Abstract
Exploring Ephemeral Memorial Landscapes in Sharpeville
This study aims to reimagine the Sharpeville Memorial, drawing on rituals, traditions, and cultures of the local community in a way that would be inclusive. Sharpeville is a township near Vereeniging in southern Gauteng where one of the well-known demonstrations against apartheid laws in South Africa took place on the 21st of March 1960, resulting in a shooting by the police. This incident is known as the Sharpeville massacre. One of the theoretical underpinnings for this proposal is informed by Sabine Marschall (2010:10) who she argues that “monuments and memorials serve important social and psychological needs for individuals and groups which are not always compatible with the political needs of the state or initiators to memorialize persons and events in a specific way”. This statement indicates not only the importance of memorials for communities and individuals who are directly affected and triggered by the memorialised events but also highlights the fact that the construction of those memorials and monuments does not ways align with the needs of those people affected. Marschall (2010:61-95) further argues that irrespective of their psychological benefits, such memorials – their delivery and their specific visual design – are never quite separable from socio-political agendas and strategic appropriation for wider societal and political goals.
The project will explore and analyse the impact of the memorials within the community, the commemorations, and how the community responds to both the memorials and commemorations. Danto (cited by Marshall 2010:11) declares “triumphalism and celebration to be key features of monuments, whereas memorials are about healing and reconciliation”. On a site visit to Sharpeville memorial, Sipho Khumalo, the manager of the memorial addressed the students where he mentioned that Sharpeville is remembered in March as a celebration of the anniversary of the massacre, and he raised a concern about using death as a cause for celebration. Through the exploration and analysis of the current memorials and commemorations, the project will investigate these as ways of mourning, healing, and reconciliation which can integrate the community’s cultures and traditions.
Theoretical framework and related Literature
The Major Design Project (MDP) follows the theory of Richard Crownshaw (cited in Berger & Niven 2014: 219) which state that “memorialization is an act of remembrance: the commemoration of historical losses as opposed to the celebration of historical events”. This describes memorialization as a ritual, an act, or process of remembering. Indeed, most South African cultures use rituals as acts of remembrance and those rituals are their ways of memorialising past events and their loved ones who have passed. This MDP will explore the performance of remembrance rituals in Sharpeville and analyse how the memorials affect the performance of these rituals, cultures, and traditions of the community. In understanding the rituals done by the communities, new architectural designs can be formulated to create new post-apartheid memorials.
Berger and Niven (2014: 219) assert that whatever the scale of memorialisation, and whoever the sponsor (official or unofficial), the memorial (architectural or ritualistic) is not complete without those who visit it, in whom memory is invoked. Many memorials were erected according to other agendas, mostly political and not for the actual people affected. Marschall (2008: 12) highlights that the local community registered their extreme anger that not only they were not consulted or involved in the project but also payments of reparations for the families of the victims were not forthcoming. The political agendas will be exposed through investigating the temporal and permanent memorials and how they impacted the designs and usage of the memorials.
Methodology
This Major Design Project will use dialogic drawing as a methodology. Through drawings and other visual techniques, memorials and commemoration rituals performed in Sharpeville would be analysed, deconstructed, reconstructed, and combined to understand the parallels and differences of those rituals which can lead to new inclusive memorials. The memorial elements will be extracted and analysed using the western cultural lens and compared to local cultural views. The rituals to be investigated are those performed not only by families in their private capacity but also by the ANC and the PAC. The project will make use of direct observations of the rituals, secondary stories from newspaper articles, publication interviews, previously written texts, and self-journals publicised by local community members. After analysing the memorials in the form of dialogic drawings and creating analogic drawings which layer all drawings into one, the project will speculate on possible ideas for Sharpeville’s new memorials which would incorporate both the memorialising rituals and traditions, and become a space of mourning, healing, and reconciliation by acknowledging the loss and pain of those affected.