FADA GALLERY, FADA BLDG., BUNTING ROAD, AUCKLAND PARK, JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA: OCTOBER 2022
Catalogue
Forts of Sand: A Reimagining of the Aesthetics of Demolition through World-building (2022): 3 models, 4 drawings; Dimensions variable. Situated Making Exhibition. © Sarah de Pina
BLURB:
The modern science of conservation and interpretation of ruins seeks to avoid their destruction by vegetation, because in that context, they are seen as agents of destruction(Dwyer, 2009). The design proposition leans into that destruction, and prioritizes revegetation through a creation myth that maps the below and above sea level conditions of the site of the 1794 Mozambiquan shipwreck of the Sao Jose Paquette de Africa, off the coast of Clifton 4th Beach in Cape Town.(Cooper 2015)
Forts of Sand: A Reimagining of the Aesthetics of Demolition through World-building proposes a 4th passage (as an extension of the 1st, 2nd/Middle and 3rd Passages)(Africans in America/Part 1/The Middle Passage), through which the ship’s drowned enslaved children make their journey back home to the Island of Mozambique where they were abducted from, so that their uprooted souls may finally rest. The passage culminates with the drowned enslaved children (whose spirits take on the physical form of algal bloom) feasting on the Chapel of Nossa Senhora de Baluarte at the Fort of Sao Sebastio, which was built in 1522, and is said to be the oldest colonial structure in the Southern Hemisphere.(Chapel of Nossa Senhora de Baluarte, n.d)
The colonisation of the chapel ruin by the children as algae is modelled in a live exhibition that is conceptualised as a an experiment. Through experimentation with non/living matter, the study reveals how the real life phenomenon of the degradation of stone buildings by algae can be rescripted, as the children catalysing the degredation of the ruin, and becoming a possible breeding ground for new plant species.
Sources consulted:
- Cooper, H. 2015. Grim History Traced in Sunken Slave Ship Found off South Africa. The New York Times.[O]. Available at: <https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/01/world/africa/tortuous-history-traced-in-sunken-slave-ship-found-off-south-africa.html> [Accessed 1 April 2021].
- DBpedia. n.d. Chapel of Nossa Senhora de Baluarte. [online] Available at: <https://dbpedia.org/page/Chapel_of_Nossa_Senhora_de_Baluarte> [Accessed 28 May 2022].
- PBS Online. 2021. Africans in America/Part 1/The Middle Passage. [online] Available at:
<https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p277.html> [Accessed 11 October 2021].