Until about March, I knew little to nothing about making plants grow. I have killed cacti from too much love and orchids from too little. I accidentally drank fertiliser and had to have my stomach pumped, and since then I have not touched it (fertiliser), no matter how starved the grass in my garden has looked. For my horticultural iniquities, I am curating a temporary botanical garden for Cape 09, a biennale that opens this Saturday in Cape Town. The project, called The First Official Provisional Fynbos Museum of the Greater Khayelitsha Area, is a makeshift fynbos garden designed for the periphery of the Lookout Hill Tourism Centre, a Tuscan-African architectural behemoth where Loyiso Qanya is curating an exhibition for Cape 09. I am working with three artists from Johannesburg who’ve designed and constructed the garden. Their names are Murray Kruger, Phillip Johnson and Rodan Kane Hart.

Curating a garden, I learned quickly, means shovelling manure — which may in fact be an apt metaphor for the job in any context. It also seems to mean learning how not to kill fynbos, and I hope, for the sake of the Ericas I planted today, that I have this part right. I am so up to my elbows in organic matter that I have not written anything terribly intelligent in a few weeks, but I just wanted to give all three-and-a-half of my readers in Cape Town a heads up about the opening which is on Saturday at 2pm at Lookout Hill, Spine Road, Khayelitsha (take the Spine Road turn-off from the N2 and Drive towards Mitchells Plein).

This is not self-promotion, well not any more than blogging is in the first instance — I’d just like to have you there so you can ask me why I’m being colonial and planting fynbos in a township and I can tell you that what I’m doing happens to be ironic and self-denigrating and is no missionary gesture.

There are many interesting precedents for temporary gardening interventions in art, although most of them happen in other countries. Robert Smithson’s posthumous Floating Island is the sort of thing I would kill to see floating on Zoo lake, and I really like Mark Dion’s archives or “museums” of the mundane, especially his Mobile Bio Types. For a bit more on this project, here is the blog I have been attending to in favour of this one.

And here is Cape Africa Platform’s (the organiser) cool but inscrutable website.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at 9:51 pm and is filed under Lifestyle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.