“The beach is fake, but action is real,” shouts the headline – a brilliant one that draws the reader in.
The report reveals that a sandy beach with spectator pavilions was erected on the Grand Parade in the heart of Cape Town, leaving onlookers puzzled. Here, the World Beach Volleyball Pro Tour will take place over the coming days. Organisers explain that the Parade already is a popular venue for several cultural and sporting events, from cycling to car drifting and more, but is also close to public transport, making the prestigious tournament accessible to more people.
The headline is, however, not the only striking feature of the report, but so also is the front page picture of the beach. The front of the image shows the beach, the volleyball net and players in the air, competing for the ball. At the back the City Hall frames the action with its historic clock tower reaching high. In this one image, the photographer succeeded in drawing attention to the progress of our democracy, even if only subliminally.
The image of the City Hall, where Nelson Mandela delivered his first address after his release on February 11, 1990, references a history of Struggle for and freedom achieved. The image of the beach and international teams competing bears witness to a free society that holds a valued place in a global community of nations.
This, then, is an expertly curated image of a master curator at work, as is the headline of a news report that entices the reader to want to know more. The headline and image, however, do more. They also demonstrate and so reveal a hidden dynamic of how citizens and their communities together create and share different understandings of their world, of a past, present and therefore also a future, namely by curating what they notice, think about and then discuss with others – the hidden dynamic of the “politics of curating”.
In basic terms, to curate is to deliberately select, organise and present objects in such a way as to articulate a certain perspective and convey a particular message. The same goes for organising a series of events, developing the content of a lesson, or preparing a sermon. Whereas these instances of curating are conscious activities that people undertake, the curating that citizens do to make sense of their world is, however, a hidden performance.
It is an activity that the citizen engages in without realising it, but it is no less real and with no less impact than how the news of the fake beach at the Grand Parade was curated. As a political performance, citizens do two things as they move through their daily lives as participants in society, namely, they render meaning and mount discourses.
To “render meaning” is to reflect on what one sees and choose a way to make sense of it. To “mount a discourse” is to share both what you saw and how you make sense of it with others, often doing so repeatedly and in many different forms. Seen in this way, citizens are continuously engaged in the work of curating, of rendering meaning and mounting discourse on the public realities of a society.
And much like curating in the arts, citizens curate political exhibitions and theatre – exhibitions to showcase how we make sense of the world, and live performances to enact our meanings of freedoms past and present.
* Dr Rudi Buys is the Executive Dean at the non-profit higher education institution, Cornerstone Institute.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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