‘Walking is the speed for noticing….’ In 2014, I began convening walking seminars together with the researcher Christian Ernsten and the documentary photographer Dirk-Jan Visser. Each seminar involves a mix of scholars, artists, curators and activists and results in various work: journal articles, musical scores, photographic essays, and creative non-fiction. This chapter sets out the thinking behind the walking seminars, drawing on a variety of sources: recent interventions in the environmental humanities, decolonial thinking and practice, arts-based research methods and ideas around embodied research and the senses. Not least, it draws on the long history of writing about walking as a way through which to engage the world and intervene in social scenarios. As we enter the ambiguous new epoch of the Anthropocene, and as familiar landscapes change and degrade, we need—more than ever—to pay attention, to notice, to take care. For scholars, this arguably involves leaving the ‘white cube’ of the seminar room for more materially involved and implicated forms of engagement with our research subjects. The humble, everyday act of walking offers one route towards such modes of engagement.

On 9 March 2015, Chumane Maxwele, a student at the University of Cape Town (UCT), threw a bucket of shit at a statue of Cecil Rhodes, prominently sited at the main pedestrian entrance to the university. The statue was removed a month later following concerted protest action by the student-led social movement #RhodesMustFall. This chapter situates the Rhodes statue and the events of #RhodesMustFall in historical relation with the broader memorial and symbolic landscape of the Groote Schuur estate, the landscape of which UCT forms a part. It argues that an imperial legacy is deeply inscribed in this landscape in architectural form, the organization of space, and in forms of the gaze and embodied habitus. The UCT upper campus was conceived in terms of two architectural tropes: the idea of the Temple on the Hill, and the idea of the site of prospect. These, in turn, derive from Rhodes Memorial, located slightly further up the slope. In this context, the Rhodes statue was the most obvious materialization of a more generalized coloniality, which remains a part of the ambiguous legacy of the Groote Schuur estate and UCT.

Climate change poses a threat to heritage globally. Decolonial approaches to climate change–heritage research and practice can begin to address systemic inequities, recognize the breadth of heritage and strengthen adaptation action globally.

In this essay, we examine poignant moments that arose while walking the approximately 80 km Hoerikwaggo Trail linking the Cape of Good Hope to the city of Cape Town, South Africa. Our walks, styled as walking seminars, started in 2013. Two local and global events have resonated strongly with the walking seminar project, and have lent a sense of urgency to the debates and experiences on the trail: the events of #RhodesMustFall in 2014, and those of #DayZero 2018. The narrative arc of this essay is plotted along moments described as in a diary: each day explores a set of ideas. As such, we think through the landscape’s history as a breathing, material presence that both burdens the present and acts as a kind of birthright. Finally, we posit that walking the Hoerikwaggo Trail can be understood as one way of navigating what Ann Laura Stoler refers to as the “imperial debris” of the mountain.

This chapter explores the craft of walking as a form of embodied research practice situated at the intersection between artistic research practices and forms of empirical research. Drawing from the authors’ experience in running walking seminars in Cape Town, Amsterdam, and Berlin involving scholars, artists, curators, and activists, it examines the conceptual basis of walking as embodied research via three broad sets of ideas. The first of these is a desire to escape the “white cube” of the seminar room, and to challenge body/mind dichotomies, driven by arguments in feminist theory and decolonial thinking. The second is an interest in notions of landscape as palimpsest, and an interest in questions of history, memory, and representation via a “history of fragments”. The third is contemporary debates on the Anthropocene, and an interest in what it means to think and practice from within the climate crisis. A rich body of artistic work has explored and worked with various walking-based methodologies. For scholars, such methods are potentially more challenging but no less productive.

