Appropriation of Ah Architecture for Truth and Reconciliation Constitution Hill, Johannesburg, South Africa Hennie Reynders the University of Edinburgh (UK)
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Appropriation of ah Architecture for Truth and Reconciliation Constitution Hill, Johannesburg, South Africa Hennie Reynders The University of Edinburgh (UK) At certain moments a significant shift in the social, economic, and political reality of a region, a country 16 Robert Mudie. A Historical Account of His Majesty's Visit or a continent provides us with new insights into the Scotland. Oliver and Boyd. High Street. Edinburgh (1822): to underlying processes of territorial reconfiguration, the 108. appropriation of place, and the mutation of colfective ' 6 Andrew Hemingway, Landscape Imagery and Urban identity - a process that South Africans have been Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge experiencing since 1989 in a localized and unique University Press. Cambridge (1992): 72. manner, yet globally with significant meaning. This 11 Scott: 20. paper explores the site of the neoN South African 10 Scott: 21. Constitutional Court in Johannesburg to define, and •o A Narrative ... : 43. explain how the shift from an ideology of difference towards an ideology of co-existence and democracy 10 Scott. 19. are being translated through the urban development 21 Simpson: 24. frameoNork and ongoing architectural and installation 72 Simpson: 115. projects. Constitutional Hill has become densely stratified through socio-economic and political conflict, Fig. 1: "Nine Drawings for Projection" but has reasserted its role as iconic site in the urban environment and the political landscape. In many key roles in the struggle against apartheid are creating respects the Constitutional Hill project is similar to the a visual language to express the complexity and attempts at reconciliation through the translation of a contradictory nature of locating history and vision in collective identity in sites such as Place des Marlyrs physical space (Carol Becker: 2004) 1 in Beirut. The opening illustrations depict an instance where collaborative art and design practices were tactically As suggested by the title we are less concerned with deployed in the mnemonic process of making the the formalistic or purely architectural merits of this l:uilding project and rather with the processes through Constitutional Hill proiect tangible prior to the opening of the court. The collaborative performance between which the site Is being appropriated by the South William Kentridge and the Sontonga Quartet with the African society. showing of Kentridge's Nine Drawings for Projection The paper is structured around two complementary under the direction of Ross Douglass, re-introduced the site as a space for the future measure of the country's and integrated narratives; first by recalling crucial democratic health, and did so through music and art historic moments in an attempt to contextualise the which unearthed buried emotions of pain, forgiveness, site within the socio-political landscape, and second and hope (fig. 1 & 2). by arguing a number of philosophical positions seeming to inform the process of reconfiguring the site into its present state. This is further elaborated through Constitutional Hill - History and Context the endnotes, where the use of such additional Standing on the ramparts of the old Boer Republic's information, reflection, or references in the text would otherwise Impede the narrative flow. Finally returning, fort2 on Braamfontein Ridge in Johannesburg allows n conclusion, to the key philosophical positions which for good views towards the green residential suburbs are supporting much of the spatial reconfiguration in to the north, with a closer view of the inner city high South Africa, and which were de.lberately woven into rise neighbourhoods of Hillbrow and Berea to the south, and Braamfontein with the University of The the narrative. Witwatersrand directly west. Unknown to the general public, the William Cullen Library at the University Transitional South Africa never looks forward without looking back. In this spirit, new public buildings such as holds a special treasure of three very large paintings succinctly encapsulating South Africa's history - from the Apartheid Museum, the Nelson Mandela Museum, that of becoming a marker in the search for a route the Legislative Buildings for the Northern Cape Province, the Hector Pieterson Museum, Soweto, and to the east, of being colonized in successioo by the 3 Dutch, British, German and the French , and finally of now the Constitutional Court Complex are becoming mnemonic aids to buried emotions. Artists who played 133 I31 configuration of territories through conflict, through agreement and through compromise. Constitutional Hill, as such a site, straddles a typical Highveld ridge, although in this case a watershed with water flowing into the Atlantic, and from the other side, into the Indian Ocean. Below the surface a 300 mile long river of gold intersects with the site, the history