Working together with:
Bert Kramer +Marie-Jose Hamers
Bert Kramer and Doung Anwar Jahangeer met each other during Cascoland, Drill Hall, Johannesburg last year where they were both participating artists.In Durban they have decided to combine their passion for space [Doung] and intelligent skins [Bert] and together with product designer Marie-Jose Hamers the team has decided to design and build an experimental ‘inflatable shack’, which will serve as a landmark on the citywalk route for Cascoland. It will also have an element of leisure to it in the form of a B&B offering the audience the chance to experience a night in the inner city.
The shack/umjondolo, as a form of anti-architecture, has been an ongoing inspiration and research towards an inquiry of a South African contemporary architectural identity for Doung. In Johannesburg he investigated a 21st century shack/umjondolo with a fragmented structure informed conceptually and aesthetically by the spatial and architectural language of the informal settlement Umkhumbane [Cato Manor].
Bert and Doung aim to challenge the inhabitor’s of First World spaces to renegotiate their perception that the Shackland or Squatter camp is associated only with poverty and underdevelopment. The shacks themselves are eyesores to refined sensibility; the people that live there are uncomfortable reminders that wealth comes at a price.
sion. A vision that responds to the present but projects a possible future. It suggests that the essence of what we call ‘contemporary’ lies in these spaces, these interstitial spaces of the ‘in-between’, since the margins offer a space for creative thinking, beyond status quo conventions, which do not benefit the vast majority of people. In the squatter camps the materials use for the shacks are ‘reincarnated’ from a ‘throw away’ society, the style is eclectic and fragmented, the construction is fast and temporary just as the space is transient.
The architectural installation echoes this concept. It is not the material that makes something contemporary but how we adapt and creatively respond to a given situation. The composition is deliberately a fragmented scape that lives through its intertextuality and juxtaposition rather than grand narrative.
As the Raw foundation point out, massive housing schemes in South African townships in the last 15 years or so have ignored cultural influence and Africanising potential. Rather the tendency has been to import and impose – with uniformity – blatantly disregarding possibilities for grassroots approaches. Ironically, the recent emphasis in the North towards sustainability, ecological awareness and recycling “has existed for decennia in the townships-junk and is being blindly undermined and imposed by [now] archaic planning strategies” (The Raw Foundation).
The architectural installation echoes this concept. It is not the material that makes something contemporary but how we adapt and creatively respond to a given situation. The composition is deliberately a fragmented scape that lives through its intertextuality and juxtaposition rather than grand narrative.
As the Raw foundation point out, massive housing schemes in South African townships in the last 15 years or so have ignored cultural influence and Africanising potential. Rather the tendency has been to import and impose – with uniformity – blatantly disregarding possibilities for grassroots approaches. Ironically, the recent emphasis in the North towards sustainability, ecological awareness and recycling “has existed for decennia in the townships-junk and is being blindly undermined and imposed by [now] archaic planning strategies” (The Raw Foundation).
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Doung Anwar Jahangeer