Taking the events of Cape Town’s “Day Zero” drought as a case study, this article examines the politics and poetics of water in the Anthropocene and the implications of Anthropogenic climate change for urban life. It argues that rather than being understood as an inert resource, fresh drinking water is a complex object constructed at the intersection between natural systems; cultural imaginaries; and social, political, and economic interests. The extraordinary events of Day Zero raised the specter of Mad Max–style water wars. They also led to the development of new forms of solidarity, with water acting as a social leveler. The article argues that events in Cape Town open a window onto the future, to the extent that they tell us something about what happens when the added stresses of climate change are mapped onto already-contested social and political situations. They also underline the precarious nature of many of our urban arrangements. This sense of the precarious is likely to extend beyond the case of Cape Town and to be an abiding feature of urban life as we journey deeper into the Anthropocene/Capitalocene.

The iconoclastic impetus to destroy Western colonialism lies at the heart of modern anticolonial practices. This commentary takes a look at decolonizing iconoclasms that are characterized by destruction and removal, mutilation or disfigurement of things, images, or words, perceived to be embodiments and symbols of colonial oppression and domination. Statues and monuments, for instance, figure prominently in this history of decolonization as iconoclastic action. The fantasy of historical rupture from the colonial past inhabits the gesture of the iconoclastic decolonizer. This commentary argues that statues can be seen as decolonial fetishes, whose extinction would be equivalent to the absolute disappearance of an over-domineering “colonialism”; it is as if their physical erasure would create a rupture in human time, inaugurating a perfect new epoch, without imperial idols and forever free from the chains of coloniality. Yet the gestures of destroyers, paradoxically, endow the colonial statues with high powers.

Cape Town is home to a series of extreme disjunctive arrangements of wealth and poverty. Key to understanding the city is the deep inscription of historical injustice and its expression in contemporary forms of social injustice. In the paper that follows, we report on conversations with four indispensable commentators on the contemporary state of the city: artist Thania Petersen, architect and artist Ilze Wolff, museum practitioner Bonita Bennett, and heritage practitioner Calvyn Gilfellan. These conversations occur at a particular moment in South African life and being: in the aftermath of the Zuma presidency, in the aftermath of #RhodesMustFall, in the context of the perceived failure of the project of non-racialism, in the context of growing frustration over the intractability of historical inequality and the slow pace of change, and amid a heated national debate around the ANC government's draft land expropriation bill. A common set of themes and preoccupations emerge: questions around race and religion; history, representation, and restitution; memory and forgetting; social justice and the abiding presence of historical injustice. Thinking inside and outside of the disciplines of art, architecture, and museum and heritage practice, these conversations present an accumulated body of wisdom and insight that might also be read as a transcript on the contemporary state of the city.

In this essay, we examine poignant moments that arose while walking the approximately 80 km Hoerikwaggo Trail linking the Cape of Good Hope to the city of Cape Town, South Africa. Our walks, styled as walking seminars, started in 2013. Two local and global events have resonated strongly with the walking seminar project, and have lent a sense of urgency to the debates and experiences on the trail: the events of #RhodesMustFall in 2014, and those of #DayZero 2018. The narrative arc of this essay is plotted along moments described as in a diary: each day explores a set of ideas. As such, we think through the landscape's history as a breathing, material presence that both burdens the present and acts as a kind of birthright. Finally, we posit that walking the Hoerikwaggo Trail can be understood as one way of navigating what Ann Laura Stoler refers to as the "imperial debris" of the mountain.

On March 9th 2015, Chumane Maxwele, a student at the University of Cape Town, threw a bucket of shit at a statue of Cecil Rhodes, prominently sited at the main pedestrian entrance to the university. A month later, following concerted protest action by the student-led social movement, #RhodesMustFall, the statue was removed. In this paper I situate the Rhodes statue and the events of #RMF into historical relation with the broader memorial and symbolic landscape of the Groote Schuur estate, the landscape of which the University of Cape Town forms a part. I argue that an imperial legacy is deeply inscribed in this landscape in architectural form, the organization of space, forms of the gaze, and embodied habitus. The University of Cape Town upper campus was conceived in terms of two architectural tropes, the idea of the Temple-on-the-hill, and the idea of the site of prospect. These, in turn, derive from Rhodes Memorial, slightly further up the slope. In this context, the Rhodes statue was the most obvious materialization of a more generalized coloniality, which remains a part of the ambiguous legacy of the Groote Schuur estate and the University of Cape Town.