Fig. 2: Jo Ratcliffe of the city, and the history of each individual in the country. The site holds layer upon layer of significant becoming a free and inclusive society in 1994. The discrete moments that were to become the seeds of memories that became the excavated, the engraved, first painting by Amshewitz on the left of the library the future South Africa. At first a moment of heroic and the extruded, and the reconstructed product of a atrium depicts the Portuguese explorer Vasco da entrepreneurial amb-tion, then a moment of claim ng multitude of histories. A cursory glance over the 1899 Gama at the moment in 1497 when King Manuael I ownership under an ideology of superiority and Fort, the 1910 prison extensions, the 1940s Queen 8 handed him his seal of approval and instruction (Fig. difference, and in the most recent moment, a reflection Victoria Maternity Hospital , the new Constitutional 3). The second painting by Colin Gill facing the visitor upon, and a projection of relative recordiation between Court. or the emerging complementary buildings and on entering the atrium captures the British Settlers the culturally diverse groups collectively referred to as public spaces does not expose the richness. or the arriving at Algoa Bay in 1826 after safely rounding the rainbow nation. A nation constituted of the native complexity of the site. the Cape of Storms (Fig. 4).4 These two earlier works born, those that came with a superior ability to claim Fig. 4: Gill painted in the 1930s and shipped to South Africa ownership, and the many others that arrived through The same ridge became the preferred location for Khoi for the first time. In his projection of the myth onto from England, reflect the socio-political reality of the circumstance. the Victorian mansions of the new gold barons and Africa, Camees elaborates further: Adamastor, his moment it wishes to portray, and significantly, also the industrialists eniOying the northern aspect in the 'Hesh' transmogrified into 'hard earth, his 'bones ... sentiment around the time of each work's respective Travellers arriving in Southern Africa, now as in the direction of Sterkfontein and one of the oldest known turned to rocks all rough and strange' is transformed date of production. The third painting on the right by past, soon discover the realities from which traditions sites of human settlement, now a World Heritage Cyril Coetzee (Fig. 5) was commissioned for the library have been moulded. The landscape, the many by the gods 'into this cape remote'. He Is the 'horrid n 1995, an equally significant date, and imports past histories, the indigenous knowedge and perceptions monster' who guards the passage around the southernmost tip of Africa. histories in a layered reconstruction of myth, memory, all reflecting the national character, and invented narrative. which, through too casual an observation, can easily appear fragmented and woven into a patchwork of But as Is true in myth, the vernacular is not a static expression, and appears to live many lives and die ln this enigmatic fold of the early Modernist library one unpredictability. many deaths. It hides in the shadow of memory through is confronted with the representation of each of those Narratives of a people, their locafi ty, their orig ns, times of change. Only when we become aware of a and their cultural mutation often resemble a fluid consistency between incompatibles can we say we incorporation of myth, song, story and quasi scientific have crossed the threshold of the enigmatic and have facts underpinning the work of cultural historians. Th.s removed the cbak that shields the birth of the next holds equally true for Southern Africa where the early phase in the mutation of tradition. ln these moments encounters between Europeans and Africans on the memory slips from the hands of the craftsman into subcontinent began as a meticulously documented new life and becomes a new form - a metamorphos s history through the extensive journals of the Portuguese of the old. explorer Vasco da Gama's first of three iOurneys from Lisbon via the Cape to India between 1497 and 1499, In retrospect one Is tempted to th nk that Cyr I and later being reconceived5 as myth by the European Coetzee's T'kama-Adamastor (1995) painting was Luis Vaz de Camees in hs 1572 epic The Lusiad.0 the first necessary step in crossing the threshold This epic revea.s the realm of P.damastor7 (fig. 6) as through a translation process of what could become Fig. 5: Cyril Coetsee a dual abstraction where monotheistic Christianity is an architectural equivalent in the redevelopment of subverted by the more fluid cosmology of the Classical Constitutional Hill as site, and a line of thought that Site known as The Cradle of Humankind. From this pantheon. Adamastor emerges from the sea as a will become clearer in what follows. Ten years beyond viewpoint the wonder of industrialisation must have mythical giant to warn against a realm where danger the transition into a democracy South Africans are been seductive and threatening to the indigenous and wonder, beauty and pain coexist.