Cape Town Under: a review

Just over a week after flashfloods hit the Cape, guerilla gallery staged a sound art intervention in the historical stormwater tunnels that run under the city's skin. The weather turned just in time: a strong but manageable water flow formed a sonorous backing track to the lyrical tones of Pauline Theart's voice, which she projected in a live performance from the depths to echo into public space above. Good weather meanwhile let passersby get drawn in for a closer glance at these usually invisible spaces through manhole interfaces above. The tunnels  were built hundreds of years ago first as canals and then enclosed and are now paved over by streets.

This collaborative work, 'Cape Town Under: The Third Voice', was conceived and curated by Kim Gurney as part of a broader project called LAND, organised by the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts at UCT. It effectively aimed to briefly turn the tunnels into a musical instrument of sorts as a lone voice animated them with an hour-long endurance lullaby sung at access interfaces. The song was stripped of words to evoke a common referent and to help Theart improvise with the tunnel the 'third voice' through echoes and refrains in a kind of co-authorship with the site. She repeated the performance at three different sites over two days.

With special thanks to our tunnel operators who handled underground logistics - Matt Weisse and Gresham Chibwaz - as well as City Roads & Stormwater, The Castle's management and Gipca's support that together helped make this project possible.

Images below by Marguerite Townley-Johnson, except where indicated. For more information, visit the dedicated project website: http://capetownunder.withtank.com

Site 1: The Castle, Strand Street trapdoor interface (22 November)

Photo: M. Townley-Johnson

M. Townley-Johnson

Photo: M. Townley-Johnson

Photo: M. Townley-Johnson

Photo: M. Townley-Johnson

Echo manhole: The Castle Lawns
Photo: M. Townley-Johnson

Photo: M. Townley-Johnson

Site 2: Grand Parade parking lot (22 November) 

The performance site, right with safety cone, prior to intervention. Image: K. Gurney

Photo: M. Townley-Johnson

Image: K. Gurney

Image: K. Gurney

Photo: M. Townley-Johnson

Photo: M. Townley-Johnson

Photo: M. Townley-Johnson

Photo: M. Townley-Johnson

Photo: M. Townley-Johnson

Add caption

Echo manhole, Grand Parade. Photo: M. Townley-Johnson

Echo manhole, Grand Parade. Photo: M. Townley-Johnson

Echo manhole, Grand Parade. Photo: M. Townley-Johnson

 Site 3: The Castle Lawns (23 November) 

Photo: K. Gurney

Photo: K. Gurney

Photo: K. Gurney

The echo manhole. Photo: K. Gurney

The echo: closeup. Photo: K. Gurney

The walk to the echo. Photo: K. Gurney

Cape Town Under: Dates Confirmed

--Cape Town--guerilla gallery adds its voice to a rich spectrum of artistic responses in Cape Town later this month exploring LAND in an event by the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA). Visual art installations, public lectures and panels run November 21-24 at various sites across Cape Town to explore land, territory, ownership and art, in particular at spaces of historical significance and contemporary contestation in the city.

Cape Town Under: The Third Voice, a performance intervention by Pauline Theart, is guerilla gallery's project, curated by Kim Gurney. Theart sings an extended lullaby at three access interfaces with Cape Town's historical tunnels that run buried underneath the city: two at the Castle grounds (Nov 22 @ 11h00 & Nov 23 @ 13h00) and one on the Grand Parade (Nov 22 @ 15h00). Read more at the dedicated project website: www.capetownunder.withtank.com.

Artist Elgin Rust, who brought guerilla gallery its inaugural project APPEAL 2012 last year, also participates in LAND. She creates an intervention with Katherine Spindler about the Rondebosch Common at the entrance to the City Hall. 

Other interventions and artworks range from walking tours through the centre of Bontheuwel and the central city to a performance on the Prestwich Memorial grounds, a mixed media installation by composer Philip Miller to an interactive work by SIMilar that allows participants to reimagine land in a live application of the virtual reality game 'The SIMS'. A site-specific work by Haroon Gunn-Salie Witness is installed in District Six and Amy Soudien's Trajectories in sand traces lineage and heritage behind the Iziko Slave Lodge. Terminal, curated by Jean Brundrit, Svea Josephy and Adrienne van Eeden Wharton, features photographic works on street poles. 

GIPCA says in a statement: "South Africa is characterised by a series of disjunctive experiences in a land of extraordinary contrast: its natural splendour belies the brutal experiences of slavery, forced removals and continued poverty. In deference to the centennial of the infamous Native Land Act of 1913, there has been a national focus on land as a vessel of trade, trauma, and restitution. The material inscription of colonisation, with the Land Act as its formalisation, remains performative - still determining where people live and intersect, and how people move through space. It results in diverse and opposing ideas, values, dreams that constantly disrupt the country’s present. That such dissension still exists twenty years into our democracy, foregrounds the complexity of the subject. LAND focuses on contemporary practices, the traumas and the hauntedness that manifest as a result of this condition."

The event is free but booking is required for some of the panel discussions. Visit: www.gipca.uct.ac.za