Soon after I returned to South Africa from Melbourne, I spotted an article in a local newspaper about another South African who turned a shipping container into a shebeen...
 

During the apartheid era, government beerhalls in the black townships were boycotted or burnt down, and backyard shebeens flourished. The mythology around them is of a place for clandestine liasons, where politics and the issues of the day where discussed. The shebeen is still a South African icon, and I wanted to play on the romantic idea of it as a 'speakeasy', where people from around the world could meet each other and talk about politics and plans for insurrection.

As inspiration, I showed projects that demonstrate tactics for subversion and provocation or embody sites of socio-political conflict, from tools for activists, to art works that engage the media or the law courts - objects and techniques for getting ideas out in innovative ways - to devices for connecting people to energy or communication networks. Some of the words and terms that informed Sideshow are reproduced below.