Nothing to See Here: Stages for Latent Revolutions

The project creates a series of stages within Church Square, Pretoria to facilitate both protest, and the performance of proposed futures. Church Square has continually functioned as a stage for protest, performance and proposed revolutions, using the landmark Paul Kruger statue and podium as a stage, set, backdrop, and cloak, and its surrounding buildings – such as the Palace of Justice – as props and actors. The proposed stages create ambiguous cloaks of form, function and programme for actors and audiences to perform, strategize, hide from and evade threats during protest.

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The project uses the 1996 Constitution of South Africa as the script/written word. In it, the individual rights of citizens are not so fixed, and during the 2020 COVID lockdown, subsections 36 and 37 permitted the relaxation of several of those rights, in favour of collective rights.

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Rooted in Jonathan Hill’s framing of architecture as spatially porous while solid and stable where necessary, the project approaches the written word (Constitution) as the prospect of architecture that can be translated into spoken word, or performance. The project’s site of intervention lies between the written and the performed, in the space the project calls the network architecture of translation.