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Festival of Encampment: A Wanderer's Guide for Occupation

Jodie Winterton

M1

Supervisors:

Thiresh Govender, Jiaxin Yan Gong,

Ngillan Faal-Gbadebo

Unit:

14 - Rogue Economies: Producing Leisure

The Major Design Project, Festival of Emplacement. focuses on the issues of social injustice in and around Johannesburg city, as well as bringing ideal, neglected and conflict spaces into focus, thereby helping to analyse social structure through space, temporality, and adaptation. It uses festival tactics and devices – as the temporal operations, social dynamics and nomadic nature of the activities and programs that take place – that could be adapted and applied temporarily, with the possibility of permanence.

A festival is defined, in the phenomenon of festivals, as an organised socio-spatial phenomenon taking place at a designated time – outside the everyday routine – increasing the overall volume of social capital and celebrating selected elements of tangible and intangible culture (Cudny, 2014). This definition serves as a modern answer to what we think a festival is, but could be reformulated to include temporality and adaptation in conflict spaces, creating a device to explore and address the issues of social injustice.

The project looks at possible “Festival” spaces by finding and exploiting loopholes in the law that allow for the act of trespassing on ‘Ideal Land’. Our growing awareness and constant connectivity highlight the many cases of social injustices around the world. The project aims to be adapted and applied to any place where temporary investigation is required to form a possible permanent solution.