Land of the scattered seed : nature, memory and silence

Abstract

South Africa’s shameful migrant labor policies of the past have left a socioeconomic mark on the families of millions. The ruin in the garden has long been a fascination of many artists and poets, but in the case of an abandoned compound complex alongside Cullinan’s diamond mine, the author is left unsettled with the thought of the romanticisation of the compound falling to ruins. The anesthesia has to stop at some point. Nature and time have acted upon the compound and has allowed for a large amount to be erased from the publics’ greater memories, (partly due to its inherent isolation and its inaccessibility to the public). Nature is only doing what it knows best - to carry on and heal. The convoluted question needs to be asked, when does it become necessary for human influence to occur and stop a natural process of decay, especially in question of preserving tangible heritage? In Skelton’s poem, it is suggested that the place is ‘filled with music”. This dissertation will attempt the opposite; to fill a place with silences so as to expose and reveal the narrative of the hardships endured to the lives of so many before us. The proposed intervention manifests as a meeting point between nature and the memory embedded in the site, and allows for mediation between healing, adaptive reuse and memorialization. A dialogue must be formed between what is ruin, the new condition and its relation to the wild nature of the Highveld as well as the new introduced vegetation for consumption and research.