As I write this chapter, South Africans are mourning three performing artists and musicians, who were all brutally murdered. In the early hours of Sunday morning, 20 November 2022, DJ Sumbody (Oupa John Sefoka) was killed in a hail of bullets on the way to a gig at a nightclub in Pretoria. Again, in the early hours of Monday morning, 30 January 2023, Vusi Ma R5 (Itumeleng Mosoeu) met his untimely death after being shot and killed in Soshanguve. Most recently – and arguably, the death that received the most widespread attention locally and all over the world – AKA (Kiernan Forbes) was murdered shortly after having dinner at a restaurant in Durban on Friday evening, 10 February 2023.

These deaths and their hypervisibility, with people expressing utter disbelief at their brutality, should be contextualised not only from the interstices of history’s precarious relationship with Black death and survival,but also in relation to the South African government’s fundamental decline at governance, leading to rampant lawlessness.

In the context of these reports of brutal deaths, while simultaneously reeling from and reconciling with the unprecedented deaths of the Covid-19 pandemic, I remember witnessing Mthuthuzeli Zimba’s exploration of the idea of the burial tribute that specifically borrowed from a repertoire of performance arts and cultures in South African townships. Zimba’s performance – which formed part of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) 2019 Infecting the City (ITC) programme – titled Habashwe! / Let Them Die! / Anything Goes! – interrogated the burial rituals from many townships, including the social practices of wie sien ons.In fact, Zimba’s performance reminds me of Vusi Ma R5’s funeral proceedings in Mabopane that were documented in a series of viral videos depicting a frenzied atmosphere of young Black people taking over the streets in processions: dancing, singing, playing Bacardi music,with half-nude young women directing traffic and attracting enormous attention from passers-by and local media outlets.

I want to start by thinking about the everyday practices of performance cultures stimulated in the streets of South African townships, particularly where cultural production intertwines with the dehiscence of Black death and survival. Performance cultures in South African townships are often quotidian and they tend to fall outside of the wholly disciplinary frameworks of the performing arts.

In 2013, events organised by the City of Cape Town, the Visual Arts Network of South Africa, the Africa Centre and the Infecting the City public arts festival coalesced around a project titled ‘2013 Ways to Do Public Art’. The project involved an exhibition at the City Hall, a series of policy engagements and artful experiments in public space that were focused on exploring the role of different kinds of public art in South Africa, paying attention to politics, publics and power dynamics. One of the performative interactions was entitled Food for Thought, the purpose of which was to engage in conversations about colonial monuments over food cooked and served in public spaces.

The provocation was conceptualised by Durban-based artist-architect doung jahangeer, who has conducted similar forms of public dialogue around urban issues in other parts of South Africa, as well as internationally. jahangeer is co-founder and director of an arts-architecture organisation based in Durban called dala, which uses artful tactics as a starting point for dialogue and considers how this dialogue can produce knowledge and action towards more just spaces. As Paolo Freire asserts: ‘Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.’

Food for Thought was a public art piece in three parts. Part one started with a process of asking for permission. Acts of public art are subject to permitting processes within the City of Cape Town and this iteration of Food for Thought was to involve setting up a shisa nyama stall next to colonial monuments depicting Edward VII and Jan Smuts.Lighting fires in the city centre is not ordinarily permitted under public space by-laws and cooking food on open flames is heavily regulated, if allowed at all. Acquiring permission was, therefore, the starting point for dialogue between the project organisers and the City of Cape Town and the cause of much anxiety. jahangeer notes: ‘I didn’t see this as an artwork, but rather as a provocation to start a conversation around the very issues that we were confronted with, to devise or set up a platform where dialogue would happen and to understand what the public is and means.’

Cape Town, a starkly segregated and vastly unequal city, is a place where, undeniably, ‘apartheid is set in stone and poured in concrete’.The city is a microcosm of the larger South African picture: a perversely prime example of the confluence of spatial apartheid, neo-liberal economic development policy and the calcified social relations that are the legacy of our history. In South Africa as a whole, there is ‘perhaps no precedent of what a democratic and inclusive city, town and community borne from good policy could look or feel like’.The public art of Infecting the City under discussion in this chapter all took place in the city centre, an area that was historically the reserve of whiteness: white colonial occupation led to white-dominated businesses, residences and political power (from the Cape Colony onwards). People of colour have been categorically and violently excluded from this centre, relegated to the periphery and kept out of even peripheral access to the city. Recent development in the city centre has entrenched its inaccessibility and unaffordability. Private investment in buildings and public space is currently transforming the city into ‘a post-modern space of high-end production, service and consumption that is aestheticized, commoditized and historicized’.

