Media Me
Infecting the City Public Art Festival, 2013
Design, Public billboard, Site specific
In Collaboration with Vuka Ndlovu (Public art Collective)
Media Me was a creative intervention that involved occupying a public billboard in Long Street, Cape Town, during the month of April in 2013.
In response to the ubiquitous nature of advertising in urban space by major corporations, Media Me aimed to actively disrupt this system by occupying a public billboard with advertising a local street entrepreneur. This project used the aesthetic and communicative strategies of typical urban advertising, yet this intervention aimed to create a media relationship/presence for an entrepreneur who plays a significant role to the community within the urban environment where the billboard is located.
Where Strangers Meet: Art and the Public Realm
Ultimately it was the quiet intervention by Wayne Reddiar and his collective, Vuka Ndlovu, that created a public artwork that spanned the dreamlike as well as remaking space in a subtle and moving way. This collective of artists and activists engages with informal traders who have appeared in increasing numbers in South Africa due to the unsolved economic imbalances in the country. With access to advertising, or any larger vision of what their business might be, the spatial and conceptual reach of their business becomes very confined and circumscribed. Sever restrictions in the use of public space by informal traders make this all the more arduous. Members of Vuka Ndlovu conduct research amongst such traders, selected a few and then create a large-scale billboard hoisted in full view high up a building advertising the traders’ work, competing with the likes of other big name brands.
There is also bathos here, in the sense that just a few traders will be afforded this opportunity, the billboard won’t be up for long, and it will ultimately fall short in competition with the big-name brands. But for a few dreamy moments, it is a valiant gesture of great impact, courage and energy. In this meeting ground between art, activism and public space the remaking of space as a space of dreams in both triumphant in making visible the informal trader and sobering that in contemporary South Africa majority of the population still struggle to survive.
Taken from: Lessons from an Infection: Temporal Forms for Elusive and Indeterminate Futures in the Infecting the City Public Art Festival, by Jay Pather (University of Cape Town)
