The countdown has begun to the Africa Centre’s 8th Infecting the City, Cape Town’s annual festival of public art that takes place 9-14 March 2015.
Cape Town’s public spaces are re-imagined as Infecting the City returns!
The Festival is comprised of artworks derived from a multitude of disciplines that include dance, poetry, music, performance and visual art. Collectively the body of work seeks to uncover and explore the underlying experience of the human condition. All the performances and programme items for Infecting the City are free to the public and take place in the central city. The 2015 Festival expects to build on the success of 2014, when 419 artists and over 32,000 audience members were in attendance.
The 2015 Festival is being curated to bring freedom of expression and unexpected meaning to the streets of Cape Town, whilst shifting artworks out of theatres and reinventing the notion of how we use and interact with our public spaces.
From the deeply poignant, to the thought-provoking, humorous and curious, Infecting the City’s 2015 programme includes work from both local and international performance artists. Says the Africa Centre’s Executive Director, Tanner Methvin; “Our intentions for Infecting the City 2015 are to provide a unique moment in time when all our complexity can be laid bare and felt by everyone. Where we take that exposure is up to us.”
A sample of the artworks includes:
- Living Room Dancers by Swiss choreographer Nicole Seilers, in which audiences are invited to view dancers through binoculars as they dance simultaneously at the windows of an apartment block.
- Johannesburg-based artist, Sandile Radebe, brings us Colour Me In, in which he presents us with an old City map depicting the geographic lines of racial segregation and asks us to redraw and colour in the City we want to see.
- Nicola Elliot, recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Dance (2014), will present a piece called Chalk which explores how the delineation of chalk can change meaning,
- Jacqueline Manyaapelo and Khayalethu Witbooi ask some important questions about South Africa’s education system in UnEducated.
- Berlin-based artist Hilla Steinert and Elize Vossgatter will make connections in The Braid by plaiting a braid using grasses they have collected. Audience members are invited to contribute materials to plait into the braid.
- Other works explore social issues and events such as Marikana and the 2014 kidnapping of 273 girls in Nigeria.
This year, the Festival’s curation has changed to a team approach.
Several curators: Mandla Mbothwe, Farzanah Badsha, Nadja Daehnke – and Mandisi Sindo, as curatorial intern – join, Jay Pather, who leads the curatorial team.
Having curated a number of festivals previously, Pather says that bringing in new curatorial perspectives brings fresh energy to the Festival: “Working with a team of curators allows us to explore further and open some new territory. Each individual curates an allocation of artists and productions that follow various routes through the City, so there is sure to be sharp differences in perspectives from programme to programme, which will serve to enrich this growing Festival.”
Three major sponsors have partnered with Infecting the City this year: the National Department of Arts & Culture, founding sponsor Spier and the City of Cape Town.
Additional sponsors include: Santam, Pro Helvetia, Western Cape Government and the Goethe Institute. For the first time, Infecting the City partnered with crowdfunding platform, Thundafund, to diversify the works included in the Festival by selecting ten works that called for public funding.
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PHOTO: Madness – A Preliminary Sketch – By: Neo Muyanga and Sean Baumann