Infecting the City invites artists to turn their attention to the city as a sociopolitical subject and a space for intervention. This often results in work that addresses not what is there, but what is absent. The festival was founded in 2007 and brings free, socially engaged performance and visual art into the public spaces of Cape Town. The programme is created through an open call and curators work with participating South African and international artists to put their work into dynamic tension with the city. For me and many other artists and curators, the festival has been an induction into the radical potential of applying critical, creative practice to our city by engaging directly with diverse publics, in public space, and intervening in the social fabric of our home. Its inclusionary and provocative ethos is a challenge to us as makers to work ethically and be bold in our aesthetic experimentation.

iRhanga is a township alleyway – a transitional space, a liminal space. It is a narrow, often makeshift corridor between homes, separating shacks, houses and streets, often seen as a place of danger – a public space to run through, not linger. But iRhanga is also a space of individual and shared experiences that prioritise aliveness – a space people pass through daily on their way to work, church and soccer practice, a place where young lovers meet to escape the tight confines of small homes that offer no privacy and where neighbours might encounter one another to share news and gossip. We can interpret iRhanga, therefore, as a public space that is inscribed with both inherited violence and human relations of love, family, connection, progress, development, happiness and dignity. iRhanga forms part of the social landscape of the everyday, which is not just about dying, but is also about living, dancing and playing.

It is this tension – between the potential for harm, on the one hand, and emergence, on the other, between an expedient alleyway and, in the absence of public gathering spaces, a communal space – that renders iRhanga a vital concept to reckon with in public art discourse in South Africa. In the face of the precarity that iRhanga holds, the necessity and capacity to imagine self differently, to reinscribe humanity, is all the more radical, all the more urgent. This is the generative paradox at the heart of this chapter, which I use as a tool to reimagine unchanged perceptions of townships, blackness and black creative practices and to critique the spatial politics that limit how each of these is imagined, engaged and defined.

I introduce iRhanga as a public space and as a theoretical framework, firstly, to understand how black people engage with the public sphere and, second, to think through how iiRhanga can potentially allow space for Black Radical Imagination. Focusing on memory, spatial temporality and a love ethic, I discuss the ways in which public interventions and live art practices recuperate iRhanga as a public space for Black Radical Imagination. I am interested in how public interventions and live art practices, read against iRhanga as a physical and metaphorical space, uncover what I am terming ‘possible narratives’ and ‘narratives of possibility’ on account of how black people have been able to transform spaces to resemble the practices or interactions of emarhangeni.

The inhabitants and multiple publics of the restless city constantly test the limits of the city’s freedoms, its rules and safety, in a myriad of ways, from the encroachment of unhoused people upon pristine city spaces, to the encroachment of estate agents and property developers, not only on every available piece of land, but also on the truth and realities of an untransformed city, anxious to mark the city as safe and saleable. It is the specificities of these actions that public artists draw from, and what makes their temporal work instructive in how we read the contemporary city.In ‘Temporality and Public Art’, Patricia C. Phillips writes: ‘The errors of much public art have been its lack of specificity, its tendency to look at society – at the public – too broadly and simply. The temporary in public art is not about an absence of commitment or involvement, but about an intensification and enrichment of the conception of public. The public is diverse, variable, volatile, controversial; and it has its origins in the private lives of all citizens.’ The writers in Restless Infections have focused largely on artists who eschew the pursuit of artworks with an enduring classic statement for the specificity of an action, of activism, a provocation – in some respects, an energy of deconstruction and reconstruction that matches the surge and restlessness of the city. Drawing from the notion of public life in South Africa as a tenuous balancing act, at times giddying and precarious, between personal subjectivities and received notions of what it means to be public, the writers in this book have created a context that artists draw from. This shift and turn, laid bare in the meeting ground of multiple public histories and personal desires, needs new imaginaries and visions, visibilising submerged pasts and intuiting futures. The grammar and forms that have been generated by artists as a result talk to a certain optimism that such an articulation is not just possible, but vividly so, within multiple publics in the throes of decoloniality.

The book, then, has centred around these imaginaries, public art that has spoken over the years to a restlessness in a city (and country), navigating its post-colonial shifts and the decolonial yearnings of the majority of its inhabitants.

For the first twenty years after apartheid, it may well be argued, art and performance were widely shaped by the framing intention of public intimacy. So much so, and across so many iterations that, by 2015, a major exhibition of South African art at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts was held, with the title Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa. The frontispiece to the book that resulted is Zanele Muholi’s 2009 photographic installation Caitlin and I, capturing an after-sex moment between the artist and their (white) lover at the time. Njabulo Ndebele’s work on the ‘rediscovery of the ordinary’ was repeatedly cited during this period as a critical resource and articulation for the building of a more capacious and democratic public sphere through public expressions of intimacy and the multiple sharing of as many stories as possible.If his view was also that ‘public intimacies do need private intimacies’ (after the destruction of homes and intimacies that apartheid wrought), he embraced the dismantling, literally and figuratively, of systems of censorship and lack of access to a public sphere curtailed by apartheid’s repressive and white supremacist machinery.

