Yet another question

Please can we join the description of our monument with the conceptual underpinnings to create a piece of writing that includes both things? because its quite hard to do one without the other. and they link together quite nicely. ?

Another Question

Can we build on to a monument to our woman that already exists? I have been looking at the Sunday Times Heritage Project website and my woman has a really great monument to her already and I think that maybe I could design something around it, that incorporates other aspects of her life in to the monument . Can we do that? Add on to someone else's idea I mean.

Question?

I was just wondering... Does the place that you put the monument have to be in South Africa? Or can we "place" the monument to our person in a different country that we think may be appropriate? Because my woman did cool things in other countries too, so could we maybe have more than one monument?

Contemplation of Choices and Parallel Realities- HOW?

For my heritage site I think it would be interesting to create an environment where the public can contemplate and consider where choices end us up and the effects they can have. I've got a few ideas that won't seem to come together in my mind.

I started thinking about something I watched that shows a parallel universe where the change of a single choice has changed the face of reality (for example- if we didn't decide to fill Zeppelins with highly flammable gas we wouldn't have had the Hindenburg catastrophe and there would still be Zeppelins in London- it's a strange example but it illustrates my point.) The problem then comes in with displaying these two (or more) realities...

My thoughts here were drawn to a house of mirrors where a girl can be shown as super skinny, short and squat, with a head three times too big or just about any other variation of the original. Surely each of those could be said to be showing a different view of reality. I just can't figure out how to put these together or if it would match what I'm imagining or even work...

Help?

Youth Day

I'd like to know what you are remembering today, and how you are remembering it. As you wander around today, take note of how people commemorate Youth Day. How effective are these commemorations?

When we remember this day, what should we focus on? How do we make our commemoration relevant to the present?

Negative Monuments

I've been a-thinking about how it can be a little difficult to memorialize someone who is not seen as a hero or to show someone as something other than one dimensional. There are many aspects to a person and those aspects are not always all good. I think my question is this: What is the purpose of a memorial? Can it be something that doesn't celebrate a person's life but rather shows the wrongs committed by that person as a kind of warning? If we were to do that would it be disrespectful to their memory or would it be accurate? How important is truth in memorials or are we only looking for impact?

Grffiti as a monument?

I was thinking about our project and how I could make it exciting. I was trying to think of all the forms of public displays that i could and one of the first that came to mind - and my favorite - was graffiti. It got me thinking about how much you can find out about a modern society by looking at the walls of their alleyways. Grievances, jubilations and opinions are all displayed with stencils and brightly coloured scrawls on the walls of cities all over the world.

I don't think that tags and witty one liners are going to change the way that the world sees Birmingham or Port Elizabeth but what about the more calculated and designed pieces by an artist like Banksy for example. He is an english graffiti artist who works in stencils. I find the peices displayed in the third image that i have posted above particularly interesting. He worked on the Palestine wall last year. He painted several images of "paradise" seen through the wall as well as several images of children trying to get over the wall. His paintings on the wall suggest that the people who are trapped by it are separated from what they need and want.

Banksy is also well-known for his anti-war images, such as the targeted dove of peace who has learnt to take safety precautions and the children ringing the atomic cloud.

Is what Banksy does a form of conservation of heritage? By painting where he is not allowed to and displaying the views of the people, is he creating a way for us to remember the past?

Ugly Statues and shopping Malls

Today I am thinking about ugly statues and the commercialisation of heritage. in particular, the statue of Hector Peterson at Maponya mall and the one of Nelson Mandela in the eponymous square in Sandton. Both designed and made by Kobus Hattingh and Jacob Maponyane.

Both are, I think, quite surpassingly ugly statues that don't justify the title of "art" but that's not the point I want to make here; regardless of their merit or lack thereof the question that I want to ask is is it ok to commercialise heritage in this manner? or is heritage always a commercial activity?

I question the motives of installing these statues - rather than to remember or celebrate, they are there as focal points, another attraction to bring the punters in, another place for the tourists to take a quick snap. Of course, you could argue that the motives are unimportant, and the outcome is what counts - if people see and remember, that's ok. I don't. I think motives ARE important in heritage, and need to be considered. I also don't think that people DO remember - rather, they become immune to the images: memory gets stored away in the bronze so it doesn't have to be in our minds [more of this in a later post I think]

Back to the question of why the statues are there.


From the Mandela square website:

"The statue was sculpted by Kobus Hattingh and Jacob Maponyane and weighs over 2.5 tons measuring 2.3 metres from elbow to elbow. The shoulders of the statue are 1.7 metres in width and the shoes are 1 metre in length.

The intention of this statue is not only to honour the former president’s vision of a free and just South Africa, but also to create a focal point where local and foreign tourists can reflect over the events that led to the creation of the Rainbow Nation. Here, you will always see tourists desperately trying to get a photo of themselves standing next to this tall statue."


What I find interesting about this little snippet is the obsession with the size (and on the Maponya website it also particularly points out that the sculpture weighs 300kg) as if BIG = GOOD or important or worthy. I guess that is the "mall" concept - show off the size, the vastness, the amount of money we can put into follies.

I also wonder how much tourists "reflect" when sitting sated and shopped-out over their R30 coffees in Sandton Square. Or peering longingly into the designer stores surrounding the statue in Maponya Mall. Is it not just a little sick to have these statues, that speak to poverty, pain and hardship, amongst naked greed and consumerism?

And to use this pain and our painful past to SELL?

Tear 'em down I say. Melt 'em and turn them into giant shoes and shopping bags - at least that would be honest! Lets have statues in malls that belong there. Keep history where it should be.

Welcome to Heritage Mavericks

Welcome! I hope you will find this site a place where you can discuss and debate issues around heritage that relate to your project. The intention is to create a community where we can, as a group, delve into the wonderful world of heritage in SA.

Please respect others' opinions on this blog. You will be immediately removed for any offensive posts.