Editorial

Since its inception 18 years ago, the most prominent event on the agenda of the Design Education Forum of Southern Africa (DEFSA) has been an annual conference. A selection of six edited papers from the Forum’s recent conference held in November 2009, entitled Opening gates between and beyond design disciplines, is featured in this edition of Image & Text. The selected papers are also available on the Forum’s website where they are published as part of the complete set of conference proceedings. Although the conference theme covered a fairly broad terrain, the six selected papers specifically demonstrate how tertiary design education in South Africa has responded, and is responding, to changes brought about by revised national education policies, social imperatives and new opportunities. These responses are positioned within the characteristics and constraints of specific educational environments

Editorial

Approaching the city of Pretoria/Tshwane from the south, one is greeted by three monumental structures perched atop three hills surrounding Pretoria, from west to east: the Voortrekker Monument, Freedom Park, and the University of South Africa (UNISA), each one of them a dense conglomeration of symbols, emblems, and iconsforged out of concrete, rock, earth and stone. Not far behind this formidable threesome follows another massive fortress marking the entrance to the city – Pretoria Central Prison.

40 nights / 40 DAYS from the lockdown Conradie, Hanien and Higgins, John.

40 nights / 40 DAYS from the lockdown is a series of 40 postcards with small mon-tage texts by John Higgins and watercolour paintings by Hanien Conradie inspired by photographs in old issues of National Geographic magazines. The texts are assemblages of fragments sourced from news coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, and from books in Higgins’s own library: an offcut from a conversation between Elizabeth Warren and Dr Anthony Fauci (for example), jostles with a phrase from John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice on a postcard with a painting of a waterfall

Hou my vas, Korporaal: Protesting masculinity in Héniel Fourie’s Toekoms Spoke/Future Ghosts: Stairways and Ruins

Idealised notions of heteronormative militaristic masculinity, particularly during the so-called Border War in Southern Africa (1968-1990), were disseminated through South African Defence Force (SADF) publications like Paratus (1970-1994). Artist Héniel Fourie, in collaboration with Paula Kruger and Armand Aucamp, ostensibly problematises this heteronormative militaristic masculine idealisation in the short film Toekoms Spoke[sic]/Future Ghosts (2023) by reflecting on the narrative of an imagined conscript travelling on a train to join the SADF. In Toekoms Spoke/Future Ghosts, Fourie creatively examines the “burden” of mandatory military conscription and the idealisations of heteronormative militaristic masculinity espoused by the SADF. To analyse Fourie’s interpretation of the conscript’s defiant masculinity in the short film, I reference Michel Foucault’s The archaeology of knowledge (1972), where he provides a theoretical framework to analyse discourses. In this article, I argue that the conscript in Fourie’s Toekoms Spoke/Future Ghosts exhibits defiant masculinity in contrast to the heteronormative militaristic masculinity portrayed in the SADF magazine Paratus, by juxtaposing stills from Fourie’s short film with s elected front covers of Paratus

An analysis of the intersections between race and class in representations of Black and white gay men in QueerLife

This article seeks to critically analyse how intersections of race and class shape representations of Black and white gay men in QueerLife, a South African online magazine. It focuses on QueerLife’s ‛4men’ section and how its content represents classed and raced gay identities. My argument is that QueerLife for wards racialised and classed representations of the gay lifestyle, which reinforce homonormalisation within what is known as the “Pink Economy”. Using Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) to read the underlying meanings in texts and images, the article concludes that QueerLife is complicit in the construction of gay identity categories that seek to appeal to urban, white, middle-class gay-identifying communities in South Africa. The article also demonstrates how, when Black bodies are represented in QueerLife, exceptionalism mediates their visibility in this online magazine. Overall, the findings demonstrate how Black and white gay bodies are mediated online and how their different racial visibilities are negotiated within the system of structural racism

‘Greening History Teaching’:: Justifying the Inclusion of Socio-Environmental History in the South African Further Education and Training History Curriculum

