by Herman Manson (@marklives) How Far From Home indeed. Chanel Cartell and Stevo Dirnberger, the duo who quit their jobs, packed their bags and travelled the world on a quest to reignite their passion for creativity, opened Design Indaba 2016 at its new home at the Artscape Theatre in Cape Town. It’s a couple of hops and a skip from its former host, the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC), but much further removed in terms of aesthetic or atmosphere.
Cartell and Dirnberger felt weighed down by the predictability of (middle-class) life. School, varsity, the career, setting up home, getting married… they were, in their own words, following society’s life plan for people of their social and economic standing. It was decidedly uninspiring. They decided to do something about it.
On a journey of 105 256km they got kinda famous but, more importantly. they pushed the boat out, with them on it. Be prepared to act upon your ideas was the key message delivered by the couple, whose quest for personal and creative freedom and adventure must also resonate with Ravi Naidoo, the founder of Design Indaba.
Now in its 21st year
Now in its 21st year, there is a huge team driving the Design Indaba festival every year, but the project has always been intensely identified with Naidoo, and he sets the direction for each event personally. As the conference grew and graduated to global stature, hosted in the slick (if you don’t count the crap Wi-Fi policy and lack of plug points) CTICC, he must have wondered at the growing constraints such success inevitably impresses upon a business of scale.
Like Cartell and Dirnberger, Naidoo has packed his bags, and pushed the boat out. He wants to once again break the mould — creating a hybrid festival that expands the concept of conferencing to one that excites the senses and inspires passion. Will he succeed, or will speakers lurch from one gimmick to another?
Design and architecture collective Assemble, represented at Design Indaba by Paloma Strelitz and James Binning, offered an inspiring look at the importance of odd local spaces to reconstruct not only relevant spaces but also communities. Acknowledging the disconnect between the public and the built environment, they argue for rehabilitating empty or misused space for the benefit of local residents, while also involving them in the rehabilitation process (including construction and learning artisan skills).
An intriguing answer to a key question
From the Cineroleum, which temporarily transforms a disused petrol station into a cinema, to a project that constructed a new arts centre below a motorway, the collective take uncelebrated space and offers it back to the city in ways which add value and become places for gatherings withing communities. The physical changes wrought by the collective upon local environments create safer physical spaces and offers an intriguing answer to a key question they put to delegates: Who do WE want to be in the city? Pragmatic, playful, interesting, together seems to be the answer they offer us.
Naidoo’s quest to infuse theatre into conferencing was brought to life by Nigerian performance artist, Helen Isibor-Epega, aka The Venus Bushfires, and composer of the world’s first pidgin opera, Song Queen: A Pidgin Opera. Isibor-Epega draws inspiration from what she refers to as that space between the line “Once upon a time” and the inevitably of a tales conclusion. The bridge to the middle, the heart of the story, also represents something we share, a bridge between people, whose tales and myths have always overlapped.
A play around a creative pitch offered me my new favourate phrase — going off into the sunshit — so I won’t offer a negative word. It was half the presentation by Nick Finney and Alan Dye of NB Studios, and I appreciated a key insight they offered: that a pitch is finding a way to share yourself. Not a cynical snort in the house, folks. But then this isn’t the Loeries (bless). So would sitting through 12 plays be as exhausting as sitting through 12 powerpoint presentations, I wondered?
The answer came some time later, as Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones, the founders of W&N Studio, winged their way through one of Design Indaba’s more excruciating powerpoint presentations, all tits and women in impossible stretches, and Björk, then more tits. So that is a no, then.
The antidote
Erik Kessel offered the antidote, if you will, with a celebration of male insecurity in the form of dick selfies. Erect dick selfies. Erect dick selfies next to coke cans, cans of shaving creams, other dicks. I did find Kessel’s sense of humour disarming; his design message — to disrupt ‘perfection’ — came across through his disregard for the perfect(ly socially acceptable) design talk. Long live Kessel, long live!
The quest to reform and desegregate public urban spaces was a key theme in the talk by Thomas Chapman, the founder of Local Studio, a Jozi-based architecture firm. Chapman unveiled the Sophiatown Remembrance Screen at the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre in Sophiatown. Chapman told the remarkable story of Father Trevor Huddleston, an English Anglican bishop and anti-Apartheid activist who did much good work in Sophiatown, before it was demolished to make space for the white suburb of Triomf, and the role he played in ensuring the 14-year-old Hugh Masekela got his first trumpet.
“I’m not a designer. I’m actually a design. My primary designers were my parents,” quipped Masekela to the crowd as he stepped onto the stage. When he lifted his trumpet and played in tribute to his old friend and benefactor…
Emotion pushing up through chest and throat until it feels like the body can no longer contain it. A man with a trumpet, celebrating a moment in time that has come full circle. Of Sophiatown lost, and remembered, of people, pushed out, and people who pushed out the boat, for themselves but also the sake of others.
It had to be here
It had to be here, in this theatre that felt slightly claustrophobic after the excess of the CTICC; in a city centre itself fighting for renewal, for remembrance and relevance; and in this country, where we still walk past places and spaces, emptied, for something prettier, newer and better shielded from reality. Yet when you fill those spaces with people … community happens, fun happens, Hugh Masekela happens.
Herman Manson (@marklives) is the founder and editor of MarkLives.com. He was the inaugural Vodacom Social Media Journalist of the Year in 2011 and has, over his 20-year-plus career, contributed to numerous journals and websites in South Africa and abroad, including AdVantage magazine, Men’s Health, Computer World and African Communications.
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