... At first we wanted to remove the rubble and 'dispose' of it.

A fine idea yet, disposing in Kwathema often means dumping onto another site... We decided to break this cycle and start thinking how we can use the rubble on the site. With the help of Richard we are going to use the rubble( which is mostly stones and broken pieces of concrete) to make another slab...In it's place we are putting a dustbin...

We have had a lot of luck with aquiring the materials.... Mrs. Pemba from Pemba hardware, gave us 335 brocken clay bricks and Adrian Turgel from Liebermann Pottery gave us about 100 ceramic saucers....These, together with blue tiles we cast into the concrete slab....

We had so much fun designing the pattern, as the saucers came in different colours...

Catherine aquired some trees from the council, we picked two Sycamores for our site...

From SketchUp to reality

Today was a big day – we erected the uprights of our balusters. We met early this morning to load up Gareth’s trailer with the c-sections and got to KwaThema around 8.30am. I was very apprehensive about the task facing us, but the Fischer fixings did what Kerry and Richard had promised us and the balustrade team, lead by Gareth and consisting of Khula, Wandile and Lawrence, worked miracles. The ANC Youth League volunteers made another ten tyre bollards for the west street edge, while I collected good bricks for the edging of the grass in front of the swings. When Robyn and Guy arrived, we worked on the placement of bollards in front of the trees and came to a solution of sloping the soil for the grass away from the level of the building, without defining a solid edge which might be seen as too defined a boundary, so the bricks will instead be mortared on the north side of the grass patch.

Robyn and Mr Cindi succeeded in organising a front end loader to shovel away the layers of rubbish which have accumulated on the east of the building in the cleaning process. This was a result of Mr Kwelamtini, the ward councillor, being impressed enough by the progress on site when he visited yesterday to help us out – the council meetings perhaps finally bearing fruit, egged on by Cindi’s persistence. A truck will tomorrow remove the enormous pile of sand that was formed, and a grader is also coming to even the surface. Mr Cindi told me about Kwelamtini’s idea that a public toilet should be rehabilitated in the building which is a brilliant suggestion not only if the building is to be used for public gatherings and performances but also simply to provide sorely needed ablutions in the public realm. Hopefully this idea could form part of the ongoing transformation of the structure by the community. Each time we looked up, the beerhall resembled more and more the Sketch Up model from our presentation two weeks ago. Though a number of people commented on the size of the baluster members, I was relieved at their proportion in relation to the structure and in fact quite pleased at their solidity. I think that anything more delicate would not have stood up to the strength and toughness of the beerhall structure.

At midday, I met Kasia at the site of Kibas’s stall to discuss the details of our work there. We came up with a good solution which works partly with the existing improvised paving that Kibas has developed around his stall and takes into account the fact that cars loop around the stall when the carwash is in use on weekends. We then visited a building goods supplier behind Cash Build, where Kasia seems to have succeeded in negotiating 315 free bricks (we placed out a square metre of the red clay half-brick cobbles to get an idea of the exact number we required!) – confirmation tomorrow. We will meet Kibas tomorrow to discuss our proposal and his ideas for the placement of the trees as well as when the work will begin…

We spent most of the day still uncertain about whether Mac Steel might donate the remainder of our steel (Kerry Kuhlmann had set up this connection), all the while wondering whether we should be biting the bullet and ordering from Fleet Steel. We were severely inconvenienced by John the welder who was originally going to make the jungle gym and whose generator we had arranged to rent this morning. He seems to have some kind of commitment in Springs which he hadn’t mentioned and finally pitched up on site after 2pm minus the generator. The pressure was due to the fact that we needed to spot weld the bolts of the balusters before nightfall to ensure that they weren’t stolen. Just as John and I were discussing fetching the generator, the resourceful January, another welder whom we have engaged to do the work on the balustrade appeared wheeling his welding equipment across the park, proceeded to re-tape certain areas on a very long extension cord, stretch it out to Mr Cindi’s house and do the spot welding. John, who then promised to bring an additional extension cord, never came back (which might be a good thing!).

Hannah, Tseleng and Peter arrived on site at around 3pm and seemed less than enthusiastic about our progress, and the way in which certain problems like the bollards had been solved. Hannah was, however, positive about the idea of grouping trees rather than planting them along the path (I had thought they might not thrive on this exposed plain and that small clumps, that could be tended and would work together in placemaking, might be better). Three sweet children Papi, Xolani and a friend, of their own accord, touchingly joined Guy and I in helping to collect litter on the north side of the beerhall.

