Redress-un-dressed: Advocate Alice presents: R v JR 2010

Abstract

Includes bibliographical references.Writing about redress 1 -un-dressed, giving my voice to the work, is probably the hardest part for me. It was my voice which was silenced when, as an eleven year old, I stepped into the witness box of the Cape Town Magistrates' Court. In the end my only defence was silence, as each consecutive question of the defence distorted my personal story until my position of victim turned into that of perpetrator. That is to say, the perpetrator was released and I went to jail. Not literally. But the effect of the trauma shaped who I am today. This experience triggered my ongoing investigation of systems of control, positions of power and causes of trauma which I explored in my undergraduate year in 2007. Comfort Room - ukhuselekile - Speak out 1 was a psychologically charged installation which explored aspects of secondary trauma experienced by children in the judicial process. The current body of work moves beyond the trauma as it investigates processes of redress. For that reason the details of the initial events are no longer the primary concern; strategies of transformation are at the heart of this investigation. This brief detour outlines my personal motivation and interest in these strategies, or forms of redress, which lead me to juxtapose processes of what I have termed aesthetic redress against processes of judicial redress. I therefore stage the fictional case of R v Judicial Redress 2010 (R v JR 2010) 2 in this document and my practical body of work