From family business to public museum: the transformation of the sacks futeran buildings into the homecoming centre of the district six Museum

Magister Artium - MAThrough a grant from the Atlantic Philanthropies Foundation the District Six Museum Foundation Trust purchased the Sacks Futeran buildings in 2002 with a view to creating new spaces of engagement that worked with exhibitions, issues of social justice and District Six returnees. The Futeran family, as a gesture of philanthropic donation, sold the building below market value thus enabling the museum to take ownership. This related directly to civic public giving that the work of the District Six Museum entails and was consistent with an understanding of community museums. Acquiring, transforming and museumising the set of five interconnected Sacks Futeran buildings to create the District Six Homecoming Centre has influenced and extended the notion of civic public giving in the museum work of the District Six Museum in relation to District Six returnees and the public. The examination of a history in and through buildings and more specifically the transformation in use, design, purpose and naming in this complex of buildings associated with a family business, E. Sacks Futeran & Co., is the purpose of this research. The oral histories of Martin and Gordon Futeran reveal the origins of their family wholesale clothing and fabric business established in 1906 by their great grandfather Elias Sacks and by extension the Jewish histories of District Six. The apartheid denial of ‘home’ within the Cape Town city bowl, resulting in forced removals of the inhabitants of District Six and the formation of the District Six Museum as a transactive community museum model on the heritage landscape of post-apartheid South Africa is examined. With reference to architectural materiality, the set of buildings as transitional space is ‘mapped’ as it has become the Homecoming Centre of the District Six Museum.Rennie Scurr Adendorff Architects blended older histories of the site with architectural aesthetic and technical expertise, and the Museum’s visions, philosophies and concepts were an integral part of the redevelopment. Over a number of years the Sacks Futeran buildings were restored and internally reconfigured and have been developed to dovetail with existing methodologies supporting the broader land restitution process. Through its spaces, a museum community is being nurtured by means of activism, notions of citizenship transforming District Six, the city and community museum practice in the process. The Fugard Theatre is an integral part of the Homecoming Centre and these buildings are experienced as a multi-functional cultural landmark within the District Six Cultural Heritage Precinct. By harnessing memory and materiality this study is relevant as a means of constituting historical urban fabric and a sensitivity of reconstructing a sense of place

Living Here with Lessons From There: Cosmopolitan Conversations After an International Service-Learning Trip

This research looks at four participants’ identity formation 3 years after their international service-learning (ISL) trip to Kenya. It focuses on life after ISL and the challenges of translating lessons learned abroad into meaningful action upon return. In the process, it speaks to participants’ struggles in resisting social conformity, conflicts with opinions of friends and family, consequences of challenging the status quo, ambivalent and contradictory commitments, and cosmopolitan identity formation attaching them to multiple global locations beyond the local. Findings are threefold: 1) ISL trips provided experiences, stories, relationships, challenges, and opportunities that contribute to various identity narratives; 2) struggles and conflicts experienced upon return destabilized participants’ sense of identity leading to, 3) an embodied cosmopolitan identity. Implications of these findings suggest educators recognize both the challenges and opportunities students may face when confronting hegemonic norms post-ISL

