Source: https://www.thundafund.com/opencity
The Open City Project approaches city space through the social reality of the streets as a dynamic space of experimentation and vitality. The project will see the construction and installation at the Festival of eight wooden structures with sixteen primary artworks. Over the primary works will be layered text, photos, images, maps of evictions and resistances – present, historical and imagined. Five poets will describe the politics and emotions of the images being constructed. They will move between and around the structures shrieking, wailing and screaming their poems. In front of the structures: a suited man, behind a desk laden with diagrams and maps, will calmly describe and discuss the evictions and the evicted areas, interacting with spectators as a representative of the city’s public relations team.
The Open City Project – Infecting the City by Wesley Pepper
We see the mushrooming numbers of evictions as echoing and reinforcing history as a violation of what it means to be human. The fact that citizens of a country do not own the land they are from, brings the logic of neo-liberal democracy into question; opening up a field of questions about our collective future and how we want to live and how we get past the present. We will express through images, structures and with poetic voices, the feelings of those who are consciously excluded and marginalised by the process of securitisation, privatisation and surveillance of city space, and how these people resist and create their own autonomous spaces.
We’re crowdfunding!
We are crowd funding for this project so that we might be part of Infecting the City – a free public arts festival that happens each year in March in the Cape Town CBD. Our aim is to raise 50% of the cost of the production. Through crowd sourcing, our production and its distinctive offering will be seen and experienced by the public for free.
Evictions happen each year in Cape Town, often during the coldest months, and targeting the city’s most vulnerable: the poor and unemployed, children and the elderly. This production brings the evicted and their plight into the heart of the city centre, for all citizens of Cape Town to see, understand and to share their anguish.
The Open City Project – Infecting the City by Wesley Pepper
Tipping point: R4 750
Reaching the Tipping Point will ensure that we receive 50% match funding from the Infecting The City Festival to realise this project.
Final Target: R9 500
The project will be realized!
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The Team
The Open City Project is a collaboration between:
Wesley Pepper, is a Contemporary Artist and Social Entrepreneur based In Johannesburg with a keen interest in social political issues across the Afrikan continent.
Andrew, a Wits University cultural anthropology graduate and book shop owner with a keen interest in politics and Street Art.
Paul Paunde, a multilingual poet and copy editor based in Johannesburg.
Contact us:
Ivana Abreu – ivanaa@africacentre.net
Emma Chippendale – emmac@africacentre.net
Online:
www.facebook.com/wesley.pepper1
www.facebook.com/InfectingTheCityFestival
www.twitter.com/InfectingtheCT | @InfectingtheCT
www.twitter.com/wesleypepper | @wesleypepper
The Open City Project – Infecting the City by Wesley Pepper
The Open City Project – Infecting the City by Wesley Pepper
