Description
Book SynopsisFalling 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.
Table of Contents
- 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
