Image & Text : a Journal for Design

The migrant labour system was an historical system used to reconcile the conflicting need for cheap labour in the mines and cities, with the apartheid ideology that workers should not reside there on a permanent basis. Labourers were housed in a unique accommodation type that developed from the Kimberley Closed Compound into the Witwatersrand Mine Compound and ultimately the migrant labour hostel. During the late colonial and apartheid periods, the mining compounds and the migrant labour hostels, which formed a key element of this system, were designed (and functioned) as tools of control and repression. In time they became synonymous with violence, overcrowding and squalor. As with so many other political and social systems, dismantling the migrant labour apparatus, and undoing the harm it caused, often requires even more tenacious efforts over a period of time.

The exhibition, PASS-AGES: References & Footnotes (2010), curated by Gabi Ngcobo, was site-specific and took place at the former Pass Office in Johannesburg, a space not officially acknowledged as a struggle site. Ngcobo, recognising the potential for using dynamic display formats to mobilise a curatorial concept, brought memory to the fore by installing artworks at the Pass Office as reenactments of evidence. I argue that PASS-AGES invokes traumatic memory through curatorial reenactment, and indicates the potentials for reenactment to explore repressed histories that still hold presence in a contemporary moment. Memory is thus invoked as an additional “text” to mobilise the conceptual framework, akin to how remembrance is often used in the continuous struggle for justice. Employing an autoethnographic methodology, which describes an analytical approach used to critically examine the researcher’s own experiences as a means to access greater understanding of cultural experience, I allow the reader to experience the exhibition through my own account. I argue that, as a nomadic curator, Ngcobo was freed from contextual, spatial, or methodological limitations traditionally bound to a colonial logic of curatorial practice. I convey that a nomadic curatorial approach can be adopted to critique traditional or institutional curatorial paradigms. To this end, I argue that Ngcobo was able to engage care in her practice by using reenactment to interrogate memory in a manner that may otherwise have been subdued within an institutional context.

Today, with decolonisation on the rise in the West, comes a timely compendium titled Educating citizen designers in South Africa edited by Elmarie Costandius, an associate professor of Visual Arts and coordinator of the Master of Arts in Visual Arts (Art Education) at Stellenbosch University, South Africa and Herman Botes, acting director of the Visual Communication Department at Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa. Educating citizen designers in South Africa proffers critical citizenship design education to confront the civic ramifications of historical colonialism and apartheid in contemporary South Africa. Together, Costandius and Botes lead a theoretically-fueled conversation with a group of design scholars from various South African educational institutions – including the University of Pretoria, The Cape Peninsula University of Technology, the University of Johannesburg, along with the editors’ respective universities – on what constitutes critical citizenship design pedagogy in present-day South Africa. The co-editors state vaguely, and in a somewhat limited way, that the book aims to ‘contribute to the critical citizenship discourse by offering a South African perspective’ (Constadius & Botes 2018:iv), but they contribute something more important than that, two-fold. On the one hand, Educating citizen designers in South Africa disseminates findings from educational research on critical citizenship pedagogy in design; and in so doing it contributes a cross-disciplinary research perspective to a global conversation on critical citizenship in design already underway. For instance, in the west, key texts that have emerged over the past decade and a half include Developing citizen designers (Resnick 2016) and Citizen designer: perspectives on design responsibility (Heller & Vienne 2003). On the other hand, Educating citizen designers in South Africa also contributes to social transformation efforts locally (in South Africa) as well as on a global scale.