Fugitive Testimonies

This research thesis takes the form of a longitudinal fieldwork study (2009–16) to question what is ‘fugitive’ from the family photographic archive. The research borrows the term from Roland Barthes: ‘the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony’.1 The research project relates this idea to what goes missing from family albums and posits that discarded materials from family albums, as found in flea markets, can constitute the ‘fugitive memories’ of family life. As a result, collecting these materials can be used to construct new ‘archives’, named in this project as the Fugitive Testimonies Archive. This archive acts as a repository for examining fugitive memories. The ‘sample’ of discarded photographs has been gathered in the practical fieldwork at a regional flea market, located in the southwest of England (specifically at the Royal Bath and West Showground in Shepton Mallet, Somerset) from 2009 to 2016. The fieldwork method was developed in two phases. The first is collecting and mapping the found materials in fieldwork notebooks (organised as a photoarchive) to form a timeline and survey of encounters, and the annotation of photographs and materials with critical notes on the transactions and encounters. All these notes give extra insight into the flea market as a site of enquiry and fugitive discourse. This work is inspired by the historical traditions of such methods as bricolage (Claude Lévi-Strauss) and objective chance (e.g. in André Breton and Surrealism).2 Examples of contemporary artists also drawing on these tactics and methods of practice are Tacita Dean and Taryn Simon.3 Phase two of the project represents the critical intervention of reconfiguring the ‘outtakes’ curated (by me) from selected material prints in the Fugitive Testimonies Archive. The subsequent grouping of these ‘outtakes’ constructs the conceptual assemblages, to reveal and expose from this discarded material what has been censored by families. By presenting and rereading these found discarded photographs the thesis produces new perspectives on family album photography, by engaging in theoretical discussion of the direct relationships between personal and social memory, and between personal and family identity vested in what is discarded from the family photographic archive. In a supplementary argument, the thesis argues that the analogue era of photography is what enabled and created - through its material form - the very possibility of this fugitive discarding of ‘family material’. The potential for new scholarship about the re-configuration of the photograph within this bricolage mode is in direct relation to the material process of analogue photography. The fugitive testimonies of family held on analogue paper substrates offer specific visual image memories whose insistent capture are likely to evaporate, deteriorate, change, fade or disappear. In consequence, the contribution of this research to new knowledge concerns the importance of this documentation of private life, a documentation, which has a disruptive urgency through questioning and investigating affective visual narratives of ‘the family’ in fugitive prints. Equally significant for this research are the intricate forms of the photographic records, the unconscious escapes from contracts of compatibility (the fugitive stories of family) to inform the tactics of a practice

The Posthuman Curriculum and the Teacher

The intent of this document is to explore education through a posthumanist lens. More specifically, elements of posthumanism will be used to better understand today’s teachers, to provide several overarching educational goals and curricular imperatives, and to inform pedagogical practice. Several posthumanist themes in particular will serve to unify this rather broad consideration of education at varying levels. One such theme is that of blurring boundaries, calling into question distinctions that have been the source of declines in the health of our bodies, our species, and the life systems of which we are constitutive parts. Distinctions too often lead to hierarchies, and hence to exploitation. The humanist distinction between man and nature has for example bolstered the idea that man should rightfully rule nature, as well as justified oppression and enslavement of the “less human” or “savage”. Another unifying posthumanist theme is that of impermanence or flux. What it means to be human changes as our environment and our technologies change. The roles of teacher and learner are frequently changing and we are always some measure of each, more of one and less of the other depending on the environment and circumstance. A final posthumanist theme that permeates this text is that of decentering the human. Posthumanism is in part a rejection of anthropocentrism, and this rejection informs much of the following considerations of teachers, curricula, pedagogy, and education

Struggling to Remember: Perceptions, Potentials and Power in an Age of Mediatised Memory

What role do new, networked and pervasive technologies play in changing individual and collective memory processes? Many recent debates have focused on whether we are in the online era remembering ‘less’ or ‘more’ – informed, perhaps, by a tendency to think of memory spatially and quantifiably as working like an archive. Drawing on the philosophical theorising of Henri Bergson and its development through Gilbert Simondon, this thesis makes two interventions into the field. Firstly, conceptually, it establishes a process-based approach to perception, memory and consciousness in a shift away from the archive metaphor – thinking memory not as informing ‘knowledge of the past’ but ‘action in duration’. It situates the conscious, living being as transindividual – affectively relational to its perceived bodily and social environments, through psychic and collective individuation respectively. Moreover, it considers technologies as forms of transindividual extension of consciousness. Furthermore, it proposes the ‘antimetaphor’ of the anarchive as a conceptual tool with which to understand these durationbased, bodily and technological, action-oriented processes. Secondly, methodologically, it advocates a rephrasing of the question from how much we are remembering to how we are remembering differently. Armed now with a developed theoretical position and methodological approach, the thesis explores through three case-study chapters how personal and more historical pasts may be remembered, individually and more collectively, through new, prevalent technologies of memory such as search engines, forums and social-media sites. Analysing the material experiences of remembering, as well as examining the economic drives of the platforms and wider actors, and the resulting socio-political implications, the thesis sets out the original argument of a contemporary struggle for memory: a complex negotiation of tensions between agencies of the body, the social, and the multifarious and interconnected socio-political and economic interests of the technological platforms and hybridised media systems through which contemporary remembering increasingly takes place

