The First Official Provisional Fynbos Museum of the Greater Khayelitsha Area

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Done and dusted

Despite all meteorological and financial odds, The First Official Provisional Fynbos Museum of the Greater Khayelitsha Area opened to the public on May 2 2009. Below are some images of the garden as it exists today.

The next phase of the project involves an "absorption day", when members of the surrounding suburbs and informal settlements will be invited to come and take materials from the garden that they can use to improve their own homes. Thereafter the plants in the garden will be cared for by a group of environmentalists led by Andile Sanayi and Zikhona Ngesi.

But for now, here are some pics.

By day

And at night.

THe floodlights are darkness-activated, so this is what it looks like every night.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

A gallery: what we've one so far (it doesn't look like much, but wait 'til Saturday)

Above: Rodan, Murray and Phil. Anthea is behind the camera.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Fynbos is coming!

So today Rodan and Phil and Murray and Anthea, the kids who are making this intervention got the thumbs up from the people with the money, who in all circumstances seem to take far too long to raise those thumbs. That means that the First Official Provisional Fynbos Museum of the Greater Khayelitsha Area is happening, and will open to the public next week Saturday at 2pm with the rest of Cape 09. You should come!

The idea behind this project is to create a temporary environmental intervention that reflects on the contested presence of temporary architecture ("squatter" camps or "shanty towns") on the margins of South African cities. Interestingly, Cape Town's urban geography bears the legacy of the apartheid Group Areas Act, which prescribed that black and coloured people could not live near the city centre, much more explicitly than Johannesburg does (which is where we're from). Massive drives to gentrify South Africa's urban slum areas ahead of the 2010 Soccer World Cup means that cities and township areas - and Khayelitsha is one of the primary targets here in Cape Town - are being rapidly and artificially juiced up with little fenced trees on the paving, fake tuscan architectural white elephants and the like.

We'll post more info on this ideological bumf soon, but for now, here's a picture of the preview construction we did for this project a month or so ago. We think it's so nice.

This is what we dig

The First Official Provisional Fynbos Museum of the Greater Khaylitsha Area is a temporary botanical garden – the first of its kind in South Africa – designed specially for a site outside the Lookout Hill Tourism Centre in Khayelitsha. For the week following the opening of the fynbos museum on May 2, its curators will host a series of talks, garden walks and teas in order to acquaint the public with the practice of provisional gardening and its potential to transform South Africa’s urban environments efficiently and nonintrusively.

We call this project a “museum” rather than just a “garden” because botanical gardens are living museums and are as, if not more, important for the preservation of elements of South Africa’s heritage as traditional museums are. In this museum live fynbos plants thrive in the barren soil of Khayelitsha, which, in 1984, the former apartheid government of South Africa recognised was unlikely to yield any plant-life other than useless coastal grass. We believe that having an awareness of one’s heritage impacts how one envisages the future, and this museum is deeply invested in how the people of Cape Town imagine their natural environment in years to come. To this end, some fynbos plants are displayed in and around special simulacrum kiosks”that offer viewers a glimpse of what Cape Town’s most degenerate urban environments could one day look like with the help of a few cubic metres of topsoil, some light construction and the mass-dispersal of fynbos seeds.

The personnel at The First Official Provisional Fynbos Museum of the Greater Khaylitsha Area are not sure how long the museum will survive in the form in which it exists at the opening. We hope it doesn’t burn down or blow away. We hope people don’t steal bits of it when no one is looking. Whatever happens to it, once The First Official Provisional Fynbos Museum of the Greater Khayelitsha Area no longer exists as a museum, the fynbos plants used for its displays will become part of a permanent, freely accessible community garden at Lookout Hill.