This article offers my speaking notes as an introduction to a panel discussion on Community Engagement, with Andrew Lamprecht (South Africa), Eric Itzkin (South Africa), Goabaone Montsho (Botswana), Puleng Plessie (South Africa) and Bridget Shumba (Malawi), programmed as part of the Reimagining Heritage, Archives and Museums: Today/Tomorrow, an initiative by the Institut français d’Afrique du Sud (IFAS) / French Institute of South Africa and the Embassy of France, which took place at The Homecoming Centre in District Six, Cape Town, from 12 – 15 February 2024.
To get this discussion on community engagement going, I would like to start by offering a working definition of community as a group of people who have something in common – be it a shared interest, geographical location, practice or characteristic. Engagement, I see as the process of consultation, collaboration or participation depending on the stage of the action, be it design, planning, implementation or evaluation. Working at a community-based arts centre, established in the 80’s in response to a call from communities on the East Rand of Johannesburg, for a space where young people could engage in their culture and heritage, find spaces for expression and imagine a future better than the state of emergency that they were living in at the time. Now, 37 years later, this spirit of existing in partnership with and in service to our community remains the underlying purpose of the organisation toward social transformation and social justice.
We are here at this convening to talk about heritage, archives and museums, and what I have appreciated over the past two days is how central the need to consider the human experience, emotional connection and action of being human in relation to museums, collections, restitution and curatorship has been. It is, however, significant that perspectives shared have primarily been criticisms around the exclusion, and worse, the negation or erasure of the lived experience, the human experience, the human.
Such perspectives raise questions around:
- The purpose of museums and archives;
- The value of living generations witnessing and engaging narratives of our past;
- And if museums and heritage institutions should be serving as spaces where people can explore and engage understandings of humanity, then how can they be more reflective, inclusive, responsive, visible, and accountable to the people they serve?
Recognising that historically, understandings of humanness have been vitiated by systems of oppression, injustice and foreign power, supports the need to question what is published, archived and presented as empirical truth. The decolonisation and transformation projects that many of our countries and institutions have engaged in the recent past, is evidence of a widespread acknowledgement that our social, political, economic and educational structures, have lost, deleted or never included the plurality of narratives on how our past was experienced by the people who lived through it.
Chimamanda Adichie, presented an incredible Ted Talk in 2009, titled “The Danger of a Single Story”, exploring the negative influences that a “single story” can have. She argues that single stories often originate from simple misunderstandings or one’s lack of knowledge of others, and that the effect of political and cultural power on these stories can have a malicious intent to suppress groups, through controlling “how [stories] are told, who tells them, when they’re told, [and] how many stories are told”. A power that not only spreads a story, but also makes its ideas persist; essentially that “to create a single story, is to show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become”. Her conclusion responds to these misconceptions by reiterating the importance of spreading diverse stories in opposition to focusing on just one. She professes that the rejection of the single story phenomenon allows one to “regain a kind of paradise” and see people as more than just one incomplete idea. For me, the questions raised in this Ted Talk can be directly translated to this discussion: what power exists in heritage institutions, how is it used and how can it be subverted for and through community engagement?
Engaging living heritage as a conceptual frame for this session, sets up 3 ideas that will guide this discussion:
- The first being that authentic narratives of our history and heritage exist in the memories and lived experience of people, in our relationship with others, and in every aspect of our culture;
- The second being the view of heritage as dynamic, continuously transformed, interpreted, shaped and transmitted by living generations;
- And the third idea being that to change to current ways of understanding and presenting heritage requires diverse community access, participation, and support.
I honestly believe in the power of the arts to transform, heal, connect, express and challenge, and I advocate the arts, can support, contribute to and lead the mobilisation and activation of change in favour of the people. For what are the arts if not an exploration and an expression of an understanding of who we are? I will share a few examples, in this discussion paper.
Example 1: Theatre
Yesterday Jay Pather mentioned a play that he directed, written by Nadia Davids in 2017 titled, What Remains, which, based on the events at Prestwich Place, uses a fusion of text, dance and movement to tell a story about the unexpected uncovering of a slave burial ground in Cape Town, the archaeological dig that follows and a city haunted by the memory of slavery. When the bones emerge from the ground, everyone in the city – slave descendants, archaeologists, citizens, property developers – are forced to reckon with a history sometimes remembered, sometimes forgotten.
Told from the perspective of four figures – the archaeologist, the healer, the dancer and the student; moving between bones and books, archives and madness, paintings and protest, as they struggle to reconcile the past with the now – Davids explores the idea that performance and memory are intertwined, that they are each other’s echo arguing that no other art form is as uniquely placed to evoke memory, to represent it, and to bring it into a conversation with the present. This is partly driven by the liveness of performance, by its capacity to disappear, but also because its very immateriality and lack of durability, allows for a profound psychic interface between itself and memory. Both performance and memory are forms of storytelling that lend themselves to the communal in their making and in their viewing; creating a fleeting community, that invites us all to bear witness to what is unfolding before us.
There is so much to unpack from this play that is relevant to this convening. But for the purpose of taking this discussion forward, I wonder, where this play sits in relation to the other published and archived narratives of this particular event? Do the people who were and remain affected by this event feel represented and seen and witnessed through this play and its performance? And how can we leverage the arts to make popular such conversations, and to invite and engage communities, often excluded from such conversations, such as this one that we are privileged to participate in?
Recognising that problematic histories (of oppression, colonisation and injustice) have meant that the narrative power of heritage (as published and archived) does not necessarily reflect or resonate with the lived experiences and truths of the people most affected or closely related; Andrew Lamprecht, Curator of Historical Paintings and Sculpture, Iziko South African National Gallery, speaks about the positioning and accountability of museums and their existing collections, as soco-political commentary, in relation to the state of contemporary society.
