Monumenting Maboneng is a public performative installation by Austrian artist Oliver Hangl and Johannesburg-based theatre company, Kwasha! that took place in March 2019 along Johannesburg’s Fox Street in Maboneng. The performance formed part of The Centre for the Less Good Idea’s For Once programme.

At its core, Monumenting Maboneng is a performance concerned with the incidental nature of interaction in the city. Hangl, who is a performance artist and urban activist, produces work that fosters a consistent confrontation between human and environment. He pushes at the boundaries between physical and psychological spaces which sees his work taking place in both real and fictional settings. For Hangl, public space becomes theatrical stage as he develops a set of site-responsive experiences and interactions for incidental audiences. Kwasha! is a theatre company that is rooted in contemporary South African performance. Seeking to produce a kind of theatre that provokes, engages and challenges conventional theatrical norms for performer and audience alike, their collaboration with Hangl is well-suited.

Monumenting Maboneng is a firmly collaborative public performance that, through a collection of short public interventions along the east end of Fox Street in the bustling Maboneng precinct, responds to the local, social, political, and personal features of this space and time in Johannesburg. Picket boards, assembly lines, synchronised greetings and more comprise the tactics employed in Monumenting Maboneng. “Play your life or your life will be played” becomes a sonorous refrain, sounding out from both sides of a makeshift tunnel that unsuspecting tourists, locals, students, and tuk-tuk drivers alike are made to pass through.

As with so much public performance, many of the richer moments elicited by Monumenting Maboneng can be found in the passing stares, the bemused looks, the dismissive chuckles and the hesitant approaches of those who populate the streets, cars, taxis, restaurants and pavement stalls of Maboneng’s Fox Street. Finally, there are the tributary players that add to the performance – the sounds, the sites and the everyday ebb and flow of Maboneng – anchoring this collaborative body of work in the social, political and architectural realities of an ever-changing city precinct.

– David Mann

CREDITS:

PERFORMERS | Sibahle Prosper Mangena, Thulisile Mduvane, Vusi Petros Nkwenkwezi, Molatelo Tracey Maffa, Sinenhlanhla Mgeyi & Aaliyah Zama Matintela
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR | Oliver Hangl
COLLABORATORS | Kwasha! Theatre Company
PROJECT MANAGER | Shruthi Nair
STAGE MANAGER | Hayleigh Evans & POPArt Productions
PHOTOGRAPHERS | Thusi Vukani & Sizakele Angel Khumalo

Special thanks to The Austrian Federal Chancellery and the Austrian Embassy Pretoria for their collaboration and support.