Cape Town to Port of Spain, In the Memory of Design.

ENTERING THE SPACE.
Something is set in.

The City Doesn’t Belong –

Cape Town, Port of Spain, Design and the Marginalization of the Black and Coloured Body.

Coming back to Cape Town six years later brought back familiar memories. It is interesting how space holds this key to locked memories, locked in time, in layers of different experiences, which the task of life brings, in the doing of life. Here in this space these memories came washing back like yesterday as if it was today. Feelings are personal, they are etched into pavements, the smells of bars, small shops, where sweat lingers and the tongues of the people wag, space entraps the senses in a wonderful cocoon, releasing emotional revelry as the body interacts with space, like little shots of endorphins.

Cape Town is a modern city, a city caught in re-construction/deconstruction, a city whose history is caught in its design, caught in the imagination of their colonialism and their re-translation of their future through their design. Walking the space, getting the glimpse of the townships, sitting in the mall or off Long Street, all brought back bittersweet memories of dislocation, the dislocation of a body within a particular space. It is how the body of colour can still be trapped in a system of aesthetic apartheid, entrapped in a colonialism of aestheticism that dictates mannerisms and behaviour.

THE CITY AT NIGHT.
It belongs to bodies with fine clothes and to those
with sharp eyes and fork tongues.

The is a long way home.
Around the corner was the taxi rank and train.

The re-designing of Cape Town is an interesting post-colonial project, as I was told that they won a coveted design award that will lead to certain urban projects in the near future. How will it turn out, as the black/coloured body is free to further dislocation due to its historical trauma.

Beautiful designs, in construction and expansion that seem not to include the many languages that create the beauty that make Cape Town: a tourist city, a space to retire, relax and resign oneself to the indulgences of life. Cape Town is a town that makes people invisible: an African city without Africa, a simulacrum of a certain philosophical ideology of memory. There is a natural enforcement in the application of design polarity which forces a sublime limitation in the body’s imagination, when this is confronted alternatively it comes off different, angry, leftist, revolutionary, racist or xenophobic.

THE AFRO MARKET.
Here migrants sell their
craft.

The other Afro Market holds the body within a gaze of economics.

As I looked at the professional dance,
bucket in front to put money, cool,
but as I turned the corner there where another group of
children even younger 5/6 doing their dance, and the other
corner.....

THIS IS THE MALL MARKET.
There is a distinct sense of white and black privilege here.
The civility of shopping in the market.

Recently a woman died.  She was most likely the last of the people who spoke the Nu’u language, the original language of the San people. The first people of South Africa and may be the closest people to the first people of this world, sadly it is difficult to find their aesthetic footprint within the design of the city.

Post Colonial design must have an empathetic design imprinted in it. There must be within the designer the ability to intellectually and spiritually feel into the space the prose of history.

The above pic shows an example of merging.

AS I ENTERED JOBURG.
I was confronted with this print titled into the
floor. This was the closet that I got to the idea of empathy.

Cape Town has a rigid moralistic design that lacks any of the intellectual empathy of design morality and ethical principles that should belong to post-colonial spaces whatever their design philosophy. Cape Town nevertheless reflects core principles of good old urban planning, engineering and aesthetic management that developing spaces should have stamped into their manifestos of development. One space that could benefit from this is the city of Port of Spain.

One thing that comes to mind is the consistency or management of these principles as spaces evolve over time from right-wing, centre, to left wing or even authoritarian politics or pragmatic politics such as we have witnessed in many developing spaces. From socialism to neo-capitalism, spaces tell a story of the character of people, and they also reflect a flawed understanding of the meaning of civilization.

The city of Port of Spain and Cape Town have both inherited interesting traits that have bought destructive and beneficial elements to both their civilizations. In the case of Port of Spain the almost inarticulate evolution of space tells a story of a lack of critical thinking due to a weak education system that sacrificed the aesthetic philosophy for a technical repetitive ideology that enforced itself. Here there was no appreciation of space.  In Cape Town it’s brutal history, psychological tearing and victimhood ideologies keep certain principles alive that will keep Cape Town in the coldness of conservative political aesthetics. Trinidad and Tobago in its political pragmatism practices a ‘whatever’ aesthetics that shoots from the hip of materialism and our collective low self-esteem.

These 3 pics tell a story of Port of Spain.
the shear pain in just walking through the space, what makes people
wander all over the road ways.
The fact that we want the buildings, and

Cant seem to maintain the space, the above pic there
lies the light the tree continues, the design broken. 

