(d)urban(a): Create South Africa

Although I wrote earlier about Create South Africa's quilt project with the South Africa Parliamentary Millennium Project, I finally feel more prepared to write about my involvement with them so far. In November of 2006 while writing a review essay on "material rhetoric," I included a catalog from the exhibition "Weavings of War: Fabrics of Memory" in my consideration of "material" engagements with the public sphere. In that essay I argued that a rhetoric of material insists textiles and clothing possess materialized agency, like Alfred Gell's notion of a secondary agent in Art and Agency or the notion of an actant in actor-network-theory. In positing a rhetoric of material, we can challenge the Western depth ontology that devalues surface and expand the possibility of what may count as rhetorical engagement, as well as the types of cultures and actors who can produce rhetoric.

Part of the "Weavings of War" exhibition included the "memory cloths" created through one of Create South Africa's workshops. These embroidered quilt panels disrupt expectations for craft work - they negotiate between invention and commonplaces within embroidery and quilt practice.

This panel, created by Pamela Grootboom in the Western Cape in December 2007, illustrates what I mean. In the lower part of the panel, Pamela depicts two young people on the street exchanging drugs for money. Above them she illustrates two young people making soup as part of a soup kitchen that Grootboom started in her township. Both show relationships between people, the former damaging to the township community near Cape Town where Pamela lives and the latter benefiting the community and giving its young residents a safe place to go to help provide meals for themselves and others. Most of us don't expect textiles or embroidery to approach subjects like drug use and the creation of soup kitchens and for that reason, these cloths arrest our attention more than merely reading a written account of the drug and poverty problem in Cape Town's informal settlements (or in economically depressed areas anywhere). Besides, many of the participants in the program don't have the facility in writing English to be able to reach audiences outside of their townships anyway.

Reading about the project and seeing a few digital image reproductions of the cloths, however, was not enough for me to get a sense of how the project operates on a daily basis. My curiosity about this particular nongovernmental organization (NGO) was embedded within a broader interest in handicraft NGOs operating within the "global South." My previous experience with such an NGO was volunteering for the local 10,000 Villages fair-trade shop in Champaign, Illinois, but that was a comfortable retail shop with several new computer stations to assist management and volunteers in product information and location. I think that was why I was so surprised when I went to the Create South Africa offices for the first time last Friday - there was such a difference. The CAS office is located on Palmer Street - basically an alley that mostly houses auto body repair shops - in Durban's relatively crime-ridden downtown area. The commercial building that houses the cloth archive is bare and the organization uses two PCs and a copy machine that are all nearly a decade old. During the summertime, the office can grow warm, even with the circulating fan and the breeze coming in from the large window that lights the space, especially on a day like yesterday when M and I spent some time ironing and steaming the cloths before photographing them. After the first few days I guess what I came to realize is that no matter how small or seemingly insignificant an infrastructure (economically and technologically speaking) - productive work (rhetorical and otherwise) can still happen. I look forward to writing more about the work that happens during a week-long workshop when the cloths are made and I will have the opportunity to participate (assisting in embroidery and sewing instruction) during the next one in March here in KwaZulu-Natal.