Unstitching Labour, Space and Feminist Histories in Cape Town

Together with South African architect Ilze Wolff I co-organised a urban walk in Cape town. Wolff reads architectural forms as material traces of societal segregation, revealing how the spatial organisation of the Rex Truform garnment factory continues to reflect the racialised and gendered logics of Apartheid. Her socio-spatial analysis foregrounds how constructs of race, class, and gender persist in shaping urban spaces in the post-apartheid era. In conversation with Wolff, we further explored how feminist forms of resistance continue to challenge and rewrite these violent spatial histories today.

The walks was organized within the Program of the Summer School of the DFG Research Training Group 2661: Connecting – Excluding: Elephants in the Room – Situating Post/Colonial Histories and Imaginaries.
A globally travelled metaphor, the elephant in the room symbolizes an uncomfortable truth too omnipresent to ignore, yet too difficult to address. Our summer school explored memories of racialization in post-apartheid South Africa and the ways in which these are used to re-claim histories and build different futures across borders. How do memory scapes materialize in sound scapes and land scapes, bodies, materialities and architecture? Collaborating across institutions, geographies, and positionalities we tried to engage in „doing difference together in good faith“ (Verran) to decenter our respective perspectives.

Partner Institutions:
DFG Research Training Group 2661: Connecting – Excluding (Cologne)
DFG Research Training Group 2686: Contradiction Studies – Constellations, Heuristics, and Concepts of the Contradictory (Bremen)
African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies, University of the Western Cape
Remaking Societies, Remaking Persons Forum, Department of Historical Studies (UWC)
SFB 1187: Media of Cooperation
Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre
Goethe-Institut Johannesburg