Browsing by Author "Sitas, Rike"

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    Music and arts festivals as platforms for enhancing Sustainable Development
    (2021) Lopez, Gomez Camila; Sitas, Rike
    Humanity is going through a complex process of historical transformation in which the consolidation of a new paradigm – Sustainable Development – is required in order to tackle current unprecedented global crises such as Climate Change and the COVID-19 pandemic. In congruence with this harsh reality, the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development can be regarded as an urgent call aimed at individuals, communities, institutions and nations, centred on the imperative need to create the structural foundations of a socially just and environmentally safe world. This research explores different ways in which contemporary music and arts festivals might operate as platforms for enhancing Sustainable Development. The central idea is to explore the way in which music and arts festivals, through strategies of socio-environmental awareness and education, community building and social participation, contribute to the consolidation of sustainable development as a new paradigm. This specific research is centred on the analysis of three organizations, Greenpop and Cape Town Carnival based in South Africa and Green Music Initiative based in Germany: organizations that actively participate in the arrangement and operation of different music and arts festivals. This selection was based on the belief that the analysis of cross-cultural cases enriches the understanding of the way in which festivals can effectively contribute to the process of encouraging the emergence and consolidation of a more sustainable world view. These three organizations are currently facing challenges and opportunities that arise from local and global processes of environmental damage and social exclusion. The key learnings of this research reflect the important role that festivals, through their promotion of creativity and community building, play in the generation of socio-environmental knowledge, in the generation of social cohesion and social capabilities, also in the experimentation and action of possible solutions to environmental global crises such as climate change and land use change. In its final section, this document also presents some of the key learnings that the festival industry has developed from the current COVID-19 pandemic and reflects upon the way in which these learnings can strengthen its role in the consolidation of the sustainable development paradigm.
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    Reimagining Cape Town Walls: The Culture and Image of the City
    (2019) Warries, Rosca; Sitas, Rike
    Public culture creates an image of the city for both local and international publics to engage and encounter. The needs of the city to be globally recognised and create opportunities for economic growth can reveal discrepancies in development agendas and raises questions about fulfilling the needs of the local public to express their understanding and selection of cultural expression. This dissertation seeks to understand the tensions in the role of street art productions in Cape Town in place making, arguing that it can run the risk of being an expression of suppression, shaped by the graffiti by-law and approval procedures. The way street art is selected, commissioned, and regulated has become an expression of culture for the global market to consume for economic development, largely through tourism as opposed to representing local cultural expressions. Previous studies of street art in Cape Town have failed to address the tension in limiting cultural producers to solely express marketable street art for tourism over the needs of social change for local publics. To identify the tensions experienced by cultural producers in producing street art in Cape Town I have examined the trade-offs of two cultural producers in becoming active participants in dominating prime locations of walls in the Cape Town central business district areas: Baz Art and Urban Khoi Soldier. Using qualitative and visual methodologies, this research explored street art in Brazil and Cape Town. The Brazilian example shows a context of unregulated expression of plural political views and citizenship within a multicultural nation. The regulation of street art in Cape Town reveals new forms of cultural colonisation where cultural representation and narratives are dominated by a globalised framework of ‘Africanity'. Therefore, this research demonstrates the lack of a variety of multicultural expressions and forms of citizenship which robs the various publics of encountering meaningful ways of seeing and being in Cape Town.
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    Speculative indigeneities: the [k]new now
    (2019) Bhagat, Heeten; Pather, Jayendran; Sitas, Rike
    The starting point of this research study began with a broad and unwieldly question - what would Zimbabwe look like if colonisation didn’t happen? This question arose with regard to the launch of the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act (IEEA) in 2007 and is focused of on building an understanding of notions of indigeneity in Zimbabwe through an inquiry of indigenousness and indigenisation. The methodological approach is designed as an interdisciplinary and experimental research inquiry that processes these debates and proposes an expansion of the probabilities of notions of indigeneity within the range of existing socio-political, economic and historical analyses of indigenousness and indigenisation in Zimbabwe. This exploration begins with a broad historical, anthropological and etymological survey of the term 'indigenous’ that is interwoven with a contextual account of Zimbabwe and its socio-political lifespan. The primary site of investigation is the independence-day ceremony that took place at the National Sports Stadium in Harare, Zimbabwe on the 18th of April 2017. This focus is motivated by two distinctive elements at this event - a banner that declares 'ZIMBABWE WILL NEVER BE A COLONY AGAIN’ and a fragment from the president’s speech that asserts, 'we can now call ourselves full masters of our destiny’ (Mugabe 2017). This event stands as a crucial node for the debates and questions this research aims to pose regarding notions of indigenisation, indigenousness and registers of indigeneity. Political and socio-economic analyses of this annual ritual tower above the lacuna of analysis of its performance logics. This performance-specific inquiry aims to contribute new meanings and complexity around the event. The information generated from this reading is further processed through the mechanisms of speculative research as a way to think beyond the dilemmas and paradoxes that emerge from the historical, anthropological and performance analyses of this event. The penultimate chapter of this dissertation suggests a conceptual rehearsal of the findings generated through an expanded understanding of queer theory. The final articulation of 2 this research investigation extends the experimental approach, presenting a set of visual, aural and sculptural elements as the conclusion. The dissertation offers alternate readings of notions of homogeneity and singularity. It is also constituted as a way to understand the probability of building new knowledges through lateral and rhizomic processes as a journey that gathers and synthesizes from across a number of disciplines. The contention of this thesis, then, is to suggest an expansion of the notion of indigeneity towards the possibility of polygeneity, a notion that aims to align with the conceptual constructs of cosmopolitanism (Appiah 2006, Kleingeld and Brown 2014), which engage arguments for expanded understandings of contemporary identity formation. Embodied in this suggestion of polygeneity lies the potential to revive notions of dynamism and creativity that have been dormant since the onset of European colonisation in Zimbabwe. In the wake of the 'new dawn’ in Zimbabwe, in this moment of growing debates for alternatives, the thesis finds its impulse in the imperative for radical and creative shifts in consciousness to activate new ideas, new readings, and new knowledges.