The braai at Stan’s was used for workshopping the launch with Tseleng, the most useful thing emerging from this process being a sense of the time at which the procession would arrive at the beerhall and a time period for our part of the launch.

Imagine

It was a crazy week, working towards the presentations that happened this morning in KwaThema. Somehow, with very little sleep, we managed to complete all the work required by the brief, despite its coming to us only on Sunday afternoon. Ironically, the postponement of the presentation of our individual research which we proposed when we got the brief actually happened because we were running late. Our group managed to get to KwaThema at the stipulated time of 8.30am despite most of us having worked in the CAD labs until 3 and 4am. We then negotiated a new venue – because the seminar room which had been booked would not have worked. Hannah, Tseleng and Jennifer Beningfield arrived well after 9am and the other group even later. And then the proceedings were held up further by the projector cord not being long enough to use with the white board which we’d obtained and set up for projection. For our zombified group, all this chaos represented precious stolen sleep time. We finally got under way with our beerhall presentation first and our frustrations were swept away by an extremely positive reception. Not only was Hannah very complimentary and supportive, but more importantly the debate which followed among us, community members and council representatives was extremely constructive. The notion of our project awakening a consciousness of the potential value of the beerhall structure became clear; in fact, as ambitions and ideas developed, people had to be reminded of our small budget and the community’s ultimate ownership and ability to drive the project. The project, despite its lack of weighty, permanant programme, seemed to be working on a level that was beginning to fire people’s imaginations and evoke possibilities. One of the powerful ideas that emerged was the notion of transforming the angry, destructive energy of children and youth of the 1976 era into a more positive, balanced and normalised dynamic in which play and recreation took the foreground. A representative from the arts and culture department, Eddie Coetzee, became quite enthusiastic about council involvement and future funding, if we were to include a formal performance space. We have set up a meeting for early next week to try to take him up on his suggestions and offers in terms of possibly supplying bollards and similar help. The presence of the ANC Youth League was intriguing and there is some indication that they may assist with a clean up as that now appears to be necessary – a quick drive-past the site before the presentations shattered our illusions that Elmah was going to solve our solid waste problems... Kasia and my paired project also seems to be taking shape. The basic philosophy behind it has to do with the notion of people taking ownership of public spaces. Nico, the artist, was at the presentations and we went afterwards to show him the site and discuss his involvement, before the ritual of pasting up newspapers and then heading home. On getting back to Wits we met up with Kasia and Tom at the Origins Centre restaurant for a late (celebratory) lunch.

Dead dogs and hope

Today was disappointingly unproductive, though we got to site quite late after finishing our preparations in the CAD lab. We met our volunteers on site and talked through our ideas, but didn’t have a firm plan of action. The bodies of two dead dogs sticking stiffly out of checkers bags disturbed us. Ultimately we did use the time constructively, though, to explore the beerhall surrounds, introduce ourselves and our project to whomever we met along the way and exchange information with our ‘business-card/info-collectors’. These explain briefly what we’re doing and have a portion for people to fill in which gets torn off and kept by us so that we can later on contact people about the launch or for help. We met a dynamic woman called Lizzy at the take-way in the nearby row shops who bubbled on about making a difference and was generally very supportive. In the same shops, Guy and I also found a tyre supplier, Nelson, who will sell us old tyres for R10 each. We met up for lunch at the library with Hannah. The exciting breakthrough is that we seem to have found a youth councillor at the council offices, where we went to book a venue for next week’s presentations, who is able to get our site cleaned. Elmah promised us that she knew the right people ‘on the ground’ and that in a week the beerhall would be unrecognisable. This will hopefully remove one of our biggest hurdles and will mean that we can give up on trying to get help from Ekurhuleni and actually start on site when the programme specifies – which is in a week! While the others glued up the week’s newspapers, Kasia and I walked up Job Maseko Street distributing the flyers we’d made for our paired project. Our flyers (which, because of a wrong letter, read in isiZulu ‘Thandi the Tree’ rather than ‘Love a tree’ until they were corrected!) ask people to contact us if they would like to take care of a tree on the portion of pavement outside their homes. We want to plant one tree on either side of the road, creating some kind of zone of difference (and thus combining our two research topics, trees and pavement zones). Gratifyingly we immediately got an sms back from someone called Kibas who said he’d like a tree next to his stall – hopefully we’ll get some more over the next few days and then we’ll have to pick two ‘lucky’ tree lovers. Kasia and I also managed to sell an advert in next week’s newspaper to Pinky’s Fruit and Veg where I bought some beautiful ripe tomatoes before we met up with the others who had found some mural artists, Nico and Veli, painting at Ekasi who may well be able to help us.