Blended memory: distributed remembering and forgetting through digital photography

This thesis explores practices and experiences of using photography to support remembering. While the increasing use of photography is well documented, we have limited theoretical understanding of how we approach the taking, organising, and sharing of personal images in relation to memory, and of the opportunities and risks that are created through technological change. Two studies were conducted in which a total of 21 participants were interviewed in front of a sample of their photographs. Study 1 explored photography and remembering around a single, specific event: a wedding. Study 2 explored longer-term patterns of photographic and remembering activity across a range of contexts and events. The analysis showed that the ways that participants engaged with other people and technologies were significant in determining the kinds of photographs that were produced, and the engagement with those photos. Photographic practices were also heavily influenced by the situations in which they were performed and the beliefs and preferences of individuals. The existence of photographs could lead to thinking about particular aspects of the past, but the taking of photographs also altered the experience of what was being photographed. This could be seen as disruptive, depending on the participant’s beliefs about whether photography was a legitimate part of experience. When taking photos, participants pursued a mix of aesthetics, objectivity, and personal meaning, and perceptions of these qualities could influence the way that photographs were used in cueing recall. However, while most participants had produced large collections of photographs, there had been limited engagement with these and taking or having photographs could be more important than looking at them. The thesis concludes that there is value in redefining memory as a kind of activity that emerges through the performance of remembering and that is dependent on the tools used to support it and the situations in which it is performed. From this perspective, photography and autobiographical remembering are parts of the same wider activity, an inseparable blend of internal and external processes. As such, attempts to support our memories should consider both the features of technology and the experience of using it, as well as the ways that we work with tools and people when remembering

Snapshot photography:a phatic, socially constructed mnemonic technology

This practice related research study explores my cognitive response to a biographical snapshot photograph celebrating my first day at school. The experience triggered an exploration of the relationship between snapshot photographs and memory. The finding of a second almost identical snapshot photograph of my son taken twenty years later by me prompted me to question why my father and I should take almost identical snapshots. I argue that the invention of photography was driven by the desire to capture the images created by the camera obscura by mark-making with the pencil of light as an aid memoir. I argue that the desire to externalise memory using mnemonic technology is innate with primal origins in parietal art and lithic technologies. The discourse explores the cultural evolution of technology through Jaques Derrida’s theory of originary technicity and Bernard Stiegler’s concept of the cultural evolution of technology by epiphylogenesis and the notion of the externalisation of memory as prosthesis. I explore the emergence of snapshot photography from the canon of photography through the theories of cultural evolution, technological momentum, and social constructivism, together with psycho-social notions of desire, ritual, performativity and intentionality in the establishment of snapshot photography as a ubiquitous ingrained social practice. The research is informed by a studio practice element that uses the adventures of Lewis Carroll’s, Alice as a conceptual framework to explore a journey of agency, self and auto didactical knowledge acquisition. I discuss the search for an appropriate methodological framework for art practice based research. My practice is a catalyst for enquiry; a project usually starts with an artefact that forms the locus of a question, the search for the answer to those questions, often leading epistemically, to unexpected places and relationships. The mode and manner of my enquiry are rhizomatous, pragmatic and serendipitous; the relationship between practice and theory is flexible, one informing the other. Through practice, I explore the deconstruction and textualisation of the visual metaphor of memory through the rhetorical devices of ekphrasis and memory texts and a visualisation of the nature and originary technicity of snapshot photography and an exploration of self and place. The thesis for this study is founded on the premise that snapshot photography is a socially constructed, phatic, mnemonic mark-making technology with origins in parietal forms of visual expression

Always at Home in the Past. Exploring Nostalgia in the Graphic Novel

My project deals with the aesthetics of nostalgia in a corpus of graphic novels. It starts by investigating the critical framework regarding nostalgia, which I analyze from a historical, psychological, philosophical and sociological perspective, giving particular attention to the implications it has for present times. It goes on to apply media-driven approaches about nostalgia to comic studies, trying to build a typology of the ways nostalgia may be seen as a two-phased, interactive articulation of comic production (of which I highlight motifs, style and structure) and reception (which I regrouped under the labels of readers, fans and collectors). Finally, I proceed to some close readings of key primary texts (graphic novels) to test my hypothesis in practice and draw my conclusions