PERFORMANCE OF THE CITY

A proposal By Dieter Brandt and award-winning Indian Designer Zuleika Chaudhari.

The rhythm of light emenating from the site becomes the measure between our experience and imagination of the city.

HOW CAN WE UNCOVER THE URBAN DRAMA AND REIMAGINE ITS RICHNESS AT NIGHT?

The Newtown site in the cultural center of the city reads simultaneously as an archeological excavation and a construction site. With the proposed lighting intervention by architect Dieter Brandt and artist Zuleikha Chaudhari, the site will become a theatre in the city’s performance between its history and its aspirations, transforming the cranes
into shafts of light. Light becomes choreography, its vertical movement gesturing towards and making visible not only the city’s history and what lies beneath the surface but also marking the invisible horizon of the ever expanding city skyline. The proposed performance relates to the way we move through the city, measuring place through the production of space. In using the cranes at night as an instrument notating change, the Atterbury site performs as an actor in the city, with its movement accentuating the forming and reforming of identity.

Place becomes an event. It is constantly produced in opposition to, and as a part of, the functional city. Like a clock, the rhythm of light emanating from the site becomes the measure between our experience and imagination of the city.

“Words carry ideas and transform into one another in a way that there is in the temporality of words an almost poetic play of death and rebirth: successive metaphoraizations means that an idea becomes more - and something other than itself: a form of thought. For language thinks, thinks for us and for us at least as much as we think through it. And in an exchange also takes place: an exchange, which may be symbolic, between words and ideas. Words themselves generate or regenerate ideas, which act as shifters. At those moments, ideas intersect; intermingle at the level of the word. And the word then serves as an operator but a non-technical operator in a catalysis in which language itself in is in play.”

- Baudrillard

With the support of Diana Campbell of Creative India Foundation (CIF), and Dillip Menon of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Witwatersrand, Zuleikha Chaudhari recentlyparticipated as a resident for the Nirox Foundation.

Zuleikha Chaudhari is a theatre director and lighting designer. Her work is an investigation of the nature and codes of performance. She explores and develops a series of questions to do with the interruption of the narrative structure, how images are constructed and experienced: the relationship of the text and performer, the dynamic between performer and space, how narratives are created and understood, and finally, the role of the spectator in the performative experience.

Zuleikha has teamed up with South African architect Dieter Brandt, a committee member of the Guateng Institute of Architecture, who is widely known for his work as the project architect for Freedom Park. Together they propose;

“The city fosters art and is art; the city creates the theater and is the theater. It is in the city, the city as theater, that mans more purposive activities are focused the physical organization of the city may through the deliberate efforts of art, politics and education, make the drama more richly significant, as a stage- set, well-designed, intensifies a underlines the gestures of the actors and the action of the play.

To embody these new possibilities in city life, which comes to us not merely through better technical organization but through acuter sociological understanding, and to dramatize the activities themselves in appropriate individual and urban structures, forms the task of the coming generation.” - Mumford

UNSEEN, I SLIPPED AWAY by CHAUDHARI and BRANDT _ 2013

The Dark Night

‘When man learns to fly, he will chop down the clouds’ - Thoreau

AZA ‘Dark Night’, Theoretical Positions and Experimentation, Architectural responses to Radiation, AZA2010, 1st South African Biennial of Architecture, the South African Institute of Architects, JHB, SA

Dieter Brandt, Art Director & Speaker, 2010

The Dark Night considers the potential effects of electromagnetic radiation levels on society today. There is a temporal and spatial correlation between the appearance of disease and exposure to pulsed high-frequency microwave radiation. The question of architecture’s primary task is thrown into question as it does little to shelter one from exposure to radiation other than solar.

The Dark Night theorises on this subject using images by Guy Tillim, courtesy of the Michael Stevenson Gallery Cape Town. Images of clouds of electro smog being discharged from the environment suggest a futuristic method for discharging excess electromagnetic radiation.

Renaissance Regicide

In a series of design masterclasses USE, MISUSE, and ABUSE, architects were asked to re-imagine Joburg.
The workshop introduced “the point of view” into the act of design - a challenge to the notion that architecture can only be practiced from the viewpoint of omniscience (as is implicitly suggested by ‘the plan’). Participants were asked to bring a recently completed or in-progress project and rethink it (critique it, remake it, deform it) according to these three points of view: use, misuse, abuse.

Renaissance Regicide is a response to this task, whereby the Project Freedom Park was interrogated by looking into the concepts of both ‘park’ and ‘monument’ – art direction and concept by Dieter Brandt, and artwork assistance by Peter Vernarcik.

BIRDMAN

‘Towards an African night, the bird crosses, till boundless strikes midnight’, is about the moment we take flight, fall, and fly again.

Towards an African night
The bird crosses
Till boundless strikes midnight

Man falls
Bound to ground

Towards an African sight
The bird seeing
Till sunrise shades nightlight

Man rises
Ground to found

Towards an African right
The bird transforms
Till midnight turns into flight

Cradle of Humankind
Dieter Brandt, Artist, 2012

AZA ‘Drawing on Origins’, Rescripting Theory, AZA2012, 2nd South African Biennial of Architecture, the South African Institute of Architects, Cape Town, SA
Art Director & Speaker, 2012

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