Summer
Show
2022
Show
2022
24
November
18:00 SAST
November
18:00 SAST
Omissive Architect(ures)
Exposing the Illusion of Gentrification in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Erasure(short film). Mango, S. Unit 18. 2021.
Sharmaine Mango
BArch 2021Supervisors:
Unit Leader: Naadira Patel
Unit Leader: Sarah de Villiers
Unit Assistant: Nothando Lunga
UNIT 18︎︎︎
Hyperreal Prototypes: Supersurfaces
Project Website
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Johannesburg co-opts surfaces as devices that conceal, erase, or distort inconvenient truths, and this is registered in its architecture, but also in its messaging systems, particularly in the use of the developer’s render. The project takes on the processes of gentrification in the Maboneng and Jewel City area particularly, which has developed sophisticated forms of hyperreal image-making of how it ‘wishes to be seen’, as a set of spaces. Words such as ‘inclusive’ and ‘diversity’ are borrowed by developers as marketing strategies, but remain quite superficial in their actual spatial realisation. Architecture and its connected territory (including the land on which it might sit) are understood here as historical vessels, which, in the case of the context in question, carry dark legacies of extractive labour and violence at the service of the colonial empire or apartheid state. These are not present in the current visible surfaces of this context, at least in a fast take of it.
Consisting of two defined parts, the body of the work takes the form of a book of archives, unpacking and analysing surface, concealment, and gentrification through historical narratives. It revisits the area’s haunting past of diamond and gold mining, and more recent violent processes of displacement of certain bodies for the cause of a sanitised and ‘attractive’ environment. In its culmination, the project proposes a set of spectral renders, which hack this representational form and fold into view spatial, social, and political realities that had been erased from view. For a moment, it reclaims surfaces possible of distortion and transforms them to project places of increased layering of critical meaning and knowledge.
Consisting of two defined parts, the body of the work takes the form of a book of archives, unpacking and analysing surface, concealment, and gentrification through historical narratives. It revisits the area’s haunting past of diamond and gold mining, and more recent violent processes of displacement of certain bodies for the cause of a sanitised and ‘attractive’ environment. In its culmination, the project proposes a set of spectral renders, which hack this representational form and fold into view spatial, social, and political realities that had been erased from view. For a moment, it reclaims surfaces possible of distortion and transforms them to project places of increased layering of critical meaning and knowledge.
Keywords:
Deceit, Delusion, Distortion, Distraction, Erasure, Exclusion, Fantasy, Forgotten, Ghosts, Haunting, Illusion, Inclusivity, Juxtaposition, Memory, Remember, Render, Silencing, Spectre, Suffering, Suppression, Utopia, Veil
Deceit, Delusion, Distortion, Distraction, Erasure, Exclusion, Fantasy, Forgotten, Ghosts, Haunting, Illusion, Inclusivity, Juxtaposition, Memory, Remember, Render, Silencing, Spectre, Suffering, Suppression, Utopia, Veil
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