What form do the current and future catastrophes of the Anthropocene take? Adapting a concept from Rod Nixon, this communication makes a case for the notion of slow catastrophes, whose unfolding in space and time is uneven and entangled. Taking the events of Cape Town’s Day Zero drought as a case study, this paper examines the politics and poetics of water in the Anthropocene, and the implications of Anthropogenic climate change for urban life. It argues that rather than being understood as an inert resource, fresh drinking water is a complex object constructed at the intersection between natural systems, cultural imaginaries, and social, political and economic interests. The extraordinary events of Day Zero raised the specter of Mad Max-style water wars. They also led to the development of new forms of solidarity, with water acting as a social leveler. The paper argues that the events in Cape Town open a window onto the future, to the extent that it describes something about what happens when the added stresses of climate change are mapped onto already-contested social and political situations.

In 2017 Professor Nick Shepherd started the project 'The Walking Residency' at the Reinwardt Academy, enabling students and lecturers to connect places, identities, stories, climate, nature, people and animals with each other in new ways. Together with staff and students, he explored artistic research, using walking as a methodology to engage landscapes and histories, and rethinking time, materiality and memory.

Este artigo analisa o desenvolvimento histórico da arqueologia de contrato na África do Sul, enfatizando a trajetória do pensamento e da pratica arqueológica local. Para tanto enfatizaremos três aspectos. Primeiro, consideraremos como a teoria metropolitana viaja, enraíza-se e tem feitos locais particulares como parte do ordenamento disciplinar do conhecimento e da pratica. Um segundo objetivo geral é pensar sobre o que está em jogo nas políticas de memória após o Apartheid e os efeitos da arqueologia de contrato na mediação e mitigação das lutas populares sobre direitos, recursos e representação. Defendo que, em muitos casos, a função da arqueologia de contrato é disciplinar e educar tal luta, desviando-os por caminhos aceitáveis e canais burocráticos. O terceiro busca pensar como a arqueologia de contrato funciona como parte do colonialismo global, como um instigador e facilitador dos projetos globais. Discuto brevemente o caso do Congresso Arqueológico Mundial (WAC) e a Mineradora Rio Tinto, como um exemplo de cooptação da linguagem de engajamento por uma organização global. Meu argumento ao longo desta reflexão é que a arqueologia de contrato recapitula o colonialismo essencial da arqueologia disciplinar, apresentando-o com uma nova face e um disfarce contemporâneo apropriados aos tempos globais e pós-coloniais.

This paper examines the historical development of contract archaeology in South Africa, placing it in a trajectory of local archaeological thought and practice. In doing so, it sets out to do three things. The first is to consider how metropolitan theory "travels," takes root, and has particular, local effects as part of a disciplinary ordering of knowledge and practice. In South Africa, the advent of contract archaeology around the time of the 1994 elections was ironic in the sense that it foreclosed on the notion of a "people's archaeology," replacing it with forms of corporate accountability and models of business best practice. The second broad aim is to think about what is at stake in the politics of memory after apartheid, and the effects of contract archaeology in mediating and mitigating popular struggles around rights, resources and representation. I argue that, in many cases, the function of contract archaeology is to discipline and school such struggles, diverting them along approved tracks and bureaucratic channels. The third is to think about how contract archaeology functions as part of global coloniality, as an instigator and enabler of global designs. I briefly discuss the case of the World Archaeological Congress and Rio Tinto, as an example of the co-opting of a global organization and of a language of engagement. My argument throughout is that contract archaeology recapitulates the essential coloniality of disciplinary archaeology, presenting it with a new face and a contemporary disguise appropriate to global, postcolonial times.