Abstract
At a moment in South African history that calls for decolonial perspectives on ideological and material remnants of the country's colonial and apartheid pasts, the exhibition of The Long March to Freedom life-size statue collection at Century City, Cape Town, constitutes a seemingly contestable juxtaposition. This exhibition, that opened at Century City on 15 November 2019, is seemingly intended as a commemoration of South Africa's struggle for freedom and a re-evaluation of former state-sanctioned versions of the country's history. The visuality of the space that this collection currently occupies can however be described as one with a contestable relationship with the past, in which spatiality itself signifies a call to forget the past, or rather to construct a mythological version thereof. While The Long March to Freedom exhibition seemingly encompasses calls to inclusion in the South African public sphere, Century City, as a space saturated with simulated signs, functions as a site of exclusion and privilege. This article aims to highlight tensions between "subjective" memory and "objective History" in post-apartheid South Africa, negotiating tensions of a historicality-sociality-spatiality trialectic within a site of socio-political and economic exclusion
Highlights
On 15 November 2019, The Long March to Freedom outdoor exhibition, showcasing 100 life-size bronze statues of South African and global freedom fighters,1 opened at Century City, a Cape Town mixed-use suburban development that includes components for residential, business/office, entertainment, and retail purposes
This paper considers the historicalitysociality-spatiality trialectic of the Long March to Freedom exhibition in the context of Century City as its current location
South Africa, as a country with a complex colonial and apartheid history, saw calls for the decolonisation of public space and monuments as carriers of memory, along with calls to decolonise tertiary curricula as markers of knowledge, by the 2015 #RhodesMustFall movement. This movement highlighted memory and public space as highly contested, an emphasis that extended to desires for changes in ideological structures that continue to privilege European and western modes of thinking, and changes in terms of physical structures that support these ways of thinking and keep a specific historicality alive in collective memory
Summary
On 15 November 2019, The Long March to Freedom outdoor exhibition, showcasing 100 life-size bronze statues of South African and global freedom fighters,1 opened at Century City, a Cape Town mixed-use suburban development that includes components for residential, business/office, entertainment, and retail purposes.
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