CAPE uses the locality and geography of Cape Town to stage and explore African visual culture, artistic practice and style in challenging and provocative ways.
CAPE therefore takes a critical approach to the interface between local African artistic practices and the international art circuit: what is lost and found in translation. CAPE questions what constitutes artistic practice and where it is located in terms of medium, geography, its production through economic relations and practices of curation, and its relation to the everyday, the social, and the political.
CAPE uses the urban fabric - both public space and the city’s hidden topographies – to catalyse cultural production. Cape Town is envisaged as a laboratory, an artist’s studio, in which innovative but sincere encounters with the role of artist, the location of artistic practice, and the production of discourses of cultural identity in contemporary society can take place.
CAPE addresses the global through this fine-grained attention to the texture of the local. Not only is Cape Town’s history as a port city addressed, but its current status as a port of call for emigrants, refugees and visitors from the rest of the continent. CAPE finds in Cape Town the African city, in all its contradictions.
By using the local as a microscope on the global, CAPE embraces the complexities of an African identity based on roots and routes; one which finds itself along the routes of exile, diaspora, creolisation and hybridity, while never losing the roots of its claims to home and belonging.
