Staying with the trouble on the flats

• Drawing on fieldwork in Cape Town, this essay moves transversally across different settings—situated assemblages made up of enunciations, actions, and codes—in order to explore “that which holds a society together”, which is the institution in the broadest sense. Confronted with the violence of inequality produced and maintained by enduring spatial structures, complexity, hybridity, and ambiguity come across as signs of hope. The main case brought up in this essay—the Edith Stephens nature reserve in Phillippi on the Cape Flats—is put forward as a promise for the future, whose ambiguous borders and oblique rationality provide means to “stay with the trouble” in starkly impoverished surroundings. It discloses the emergence of a “minor architecture” that, in taking its material from the alleged margins, differs from previous readings. 

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Arkitektur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Architecture (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Governing the commons

Institutions

Minor architecture

Post-apartheid democracy

Transversal writing

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)