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A Glimpse of The City’s SEE Festival

A Glimpse of The City's SEE Festival

Written by Manelisi Manellie

The City, a research, publishing and place-making agency founded in 2010 has produced an exhilarating conference named The SEE Festival. Taking place at Cultivate, a wine bar and tasting room in Salt River founded to promote black talent in the sector, it assembled institutions, activists, artists and creative practitioners for an exchange of ideas, debate and the development of methodologies to counteract the ripple effect of colonialism and apartheid.


The director of The City is author, urbanist, entrepreneur and founder of Cultivate, Zahira Asmal, who has written three books examining the socio-economic, political and cultural environments in South Africa. This unquestionably qualifies her to facilitate a gathering that positions visibility, time and space as a centre-piece to a meeting of minds over culture, arts, history, food and wine.

The basis of the conference was to reflect the past with the present, and in doing so it began with a presentation about a landmark in archaeological research that was inspired by the Slave Wrecks Project in 2012. Curator scientist at Iziko Museums, Jaco Boshoff, highlighted the reactions and further developments in the research of Sāo José Paquete d’Africa, a slaveship that was wrecked in 1794 on the Cape coast off Clifton Beach. His presentation led to a poignant contribution by visual artist Meghna Singh, whose audio visual artwork focuses on the experience of contemporary and historical migrations in Cape Town.

A standout in her talk was a reflection on one of her pieces, The Container: A short film presenting slavery and the effect of capitalism through a palpable, thought-provoking experience of visibility, time, space and memory through the lens of migrants. This was followed by Iranian-born artist Kamyar Bineshtarigh who shared the process of working on his aptly titled offering, Uncover.  This was the byproduct of two years of inadvertent mark-making on a studio wall in an abandoned, dilapidated factory in Salt River. Consistent with the theme of the conference, Uncover prompts a sense of history, proximity, space and presence that abstractly affirms existence and visibility in a state of abandon.

The sociological effect of erasure stemming from linguistic othering was offered by three panellists consisting of documentary filmmaker, Dylan Valley, UCT professor and expert on hip-hop activism Adam Haupt and coordinator of Heal The Hood, Shaquille Southgate. Their discussion, on the value of Afrikaaps, highlighted the significance of taking agency through self-identification and the assertion of a merited position in the linguistic and cultural history of South Africa.

A similar sentiment was identified in a recognizable historical correlation between the current topic of Afrikaaps and Khoi existentialism. This arose largely from the input of Tauriq Jenkins, a High Commissioner of the Goringhaicona Khoi Khoin Traditional Indigenous Council and founding member of the AIXARRA Restorative Justice Forum. His compelling and charismatic delivery inspired great interest in exploring the rich history of a pre-colonial South Africa.

The conference incorporated a segment called Unfinished Business, Reflections on The Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In this segment, Zahira Asmal provided moving anecdotes of her personal apartheid experience through recited excerpts of related literary work from fellow authors.

She expounded on the issues and complexities on the concept of forgiveness, subsequently opening a dialogue on the state of race relations in South Africa. Equally gripping and significant contributions from a sitting panel chaired by Stellenbosch University sociologist Steven Robins, with Nazeer Sonday (chairman of the Philippi Horticultural Area Food & Farming Campaign, Denisha Anand (intersectional environmentalist at Princess Vlei), Gary Steward (activist protecting  Atlantic Seaboard spaces from commercial development), Dr Jonty Cogger (activist foraffordable housing) and Jack Poking, heritage campaigner in the Bo-Kaap..

Each panel member provided a presentation regarding their respective fields, spanning efforts to redress spatial apartheid, gentrification, conservation of heritage sites, restoration of biodiversity initiatives and the value of an agricultural economy. It is here where noteworthy concern on the inadequate state of the City of Cape Town’s support for these initiatives was raised. This apparent denunciation by the Cape Town government evidently necessitates a continued space for organising a collective committed to cultural, historic and social change.

Zahira Asmal is commended for her creative effort of premising visibility, time and space as a means to confront history. The seamless coordination of this crucial event, appropriately concentrates on the magnitude of art, language, culture and history in today’s Cape Town urban society. It thus demonstrates The City’s SEE Festival as part of a fundamental remedy to challenge historic and present day abandon and erasure.

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