Falling Monuments, Reluctant Ruins (eBook)

The persistence of the past in the architecture of apartheid

Faeeza Ballim, Hilton Judin, Arianna Lissoni, Yasmin Mayat, Temba Middelmann, Barbara Morovich, Muchaparara Musemwa, Goolam Vahed, Tara Weber, Roshan Dadoo, Nnamdi Elleh, Sally Gaule, Kelly Gillespie, Pauline Guinard, Brendan Hart, Ali Khangela Hlongwane, Eric Itzkin (Autoren)

Hilton Judin (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021
336 Seiten
Wits University Press (Verlag)
978-1-77614-670-3 (ISBN)

Infos

Examining questions around heritage, ruins and remembrance in post-apartheid South Africa, the contributors seek to understand how architecture contests or subverts the persistent conditions in order to promote social justice, land reclamation and urban rehabilitation. This edited collection looks at ruins and vacant buildings as part of South Africa’s oppressive history of colonialism and apartheid and ways in which the past persists into the present.

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Falling Monuments, Reluctant Ruins: The Persistence of the Past in the Architecture of Apartheid interrogates how, in the era of decolonisation, post-apartheid South Africa reckons with its past in order to shape its future. Architects, historians, artists, social anthropologists and urban planners seek answers in this book to complex and unsettling questions around heritage, ruins and remembrance. What do we do with hollow memorials and political architectural remnants? Which should remain, which forgotten, and which dismantled? Are these vacant buildings, cemeteries, statues, and derelict grounds able to serve as inspiration in the fight against enduring racism and social neglect? Should they become exemplary as spaces for restitution and justice? The contributors examine the influence of public memory, planning and activism on such anguished places of oppression, resistance and defiance. Their focus on visible markers in the landscape to interrogate our past will make readers reconsider these spaces, looking at their landscape and history anew. Through a series of 14 empirically grounded chapters and 48 images, the contributors seek to understand how architecture contests or subverts these persistent conditions in order to promote social justice, land reclamation and urban rehabilitation. The decades following the dismantling of apartheid are surveyed in light of contemporary heritage projects, where building ruins and abandoned spaces are challenged and renegotiated across the country to become sites of protest, inspiration and anger. This ground-breaking collection is an important resource for professionals, academics and activists working in South Africa today.

Inhalt

Acknowledgements List of Figures Foreword – Muchaparara Musemwa Introduction – Hilton Judin Part One: Lands Chapter 1 Land Dispossession and the Ghosts of the Medupi Power Station – Faeeza Ballim Chapter 2 A Community Journey: Return to Juliwe Cemetery in Roodepoort, Johannesburg – Eric Itzkin Chapter 3 Public Memory and Transformation at Constitution Hill and Gandhi Square in Johannesburg – Temba John Dawson Middelmann Chapter 4 Ejaradini: Notes Towards Modelling Black Gardens as a Response to the Coloniality of Museums – MADEYOULOOK Part Two: Buildings Chapter 5 Johannesburg Central Police Station and the Photograph as Evidence – Sally Gaule Chapter 6 The Persistence of Robben Island: Abolition and the Prison Museum – Kelly Gillespie Chapter 7 The Apartheid Pass Office in Johannesburg and a Heritage of Destruction – Hilton Judin Chapter 8 Indian Trading, Art Deco Buildings and Urban Modernity in a Segregated Town: Jubilee House in Krugersdorp – Arianna Lissoni and Roshan Dadoo Chapter 9 An Uncertain Heritage and Resistance: Transforming the Drill Hall in Johannesburg – Barbara Morovich and Pauline Guinard Part Three: Statues, as Monuments Chapter 10 Creating Spaces of Memorialisation: New Delville Wood (France) and SS Mendi (South Africa) – Yasmin Mayat and Brendan Hart Chapter 11 Re-historicising Credo Mutwa’s Kwa Khaya Lendaba Cultural Village in Soweto – Ali Khangela Hlongwane and Tara Weber Chapter 12 Facing (Down) the Coloniser? The Mandela Statue at Cape Town’s City Hall – Cynthia Kros Chapter 13 ‘Where’s Our Monument?’ Commemorating Indian Indentured Labour in South Africa –Goolam Vahed Chapter 14 Decolonisation, Monuments, and a New Architectural Language – Nnamdi Elleh Contributors Index

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.6.2021
• Verlagsort: Johannesburg
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
• Themenwelt: Technik ► Architektur
• Schlagworte: Apartheid • Architectural History • Architecture • Art History • Political History • post-conflict studies • South African Apartheid • South African history
• ISBN-10: 1-77614-670-0 / 1776146700
• ISBN-13: 978-1-77614-670-3 / 9781776146703