People in Places Make Spaces (Doung Anwar Jahangeer)

Cascoland Durban 2008
by Bronwyn Lace

I met Fiona de Bell (artistic director) and Roel Schoenmakers (co-initiator) in 2005 when they came out from Amsterdam to Johannesburg to do research and form relationships for this project they called Cascoland. I remember sitting down behind a computer with Fiona and going through images of the project that was initiated at the Oerol-festival on the island of Terschelling, in the Netherlands. It took place in 2004 and brought together a group of five artists from different backgrounds all researching Do It Yourself (DIY) architecture. A Cascoland village was erected in three weeks prior to the festival and kept developing during the festival through audience-participation. While I was fascinated by the work produced for this festival, I remember wondering how this type of work would survive in a South African context.

It's now three years later, Cascoland's third intervention in South Africa took place in Durban (2007 Drill Hall, Johannesburg / 2006 New Crossroads, Cape Town). Fiona's brainchild has not only survived in this country but it is thriving. The original model of Cascoland has of course shifted, but it is exactly this pliable quality that impresses me most. Cascoland as a working process has shaped itself each year to ensure a relevance to its environment but at the same time it makes sure it does its fair share of environmental shaping.

The focus for all Cascoland projects is public art.   According to the Cascoland mission statement   "Public Art is an important tool in activating and developing public space. In the kind of Public Art Cascoland promotes, inter-disciplinary artists engage themselves in communities to collaborate with audiences and members of the communities in shaping their public space through dialogue and participation. The intention is to motivate and mobilize audiences to become an active participant in the process initiated by the artists and in which the eventual artwork is not as much a physical object but a change in perception of public space with the audience" (www.cascoland.com)

This year Durban based artist and architect Doung Anwar Jahangeer's 'City Walks' inspired one of the focuses, Doung has been walking the streets of Durban for 10 years. In an article written in 2006 by Nathaniel Stern, Simon Gush and myself we describe Doung and his walk as "A kind of cultural chameleon of difficult-to-place origins, Doung's 'art-work' is more like a long-term social project that asks us to look again at our preconceptions, stereo-types, and interpersonal relations. Obviously idealistic, a walk through Doung's efforts is an invitation to believe; it may sound overly-sentimental, but his optimism and faith in humanity are utterly infectious, and his project is more than a gesture towards empowerment: it works." (www.saartsemerging.org)

Doung's walk highlights a route and the act of walking. As the challenge for Cascoland Durban 2008 lied in activating this route, Fiona developed a parade.

The intention of the parade was to activate public spaces through audience participation. The relationship to it's audience is far more than the one sided act of looking. Cascoland pulled audience members who would not normally find themselves in these areas into re-enacting this natural phenomenon of walking, an unrecognised form of transport taken by thousands of people each day. The intention of having outside audience par take in the parade is that they are taken on a journey in which perspectives are challenged, and the act of looking shifts to experiencing and then very importantly participating. Having the audience become performatory created a socially charged experience, whose by-products are secondary to process.

The parade aimed to connect the 'informal settlements' outside of the city center with the inner city context through engaging these 'informal routes', the Cascoland artists where dispersed across Durban. With a base workshop at Dala, a factory space next to Durban Solid Waste on Alice Street near Warwick Junction, the artists developed three key sites, Warwick Triangle Park (end of Wills Road Warwick Triangle), Umthombo/Drop-in centre (Victoria Embankment/Margret Mncadi) and Little Cato Manor (Corner of François and Booth Road, Cato Manor). Connection was stimulated through various interventions that ran along the 'axis' between urban and suburban and aimed to mobilise audiences into engaging with these routes.

The physical interventions on these three sites included a mobile swimming pool, board game tables, a junk playground, car tire furniture and plastic bottle-top mosaic signage to name a few. These objects are however not the only products of Cascoland but rather symbols for the interactions and relationships developed between the artists and the existing communities inhabiting these spaces. The process of working in each of these communities was a sensitive and difficult one, each with it's own sets of challenges and rewards. The underlying questions when all is done, are of course, to what extent these relationships have been beneficial to the communities? And if they were beneficial to what extent are the achievements sustainable?

These are questions Fiona and Roel are tackling head-on. Cascoland 2008 is only the beginning. There are a number of on-going goals for Durban, firstly setting up a Dala collective at the workshop space on Alice Street, it aims to strengthen networking opportunities for creatives working in this field within Durban and to the rest of South Africa. Secondly Cascoland also addresses an international audience, through the new Dala collective networking can take place with a variety of parties internationally involved with urban planning and the use of public space, ranging from policy-makers, architects and designers, to the users on a street-level. Longer-term objectives include creating awareness about activating public space through Public Art and sharing the experience of being part of an international project and what this requires from individuals and organizations.

While the Cascoland model was never particularly interested in the brick and mortar of architecture, this year saw a difficult, beautiful and very real shift into those   'spaces of in-between' that Doung has so often spoken about, most importantly light seems to have finally reached those oft-forgotten people that inhabit them.