In Mary Sibande’s 2013 series The Purple Shall Govern,purple roots, tentacles, snakes and suspended non-human entities emerge from the inside of a woman’s body. In the process of spilling, they draw a complex landscape of multiplicity and anguish. The interior exteriorises itself. The dream of Sibande’s semi-autobiographical figure, wrestling with spilling and transfiguration, was in part to free herself from herself – and from the lives of her mother and grandmother under racial rule: ‘I wanted to make something else I had never seen before,’ she said of the work.Several of Sibande’s female sculptural figures can be seen cupping their hands across their stomachs, attempting to hold in what is nevertheless pouring out. Sibande recalls a story told to her by her grandfather: ‘When he was young he was seriously injured and had to walk for kilometres with his intestines hanging out . . . holding his insides.’Penny Siopis, in a related vein, once described exhibiting her paintings as being like ‘crying in public’.In relation to her Shame series, she explored ‘a feeling of losing oneself in full view of others’.

In his immense monograph, Chasing Shadows, South African photographer Santu Mofokeng begins the discussion of his 1991–2006 photographic series Township Billboards by asserting:

Taking my cue from Mofokeng’s careful observation of place – as well as from philosopher Jacques Rancière’s insistence in The Emancipated Spectator on the capacity of artworks to make us alive to the social, spatial and aesthetic dynamics present in the world – in this chapter, I consider street photography as an engagement with meaning-making in the public sphere.

More particularly, my interest lies in the iconic works of Mofokeng and fellow South African photographer Guy Tillim and their propositions of public space – through their photography – which work against the ways we overlook or stop seeing our surroundings. Put differently, my interest is in street photography as public intervention, an inquiry into adaptive strategies that continue to be a function of self-preservation and survival in post-apartheid South Africa.My exploration of Mofokeng and Tillim considers how they challenge these adaptive strategies, asking us to look again, reconsider and re-make, so that we may be sensitised to what lies openly in our midst.

In their 2012 paper ‘Counterspaces’, Andrew Case and Carla Hunter define ‘adaptive strategies’ of marginalised individuals as the means by which these individuals maintain their selfhood in oppressive conditions, observing:

As a visual artist and researcher, blurring the field between documentary and fiction, I decided to exhibit the multimedia immersive experience The Rusting Diamond at the Castle of Good Hope, as part of the University of Cape Town’s Live Art Festival in February 2017. It was important to me that in presenting this work about the hidden lives of Ghanaian immigrants taking shelter in an abandoned diamond-mining vessel inside the port of Cape Town it was shown in a heritage public building, popular among tourists, where people least expected to encounter the story of African immigrants in Cape Town.The Institute for Creative Arts’ Live Art Festival is an interdisciplinary festival, started in 2012, which extends the public’s experience of live art in a noncommercial environment while making accessible works of visual and performing artists who explore and experiment with new forms of public art. The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) is an interdisciplinary institute based in the University of Cape Town’s Humanities faculty, fostering innovative practice and research. While pursing my PhD, I was being supervised by Jay Pather, the director of the ICA, and used the Live Art festival and the Infecting the City festival, also hosted by the ICA, to showcase my research-based multimedia works.

On 19 February 2017, visitors to Cape Town’s Castle of Good Hope entered the dark space of the Old Recruitment Building to experience the immersive multimedia installation The Rusting Diamond as part of the Live Art Festival. At the door, they were alerted to the precarious setting of the piece. Entering the small, dark room, they found themselves stepping onto a narrow wooden walkway surrounded by water. They watched details of an old, rusted ship projected onto the wall surface, which created multiple reflections in the water, conjuring a feeling of walking through the dark belly of a ship.

In March 2021, in an unprecedented move, South Africa’s Infecting the City (ITC) – the largest and longest-running public art festival in the country – sported a name change: (Un)Infecting the City. The ITC had always been a provocative suggestion of an artist-driven takeover of the city. Artworks by, in the main, marginalised artists infiltrated the city’s pristine public spaces, disrupting its apartheid-era topography and logics with an abundance of site-specific interventions.

In 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic, infection as a daring provocation had to give way to something more sobering. With actual infection of the body so confoundingly close, threatening to overwhelm with hospitalisations, long-term suffering and death, it became necessary to qualify the weighty connotations that ‘infection’ held at the time. (Un)Infecting the City, imbued as it was with some of the playful irony of its precursor, was, as it turned out, more than a nod to a global health crisis. The change of name took cognisance of the devastation that the pandemic wrought on publicness itself.

