UP Journals (Univ. of Pretoria)
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Cybernetic Conversations: Designing ourselves towards discovery
Get PDFIn this article I wish to argue for a mode of critical and expansive thinking that our profession can call designerly-knowing, design thinking, or a design conversation – if this mode of thought can be understood to be undisciplined, and understood to be critical thought that owes allegiance to no (one external) directive philosophy except the one that regulates the fluid conditions of living and being of everyday existence, as will be explained below. This is not to be taken as a contradiction, since the developing argument will be for an internal (intrinsic) directive that regulates life, but further, also that this intrinsic directive is a shared concept as opposed to an individual one, making this ‘directive’ a constantly reassembled one. It is in this sense that Merholz (2009) would rather rename ‘design thinking’ as ‘social science thinking’, since design needs the clarifying perspectives and viewpoints brought to its practice by the disparate disciplinary backgrounds of the non-designers on the team, while Patnaik (2009) calls these newly combined skill sets ‘hybrid thinking’. Roger Martin (in Merholz 2009) acknowledges the need for a different type of ‘thinking practice’ (inelegant as my phrase may be), since the mere wish for interdisciplinarity, and knowingly putting a design team together from different disciplinary backgrounds will not be enough. I stated above that I do not wish to argue for the type of interdisciplinary thinking that integrates the systems approach into design thinking as if simply adding another string to the bow would solve an inherent problem, since ‘the problem’ is not so much design thinking but one highlighted by the contemporary, external, world of complex social interactions; the ‘problem’ is a truly systemic problem, namely one of evolutionary adaptation
At Home with Vanley Burke
Get PDFIn this article, I reflect on the exhibition At Home with Vanley Burke (2015, Ikon, Birmingham). Three objects from Burke’s archive – a Pitchy-Patchy Jamaican Jonkonnu Carnival costume, an old-fashioned wooden school desk and a photograph of a boy with a Union Jack flag – are used as catalysts to explore the relationship between personal/private/intimate and public/collective cultural histories, remembering, memory and material culture. In so doing, I demonstrate how hidden diasporic histories in Britain can be uncovered via the close reading of everyday objects. Using an autoethnographic approach, I examine how Burke’s archive functions as a site of memory and source of individual and collective knowledge
Writing the city into being: Essays on Johannesburg 1998-2008.
Get PDFLindsay Bremner‘s volume of essays on Johannesburg’s transformation after the demise of apartheid received the prestigious Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Award in 2011. The award – named in honour of the late social activist and author of The death and life of great American cities (1961) – is made annually by the New York based Urban Communication Foundation and aims to recognise outstanding books that exhibit excellence in addressing issues of urban communication. It is not difficult to surmise why Writing the city into being received the award for it contains an impressive collection of reflections both intellectually and visually on the city of Johannesburg.
Under Priscilla’s eyes: state violence against South Africa’s queer community during and after apartheid
Get PDFUsing South African performance artist Athi-Patra Ruga’s ...the Naïveté of Beiruth (2008) photographic series as its genesis, this article employs critical approaches to semiotics and textual analysis to examine the history of police brutality in South Africa with a focus on the experiences of the queer community both under apartheid and after the transition to democracy – a history that repeatedly doubles back to the former-South African Police Force headquarters: John Vorster Square/Johannesburg Central Police Station. For queer subjects, South Africa’s transition to democracy in 1994 brought with it many significant de jure changes to the daily lived reality of life in South Africa. However, misconduct and violence at the hands of the police – referred to as ‘Priscilla’ in the gay South African argot, Gayle – continues under democracy albeit of a divergent nature. Through Ruga’s radical aesthetic and disruptive artistic intervention with the Johannesburg Central Police Station – a site which has deeply penetrated South Africa’s cultural imaginary – this paper examines state violence against those who are identified as queer to expose the limits of the Rainbow Nation project, question the transformation of the South African police, and serve as an unsettling reminder of the complex and often dangerous societal position of women and queer subjects in South Africa. Significantly, while predominantly phenomenological in nature, this article to also partly auto-ethnographic as I draw from my own experience as a queer subject born in apartheid-era State violence Johannesburg and living in democratic South Africa
Repetitions repeatedly repeated: mimetic desire, ressentiment, and mimetic crisis in Julian Rosefeld’s Manifesto (2015)
Get PDFThis paper offers an exploration of Julian Rosefeld’s film Manifesto (2015), which is a fascinating amalgamation and interpretation of modernist, avant gardist manifestos. The paper employs the film itself as a hermeneutical framework, especially is use of the rhetorical-hermeneutical device of repetition, and also makes use of René Girard’s mimetic theory. Through this double-hermeneutic, two aims are set out: the first being to offer a way to rethink the meaning of the art manifesto as that modernist genre par excellence and the second being away to rethink trends in artistic and creative production in general
Liberatory violence or the gift: paths to decoloniality in Black Panther: African Perspectives on Marvel’s Black Panther