Example 2: Visual Art
Considering heritage as a dynamic dimension of our culture; allowing for ‘living generations’ to express, (re)define, interpret and change (or at least contribute to new/alternative narratives of) heritage, I’m quite interested in the insights elicited and potential meaning created through the juxtaposition of existing collections and curatorial approaches to living heritage held in the memory, experiences and culture of people; and how curated creative experiences can speak back to these collections.
I think of an exhibition, Through Positive Eyes, co-curated by David Gere, UCLA Professor of World Arts and Cultures, and photographer Gideon Mendel, which was created in collaboration with people living with HIV/AIDS, putting cameras in the hands of the people most deeply affected by HIV to create personal photo essays. The exhibition hoped that “by seeing these photographs and reading the accompanying stories, we can overcome fear and recognize our common humanity; banishing stigma to stop the epidemic.” In 2016, in partnership with Drama For Life, an Applied Arts and Arts Therapy Department at Wits, a performance element was added to the exhibition, where performing artists were paired with activists part of the Through Positive Eyes exhibition, and, using verbatim theatre, performed their stories as narrated by the activists, allowing for the emotion, humanness and life of these activists to be expressed in a way that one might not have experienced through viewing the photographs and reading the short captions, particularly for young audiences. The exhibition was performed at museums in South Africa, including the Adler Museum of Medicine was established in 1962 by Dr Cyril and Mrs Esther Adler who together collected a truly remarkable private collection of medical memorabilia. Today the collection consists of over 40 000 objects depicting the history of medicine in Africa, as well as traditional healing. In June 1974, the Museum was officially handed over to the Wits University.
Considering museum programmes, which invite young learners and students to engage and interact, Puleng Plessie, Curator: Education Mediation at Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, speaks of the value of open classrooms and collective studies, which allow young people to fill in the blank and negative spaces in exhibitions, as central to reimagining future possibilities in arts curatorial education.
Example 3: Music
Many questions have been raised in the past and present about narrative rights, authorship, ownership and representation in and of heritage, and the safeguarding thereof. I’d like to share another artistic expression, in relation to making popular conversations through social commentory on issues concerning heritage, culture and language.
Jitsvinger is an Afrikaaps vernacular performer who combines (Afrikaans with local Cape Town dialect), Hip Hop, poetry, self-composed music, theatre and storytelling. In his 2021 album “Jitsonova Vol.1: Compos Mentis,” (having full control of one’s mind), Jitsvinger explores a range of subject matters such as knowledge of self, taking back ownership of the Afrikaans language, celebrating culture, honouring those who came before us and an unapologetic immersion into the lyricism and boom bap that is hip-hop music. Let’s listen to Die Profeet, by Jitsvinger, featuring Robyn Radcliffe and Ferdinand ‘Ferdy Ferd’ Buffel.
As in the work of Bridget Shumba, Cultural Manager at Music Crossroads Malawi, which considers music projects that seek to preserve indigenous culture for future generations, and could by the nature of documenting music reach farther communities to whom this culture may be quite foreign – should this broader ‘audience’ be a target when conceptualising projects, and do aspects of project design, intellectual property and the management of sacred/secular heritage need to considered differently depending on who this archive is for?
Example 4: Cultural Tourism
In thinking about cultural tourism and preservation, and considering cities and public spaces in and of themselves as sites of heritage engagement in our everyday lives, fosters alternative ways of thinking about heritage, sites and archives – on the idea that was is buried is not dead.
As in the case of Bruce Willen, who was looking at an 1890s map of Baltimore when he noticed something unexpected: “There had been a creek running through the middle of his neighborhood, just a few blocks from his house; but today, that creek is nowhere to be found. It had been buried in the early 1900s, and he set out to resurface the stream – if not physically, then in people’s minds. When Wallen first started working on Ghost Rivers, he said that only a handful of the residents he spoke with knew the Sumwalt Run existed. Today, anyone walking through the hip neighborhood of Remington in Baltimore will know the area was once bisected by a creek called the Sumwalt Run. That’s because Willen dug through archives and used various historic maps as a reference point to then overlay the city’s streets and sidewalks with a sinuous path that makes the vanished creek visible again”. The art project, which is called Ghost Rivers, covers a 1.5-mile stretch of the stream.
Eric Itzkin, the Deputy Director: Immovable Heritage in the City of Johannesburg, speaks of public art as ‘moving beyond the conventions of monuments from past eras, [and] fresh waves of post-apartheid artworks… [democratizing] public space with more contemporary artworks, community murals, counter-monuments, and humanistic art-forms’ – this perspective raises questions around the role of the city in relation to the management, facilitation and preservation of public art, within a human rights perspective of free speech that does not impede on rights, properties and experiences of others.
Accessibility
To achieve such participation and inclusion in heritage; not only should we be talking about physical and digital access to heritage spaces and archives, but as importantly, accessibility for engagement by people with disabilities. Goabaone Montsho, working at the Botswana National Museum and as the general secretary of Botswana Association of the blind and partially sighted, speaks about the fact that despite accessibility legislations and frameworks, museum premises, exhibitions and collections are inaccessible to people with disabilities, due to a reliance on sight, the height at which items are placed and the attitudes of personnel engaging with visitors.
Concluding Questions
Acknowledging the (oftentimes) gap/rub between the intangible/anecdotal Monitoring & Evaluation of community experiences and success, value and impact evidence – how are we collecting data to support and inform curatorial approaches to community engagement with collections?
What are the discussion highlights and insights particularly in terms of engaging diverse communities, in order to inspire a people-centred approach and inform funding/partnership agendas – what should we be doing more of and what is needed to do so?