The second 2-week block of the course largely involved student groups executing their final projects, reporting on their progress in class, and engaging in feedback with the course lecturers and other students. This block culminated in the display of documentation and a group crit of their final projects in the shared project room at Michaelis. These final projects were re-exhibited in the project room for examination a few weeks later – documented under ‘Final projects‘ on this site.

The first 2 weeks of the class are now past, with students having made their midway presentations. The next 2 weeks of classes starts on Tuesday 17 April. Students will come to the first class equipped with plans for a 2-week programme of work to execute a more fully developed intervention.

Students presented the work they did over Friday, Saturday and Sunday executing interventions on their sites. Their presentations and projects at this midway point are documented under ‘Midway presentations‘ in the menu above.

Students were free to work on their project today, and were assigned to execute more fully developed interventions at their sites over the weekend, for presentation Monday.

Students continued conceptualising, planning and giving form to their projects.

Ralph gave a short presentation introducing the idea of ‘circuits’ and ‘critical vehicles’ in artistic intervention, drawing from the Brazilian artist Cildo Meirele’s work ‘Insertions into Ideological Circuits’, and artist-designer Krzysztof Wodiczko’s work designing ‘Critical Vehicles’. We were interested in ways of communicating to audiences, and how messages might be delivered to them. Students can download the presentation ‘audiences_etc.pptx‘.

Cildo Meirele's Coca-Cola project from his series 'Insertions into Ideological Circuits' (1970s)

The presentation included an example of the viral spread of projects now possible through the internet, looking at Jonah Peretti’s Nike Sweatshop email saga. Students also brought up the current ‘Kony 2012’ ‘meme‘ as an example of the potentials and risks in the viral spread of information.

This class was mostly spent on review of work done over the weekend, as students located their sites and tried out their first ‘sketches’. We’ll post some more documentation of this.

Visiting Swedish artist Paula von Seth presented her work to the class. Paula was in Cape Town as part of a multidisciplinary group, including artists, looking at environmental projects here. Her own practice draws on interventionist art practice, teasing out subtle human interactions around trust, relationships and humour. Her work was useful to this course in demonstrating ways in which art can do work in the world, interrogating and communicating to a public. A past residency of hers: http://www.gasworks.org.uk/residencies/detail.php?id=306

Students divided themselves into groups of 3 to 4 people, and were assigned work over the weekend: to find a site and respond to it, intervening in ways which engage with environmental issues and urban nature. Documentation of this work due on Monday 5 March.

We undertook two site visits in this class, one to a derelict site in Woodstock – an old boat yard – the other to the landscaped Greenpoint Urban Park. Students were asked to list all elements in both spaces, considering what seemed ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’. Our intention was to complicate our ideas of what is ‘natural’ or ‘nature’. Students also photographed the sites.

In our discussion after the site visits, students spoke about the differences between the two spaces, and how each could be considered ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ in their own ways. The Greenpoint park presented an obvious, perhaps ‘idyllic’ natural space, with a biodiversity garden, many trees and plants, birds and so on – but in its order and formality it was ‘unnatural’ in comparison to the ‘natural’ chaos of the Woodstock site. The derelict Woodstock site had more synthetic or manufactured, ‘unnatural’ elements in it, being filled with old boat hulls, bits of rope, paper, fragments of wood, broken roof tiles, and so on. It didn’t present an idyllic ‘nature’; but in its disordered mix of unnatural with ‘natural’ elements – grass and trees growing up through the detritus, natural forms taking over or reclaiming the synthetic space: in this way it was a natural space.

Our intention was not to elevate one site over the other, but to understand how the meaning of what is ‘natural’ shifts according to its definition. We also spoke about the possible attraction to artists of derelict spaces, with the exciting sense of trespass in investigating them – which are perhaps different criteria to other citizens’ use of space. Of interest to us too was questions of audience and access; who could be targeted in each space? And we spoke about how an interventionist approach to each space might work: what are the affordances of each space, and how might an artist mimic, subvert or amplify elements of each space.

The main content in this class was a presentation by ‘Reclaim Camissa’ founder and director, Caron von Zeil. Reclaim Camissa is a project identifying the opportunities presented by Cape Town’s original freshwater spring, Camissa, located on the slopes of Table Mountain above the city bowl. Right now, water from Camissa is almost completely unused, Caron told us, with about 3.5 million litres of water a day allowed to flow through underground pipes into the ocean. Caron has a project to landscape the city centre around a greenway and water canal from Table Mountain to the foreshore, using the water from Camissa. More about the project here: www.facebook.com/RECLAIMCAMISSA, and a TEDx talk by Caron.

After Caron’s presentation, students identified features of her presentation: the way it was structured around ‘water’ as the opening motif, using a universal symbol to draw audiences into the project; and the use it made of narratives such as that of ‘Raaswater’, for example. Such narratives can be powerful tools for conveying ideas.

Students were asked to briefly discuss current environmental issues that they are aware of, and we wrote up the results on the classroom whiteboard. They were asked to do further research for homework – and they were asked to find an example of an artist working with environmental issues.

Brief brainstorming of current environmental issues, particularly those affecting South Africa

On the first day of the course, Virginia presented work around her project ‘Threshold‘, and Ralph presented a selection of his own work (see ralphborland.net), and work he curated for the exhibition ‘Surface Tension – The Future of Water‘.

The course dates and outline of requirements were discussed. Student projects should take place at the intersection of three concerns: environmental issues; urban nature; and interventionist art practice. See the course outline.