No full textBlack Panther’s (Coogler 2018) popularity amongst its black audiences in part stems from its foregrounding of the persistent social injustices engendered by colonialism and slavery (what Aníbal Quijano (2000:533) terms ‘coloniality’) and black people’s struggles to overcome them. As a representational tactic in approaching this theme, the Hollywood blockbuster draws on the imaginings of Afrofuturism, which variously endorses radical or more conciliatory approaches to decoloniality. This southern theoretical approach and the critique of coloniality offered by Afrofuturism frame our exploration of how the film positions the hero, T’Challa and the villain, Erik Killmonger, as embodiments of contrasting approaches to emancipation from colonialism’s entrenched legacy. Using a structuralist approach that draws on the narrative models of Tsvetan Todorov, Vladimir Propp and Claude Levi-Strauss, we analyse the film’s approach to decoloniality by examining the relationship between T’Challa and Killmonger as the protagonist and antagonist respectively. The analysis reveals the limitations of the film’s construction of the hero’s and villain’s understandings of the path to liberation. Rather than offering a revolutionary remedy for the injustices of colonialism and its aftermath, the film embraces a liberal standpoint that remains palatable to the white establishment, both within Hollywood and the broader socio-political milieu
[Un]performing voice: Simnikiwe Buhlungu/Euridice Zaituna Kala
Get PDFTwo unspectacular interventions, performed in central Johannesburg by Simnikiwe Buhlungu and Euridice Zaituna Kala, evidence the performativity of voice in public space. Addressing the unheard in contemporary society, they operate a shift in the way language is put to use (Cassin 2018). In paradoxical reciprocity, the action of [un]hearing comes to signify a fine-tuned form of informed and involved listening capable of bringing to the fore that which ordinarily goes by unheard or remains stifled. An “accented” way of speaking for example is inflected, shows situatedness, indicates individuated thought patterns (Coetzee 2013). This form of speech carries the legacy of historical exchange between languages and the power relations involved. It bears recognition of the multiple languages involved in the totality of any act of speech. Given current global concerns, it seems indispensable to caution that language identity cuts two ways: it is simultaneously a marker of belonging and a means of singling out those who do not belong. Side-stepping identity-politics, protesting discriminations based on language proficiency, the two interventions suggest self-transforming labour where the reader or listener may potentially perform an activist interruption of the [un]heard
In search of a ‘POST’: The rise of Cosmism in contemporary Russian culture: Challenging Legacies in Post-Colonial and Post-Socialist Notions of Place
No full textThe landscape of contemporary Russian culture is ground zero for the recent revival of Cosmism, the late nineteenth century utopian quest for immortality and space colonisation. Overwhelmed, as we are in the west, with accounts of geo-political conflicts with Russia, it is especially timely to interrogate the underlying social narratives that are inseparable from these conflicts. To do so, we must simultaneously juggle the discourse of post-colonial studies, a close look at the circulation of nationalism, the nostalgia for Soviet times, an explosion of religiosity, and the ideological and cultural work being done by the prominent cosmist devotees, Anton Vidokle and Arseny Zhilyaev.
‘In search of a “POST”: The rise of Cosmism in contemporary Russian culture’ navigates through the specter of contemporary neo-liberal Russian culture on its way to Cosmism’s other-worldly narrative of a cult of the ancestors and the immortality for all. Since the 2000s Cosmism has entered intellectual vogue. Touted as a harbinger of post-humanist ideas, it offered a vastly different view of the future, one that blurred the borders between the scientific, the religious and the fantastical (Smith 2016:4). Cosmism thus appears to function as a temporary refuge from the human denigration subsequent to the Fall of the Soviet Union and, more recently, the death caused by the Covid-19 Pandemic. Cosmism’s focus on theorising is at the expense of formal explorations and new visual languages. They are not challenging the status quo but perpetuating centuries’ old Russian traditions of millenarism and mystical fabulism and thereby not promoting any real advancement in constructing a new identity for a post-Soviet society
Play-able: using play to realise the intent of social design: Art, access and agency - art sites of enabling
No full textDesign – by its relational nature of connecting people, places and things – is an intrinsically social practice. However, the marked shift from prioritising commercial design objectives to creating constructive opportunities for collective engagement and social change has resulted in the emergence of social design. Viewed as a discursive moment and not a discipline, social design embraces different design approaches and participatory processes; as such, it is not defined by a pre-determined design process or outcome, but rather by its intent of engendering responsibility and social behaviour change. Within this context then, the aim of the paper is to reflect on the way in which play enables designers to realise the intent of their social design practice. To address the aim, the paper first contextualises social design and presents a conceptual framework of play. Secondly, the paper presents South African vignettes of the city and the higher-education design classroom to highlight the practical value play affords design to aid the understanding of social problems in general and advancing agency and ownership for sustained social behaviour change, in particular
Special section editorial: Decolonising Speculative Fiction
No full textDecolonisation is a group of critical theories aimed at negating colonialism by eradicating its multifaceted effects on the life of the colonised. According to Olufemi Táíwò (2022:xvi), it is an all-encompassing theory that has become a catch-all idea to tackle anything with any, even minor, association with the ‘West’. Decolonial scholars such as Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Achille Mbembe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Sabelo J Ndlovu- Gatsheni argue that colonialism did not end with the political independence of colonised nations as the effects have extended beyond independence and have continued to permeate all aspects of the lives of the colonised. The continuing power of colonialism, according to these scholars, is manifested in the coloniality of power, coloniality of being and coloniality of knowledge (Mignolo & Walsh 2018:10). They advocate for a decolonial turn from the dominant hierarchical, white, male, and Christian supremacy of Western hegemony and universalism to a dynamic pluriversal recognition and acceptance of knowledges from the Global South