ARTISTS CHANGING REALITY
Public art paints a sad picture of a neglected suburb
The artists of District Six, the most famous neighbourhood in Cape Town, tell its fractured story, writes Valeria Geselev
The most famous neighbourhood in Cape Town has no threads linking its disparate parts. Buildings in District Six look very different from each other; huge empty fields of wild grass prevent the puzzle from being completed; there is no continuity and no centre, only fragments. There are students’ residencies here, old rows of Victorian houses there, a mosque, a school, improvised shacks and clubs. The campus of Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) is a collection of scattered buildings. There is no glue to unite the suburb. This makes it a challenge to show District Six to a first-time visitor. There are few traces left of the forced removals of black people from the area during apartheid. But, there is public art in the suburb and artists are the best story tellers. So I present the following itinerary: Corner of Tennant Street and Sir Lowry Road. What looks like a standard road sign on the busy junction at the Good Hope Centre — with an arrow directing people to District ...
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