The First Official Provisional Fynbos Museum of the Greater Khayelitsha Area: May 2009

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.

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, May 12, 2009

Done and dusted

This is what we dig

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