Telling tales: building, landscape and narratives in post-apartheid South Africa

摘要

In the above extract from her 1994 novel Jriomf, the author Marlene Van Niekerk describes a contemporary South African landscape in which the surface of the land conceals the destruction of past lives, buildings and inhabitations. Here, the visual landscape is a veneer, a thin edge drawn over the piled debris of the past that still thwarts attempts to coax the land into fertility and growth. The failure of the visual landscape to communicate the complexity and ambiguity of the land and the history of its inhabitants is explored in a series of architectural projects and interventions that seek to uncover and represent unknown, concealed or destroyed histories, as well as contributing to economic growth and the reimagination of South Africa in the post-apartheid period.