The series of national lockdowns and curfews that Cape Town and South Africa as a whole were forced to endure to ‘flatten the curve’ of infections and safeguard an already frail healthcare system had taken a severe and ghostly toll on the public life of cities. Against this backdrop, (Un)Infecting the City’s programme of both online and limited in-person interventions unfolded as an experiment at invigorating the city safely, while supporting and restoring the artistic impulse to create in a time of great loss. It brought into sharp focus a question that the festival had been probing since it first began, but never in so loaded a context – how we make meaning of place and public in a deeply fragmented society.

Even though the pandemic had intensified the book’s rationale, work on Restless Infections began long before Covid-19. South Africa is a country where publicness and public gathering are central to how we live and have immense historical and political importance. It is a country, too, where spaces for most of the population continue to be small, under-resourced and overcrowded. The production of a restlessness, concomitant with a desire for both personal intimacy as well as community engagement beyond spatial restrictions and lack, characterises our society.

In this chapter, I address quotidian performance as a means of engaging with, and performatively contesting, post-apartheid cityscapes, as well as the neo-colonial modes of social organisation, political visibility and power that the cosmopolitan modern city produces and contains. I specifically look to the appropriation of everyday public spaces by congregants of iBandla lamaNazaretha (the Nazareth Baptist Church) and how this practice of de-and re-territorialising the post-colonial/post-apartheid city works to lay bare the neo-liberal investments instantiated in its dominant rhythms while, at the same time, reclaiming the city as the site of a syncretic African modernity that emerges and moves ‘betwixt and between’ formal institutions and structures of colonial power.

Human ‘progress’ into modernity is commonly perceived to have begun in the metropolis of Western Europe with the Enlightenment, spreading outwards from there to non-European worlds that, in this view, but for Europeans’ noble, civilising zeal, would have remained stuck in their backward traditions and beliefs. This Eurocentric centre/periphery model and its associated ‘ideology of European diffusionism’, as Jonardon Ganeri calls it,territorialises Western Europe as the centre of the ‘modern world’. It produces a universalising vision of progress animated by the ‘theories, norms, historical experiences, utopic fantasies, and ideological commitments’ of Western European society.According to Holly Wardlow, not only does this perspective wrongly assume that there was a ‘seamless consensus on what so-called Western modernity is or was’ in the first place,but it also makes it all but impossible to conceive of the same advancements that are seen to have been post-Enlightenment Europe’s singular inheritance to the (now, late-capitalist) modern world as having been possible elsewhere and at other times in other societies.

This Eurocentric conception of modernity does not describe the world as it is, as much as it offers a self-reifying vision of it that Michel-Rolph Trouillot says ‘comes to us loaded with aesthetic and stylistic sensibilities, religious and philosophical persuasions; cultural assumptions that range from what it means to be a human being to the proper relationship between humans and the natural world; and ideological choices that range from the nature of the political to its possibilities of transformation’.Such a vision is always socially, culturally and politically prescriptive, inasmuch as it will ‘always suggest, even if implicitly, a correct state of affairs – what is good, what is just, what is desirable – not only what is, but what should be’.

In this chapter, I contemplate and dialogue with a sculpture submerged into the land, in the central city of Cape Town. Crying for Justice – a site-specific public installation/sculpture by Haroon Gunn-Salie – resides next to the Castle of Good Hope, situated within what is at once a historical site, a museum, an exhibition space, and an urban texture in a contested part of the city. The monumental artwork by Haroon Gunn-Salie caves inward, towards the below ground, offering a starting point and anchor to consider visualities beyond dominant modes of seeing. The sedimentary, alluvial, micro-agential nature of this monument, etched into the cityscape, in the ground and subsoil, invites embodied and relational ways of knowing, asserting ongoing relationships between the living and no-longer-living, between people and land, monument and community, architecture and ancestors. Through the presence of this work, and the existence, echo and cry of the word ‘JUSTICE’, spelled out and submerged in the ground, the unfinished nature of imperial structures and logics is laid bare. This artwork through its spatiality, its haptics and materiality, moves us from an optic of monuments and ruins towards space-times and sculptural interventions that speak to colonial processes as ongoing and unfinished, allowing for a consideration of the ‘deeply saturated, less spectacular forms in which colonialisms leave their mark’. A submerged sculptural work, woven into the landscape, looks different from the ground than it does from the air. The different fields of vision, rather than juxtaposed one against the other, emerge in the traffic between positionalities and views. They open towards differently perceivable worlds, worlds of entanglement, comingling and both visible and invisible co-inhabitants of space and time.The invisible graveyard beneath the monument, the spaces of public execution and punishment that lie hidden beneath the palimpsest of the city that this monument occupies – demands that we slow down time, to expand and contract temporalities, pushing back against the rushed, fast-paced productive time of capital.