Changing the city after our heart’s desire: Creative protest in Cape Town

Abstract

In the city of Cape Town, ubiquitous stencilled texts proclaim “This city works for a few”, “Remember Marikana”, “Dehumanization Zone”, “Not yet Uhuru”, “Gentrinaaiers”; there are also stickers saying “Non-Poor Only”. The image of Mgcineni “Mambush” Noki, an iconic symbol of the Marikana massacre, predominates on walls, road signs and bridges. These texts, labels and symbols interject city texts into commercial and road signage to reveal the “legibility” of the city as operating in the interests of capital while maintaining the segregationist spatial designs of apartheid. This article discusses the artists and art collectives, specifically Xcollectiv and Tokolos Stencils, that were part of the exhibition Plakkers, curated by Justin Davy, as forms of creative protest that widen the space of contention, uncover the normalized violence entrenched in the logic of improvement districts and engage with the continued erasure of people’s histories.

Keywords:

• Space
• street art
• art activism
• Cape Town
• Plakkers
• Xcollectiv
• Tokolos Stencils

Notes

1. The notion of a “legible city” is defined by Lynch (1960) as “the ease with which [the city’s] parts can be recognized and organized into a coherent pattern” (2–3). The artist Jeffrey Shaw engages with this notion in his 1989 interactive installation entitled “Legible City” where existing cities are made entirely out of text. Participants pedal a bicycle through “cities of words” (Shaw n.d.).

2. Unless otherwise indicated (i.e. as deriving from a personal communication), quotes from the Tokolos Stencil collective are cited from its unpaginated website.

3. After many tense days of negotiating with miners who gathered around the hilltop in Marikana in protest, on August 16, 2012 34 miners of the Marikana mine were shot at close range, as they fled, by the police.

4. The direct translation of naai is “to sew”. Using the metaphor of a needle penetrating cloth, the colloquial use of the word naai means “to have sex with”. The statement in the poster, however, can be interpreted to mean that the mayor “has sex” with whites. However, in this instance, it is a metaphor for “serving the interest of”.

5. http://www.sabc.co.za/news/a/fc8a01004c24320bb261b76995218ba3/Govt-won’t-deploy-army-to-gang-ravaged-Cape--20120728 (accessed October 15, 2016).