Autobiography

Abstract

Post Apartheid freedom architecture constructs new narratives and encounters with our past. Often representing the collective memory, these spaces exclude peripheral memories, displaced communities and negate engaging with intangible heritage. These sites of memory are points of intersection where our past, present and future collide and where the individual and society is called to construct and anchor our identities and envision our future. The institutionalised history beckons an inevitable distortion; an agreement between selective remembering and forgetting and in that process of accessibility, identity is invented. The dissertation will focus on the contemporary constructs of identity in post apartheid South Africa, through a study of memory and remembering, set within the existing heritage conservation area of Marabastad, Pretoria. The architectural intent seeks to find a regional response to memory space. It aims to construct space where memory and community can be reactivated, confronted and explored- a setting that draws out memory and encourages reflection by relocating the intangible and varying perspectives into the public realm. The overall architectural intent seeks to challenge contemporary production of memory space, to disrupt the traditional notion of containment and to celebrate the relationship of the past to the present by acknowledging that the past cannot be framed in a linear manner. Architecture will be explored as a mnemonic device where memory can dwell with time such that it acquires a dynamic character freely accessible to individual interpretation.