The Wits City Institute and the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies invite you to attend a workshop on Memorialising Inequality with a site visit to the Rissik Street Post Office, 17th May 2018, 08h30-14h00.

Memorialising Inequality  Studio 2:The thresholds of the old City. How do adults and children engage in public space?

At this gathering, set in the Oppenheimer Park, alongside the Joubert Street Mall, filled with informal traders and The Rissik Street Post Office (RSPO) built in 1897, we will hear a description of the site, elements of its history, and its position as a threshold to what was the back entrance to the Post Office. It is practices and behaviors of daily life, in and around the old Post Office that must inevitably inform the activities envisaged for the future RSPO building. We need to question and understand the kinds of barriers of exclusion that will emerge?

As a follow on from Studio 1, where we discussed some objects such as toilets, beds and diamonds and how they might represent social inequality. In this meeting we will look at the current and historic social practices manifested in art, commerce, recreation and civil action in various parts of the City, specifically the RSPO precinct. We will seek to better understand, what geographic spaces are occupied by those in and around this threshold: informal traders, office workers, government employees, public representatives, police, general workers, homeless people, artists, architects, planners, engineers and visitors.  We will also research where the conversational places are and spaces where conversations of an organised nature, formal and non-formal, take place?

We will posit the idea of a ‘common room’ and how this may be established, even if only temporarily in the RSPO. We also wish to better understand how children are occupied outside of school and beyond the home? What is the daily life of a child in and around the RSPO? The proposed partners to this encounter are artists, architects, urban planners, museologists, academics and students, based at Wits and other Universities. 

Presentations by:

1. Njabulo Chipangura (Wits City Institute, Wenner Gren/Wadsworth African Doctoral Fellow) to introduce Eric Itzkin (COJ Department of Community Development’s Directorate of Arts, Culture and Heritage). Topic: An historical account of the Rissik Street Post Office
2. Patrick Bond (Professor of political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand Wits School of Governance). Discussion with invited guests.
3. Steven Sack (Steven Sack, Honorary Research Fellow, Wits City Institute) and Nicolas Sack (Co-founder of ASM Architects). Topic: Thresholds. How are they constituted?                            
4. Round Table of NGO representatives: Topic: How are our city children occupied?
5. Tanya Hugo (Curator and Manager of 56 Pim Studio). Topic: The Turbine Artfair Fringe. July 12th- 15th. The Partner Committee. What the Municipal Systems Act and City By-laws allows. What we are planning to exhibit?                                                                                                   

Dress Code: Closed shoes and trousers
 
Date: Thursday 17 May 2018 / 08h30-14h00

Venue: 56 Pim Studio ,56 Gwigwi Mwrebi Street, Newtown 

With site visit to Rissik Street Post Office

RSVP: 15 May 2018: 56pim.studio@gmail.com