 Good design needs to be empathetic. It needs to be responsible to the form that will inhabit its space. Design that does not accomplish this has missed their mark in one way or the other. In Cape Town there is the lack of empathy for the other, in Port of Spain it is the lack of empathy for self that is evident, and it is the obvious destructive nature of both sites. Both locking the other out, in their own white-denial of the own Black African-ness

Still no cultural policy, no land policy, what’s up? As I left, Trinidad and Tobago, the Asa Wright Nature Centre was being threatened by quarrying. (Asa Wright is an international recognized ecological site, where researchers, nature enthusiasts and tourists come to visit).  Here we see this pragmatism that has held us back in the development of our civilization. Here we see how our low self-esteem has contributed to an inarticulate development that has been destructive since post independence.  Generally worldwide the aesthetics of the Global South has been caught in globalized, neo-liberal capitalist development rhetoric that recognises only one paradigm of ‘development’. It seeks to erase (among other things) the aesthetic contribution of people of colour and they have fallen for it. Our designers and artists have not been able to conjure our spirits, but not want of trying.

Artists of colour and sensitive African-white designers have been challenging design theoretical principles of form and function throughout postcolonial spaces. It is my hope that we will see more of this in Cape Town and Port of Spain. Sadly it is evident that the black body isn’t included in both our spaces as they seem caught in the periphery of each city’s imagination. When confronted, the powers that be seek to reject, sanitize and change to adapt to their ideology of globalised modernity or middle class conceived notions of propriety and proper etiquette.

My concern is with the empathy of form and the ability to be inclusive in the aesthetic consideration of the development of property - the people’s property. Space development is about power and how power considers form, as we see in Cape Town and Port of Spain one or the other is invisible to the power structure.

Which leads to one of two conclusions: in one space there is the intellectual decision to exclude the black/coloured form through a right-wing political aesthetic agenda that will lay down certain rules and regulation of the body, through Western aesthetic ideology. The other, due to historical consequences there is a lost of consciousness of the other, which leads to a lost of empathy, which makes me, makes me invisible.

How we re-introduce new aesthetics?  It can come through the designer or the client, through the development of a culturally aware clientele that will insist on certain instructions that will guide this renewal.

THE OPEN CREATIVE EDUCATION MODEL.
Which state that at the core there is the
creative circle that allows for
ETHICS
MORALITY
SPIRITUALITY
CRITICAL THINKING,
all being taught through a platform of creativity,
they will in extension flow into the other academic circle, maths, english,
gender and sex education etc.

THE TAXI DRAMA.
The tout was engaged in a very heated confrontation with another
taxi tout over a woman customer,
this went on for awhile and was eventually called out
by someone in authority,

So the driver had to pull aside to wait for the tout return.
This confrontation of her body is just that, a confrontation
of form that doesn't see you or feel you.
She became invisible to them.
It was violent.

The deconstruction and reconstruction of the education system to a creative open model is necessary.  One where we instill in the child from an early age a strong sense of self through creativity that will develop critical thinking, ethics, morality (not religion), spirituality (again not religion)and philosophy. This will allow the child to experience life on their terms allowing for greater ability to be democratic and inclusive of the other. They will be able to walk into the other academic areas and hold their own.

I remember an architect telling me about Camps Bay (the rich residential and tourist part of Cape Town), that newly arrived residents will get these famous Cape Town architects to design and build these modern houses, tearing down the old structures. They will live in it for a while but tire of it because they find it cold and grey. She prefers a mixture of traditional and modernism that allows for personality (form).

The moral of this story is at the heart of the success and failure of our developing spaces, it lies in the re-education of people, of power, of the state to allow for an indigenous philosophy of art-design, the re-imprinting of ourselves into our spaces. There are things we can learn from Cape Town and I will like to think that there are things that they can learn from us, we at 50 years and they at 20 years into the post- apartheid era.

TRADITION IN MOTION.
In the every day ness of our lives
their lies big stone philosophies that tell
a story and can create bigger meanings for all of us.
for me the above pic was just that.

In the corner they stood there reminders of
cattle, nature and industry.
TRADITION.

Let us be free to re-construct this question of tradition.

Let us feel free to speak out loud our projects……..

Dean Arlen

Cape Town-Pretoria

South Africa

March 12-20^th 2012