The First Official Provisional Fynbos Museum of the Greater Khayelitsha Area: 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.

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.

The First Official Provisional Fynbos Museum of the Greater Khayelitsha Area

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

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

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