This position paper argues for including socio-environmental history in the South African Further Education and Training (FET) history curriculum. It is premised on the fact that planet Earth is in the age of the Anthropocene, within which humans have had a dominant effect on the planet and have contributed fundamentally to climate change, which is noticeable through extreme weather events, such as erratic rainfall, floods, droughts, heatwaves and wildfires. These have led to extreme hazards, including destruction of infrastructures, large-scale migrations and loss of lives. Climate change aside, humanity is also facing problems of air and water pollution, deforestation, desertification, famine and diseases; in fact, we still have traumatic memories of the COVID-19 pandemic, which destroyed livelihoods and to date, has left more than seven million people dead worldwide. This paper is based on a desktop qualitative research method and draws from secondary and primary literature on socio-environmental history. Furthermore, it analyses the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS), focussing on the FET history curriculum. The study builds on the intersectionality and all-inclusive ecologies of knowledge approach to demonstrate that socio-environmental history intersects with other history topics already part of South Africa’s CAPS FET history curriculum. The paper argues that, through the infusion of socio-environmental history content into this curriculum, history teaching will contribute more meaningfully toward learners’ understanding of the socio-environmental challenges confronting humanity in South Africa and beyond. This will provoke learners to raise questions regarding the nexus between people and nature, and interrogate how this shapes the local, regional and global environments and the results thereof, in the process, inculcating positive attitudes and values about stewardship of planet Earth.

lnterdesign 2005 and communication design: a contextualisation

The two-week lnterdesign workshop took place in Rustenburg, the capital of the North West Province . Three rural villages from the North West (Pitsudesulejang, Mathopestad and Syfe rbult) were pre-selected because of their diver sity, including a deep rural, semi-rural and informal settlement respectively. During Week One, two days were set aside for exploratory field trips . The rest of Week One was spent developing concepts that were presented in a preliminary presentation. Week Two was spent revisiting villages and defining concepts for a final presentation . A selection of ideas presented at this final presentation was made for further development and testing by DOT, project organisers and participants from the community. lnterdesign 2005 was concluded at a feedback session in Pretoria, September 2005 , where some of these developed solutions were presented

Developing citizen designers

As the design industry evolves, so too does design education. Design, as a discipline as well as a mode of reasoning, essentially responds to the needs of people. Owing to the complex nature of problems that humanity faces – such as global warming, poverty, racial discrimination, to name a few – it is not surprising that socially responsible design has reached a critical moment and underpins contemporary design  ractice. Accordingly, it follows that design education has a responsibility to train and nurture students with a socially-minded and empathetic mindset so that they can be mindful of making ethical design decisions. Essentially, the role of a designer’s response to a complex social, environmental or political problem is to move people to action, beyond mere awareness

Haecceity and haptics: A critical explication of bookness in Speaking in Tongues: Speaking Digitally / Digitally Speaking: Corporeality / Sensoriality / Materiality: Body-centered interpretations of South African art

Given the ongoing need for a more rigorous theoretical underpinning for book arts discourse, this essay conjoins a critical explication of my artist’s book Speaking in Tongues: Speaking Digitally / Digitally Speaking, and the practice of making it, with selected foundational statements on the haptic experience of artists’ books by Gary Frost. These statements provide a framework across and through which I am able to weave the explication. In order to do this, however, a history of the call for a more critical underpinning of the field is first undertaken. Thereafter, selected relevant theoretical tropes that have been influential on my thinking and practice are drawn together, forming a ground upon which the explication can be undertaken, focusing particularly upon haptic theory. This explication of artist’s book practice acknowledges, and is predicated upon, the well-documented lack of a conclusive definition for such objects, and thus I attempt to foreground constituent concepts of bookness as critical and appropriate lenses for characterising and theorising the book arts

Discursive cuts, receptive wounds Notes on the reception of Inxeba/The Wound

There is a specific strain of queer theory seeded in Southern African soil – a permutation that, for its specific geo-affective location, seems all the more lived, more humanistic-centred, more humane. The work collected in this themed issue arose from a panel discussion and a set of papers presented during the 2018 iteration of the February Lectures conference series (februarylectures.co.za), a platform established to showcase what happens when queer theory is brought to bear on the lived experience of queer peoples of the global South