Cargo: Dwelling in the Archive of Slavery at the Cape

Mark Fleishman

About this exposition

In 2006, together with a group of collaborators, representatives from two Cape Town-based performance companies with connections to the University of Cape Town, I set out to create a production on the history of slavery at the Cape. The production, Cargo, was first produced as part of the Spier Arts Summer Season in March 2007 in Stellenbosch and then at the National Festival of the Arts in Grahamstown and the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town later that year. Cargo is the fourth part of a series of productions based on ‘key sites of memory’ in and around the city of Cape Town. The term is taken from Pierre Nora (1989) and refers to a conglomerate of physical, material and archival sites that function to concentrate remembrance in a world in which, to paraphrase James E. Young, the more we monumentalize, the more we seem to have “divested ourselves of the obligation to remember” (2000: 94). In making each of the works in the series, my collaborators and I faced two fundamental and interconnected problems related to the themes of time and silence: How to find an appropriate image in the present for something that has past and how to make the archive speak in unspeakable ways. The productions were created through a dramaturgical process based on the idea of ‘dwelling’ borrowed from the anthropologist Tim Ingold (2000) based on a question posed by Heidegger on the difference between ‘building’ and ‘dwelling’ (1971).

type	research exposition
date	01/01/2011
published	20/11/2011
last modified	11/07/2017
status	published
share status	private
license	All rights reserved
url	https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/7669/7670
doi	https://doi.org/10.22501/jar.7669
published in	Journal for Artistic Research
portal issue	0.

id	name	copyright	license
7728	Spades - interview 1	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7729	Porcelain pots - interview 2	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7730	Porcelain pots - interview 1	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7731	Buckets of water - interview 2	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7732	Buckets of water - interview 1	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7733	Spades - rehearsal	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7734	Porcelain pots - rehearsal	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7735	Buckets of water - rehearsal	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7727	Spades - interview 2	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7725	techmical spacemaking	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7726	Spades - interview 3	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7698	Porcelain pots rehearsal #0	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7696	Spades rehearsal #0	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7694	Spades #0	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7692	Buckets of water #0	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7690	Porcelain pots #0	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7688	Spades - interview 2 #0	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7686	Spades - interview 3 #0	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7684	Buckets of water rehearsal #0	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7682	Buckets of water - interview 1 #0	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7680	Buckets of water - interview 2 #0	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7678	Spades - interview 1 #0	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7674	Porcelain pots - interview 1 #0	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved
7672	Porcelain pots - Interview 2 #0	Mark Fleishman	All rights reserved

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Cargo: Dwelling in the Archive of Slavery at the Cape (2011)

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