| Civil
Society organisations declared the Johannesburg
World Summit a complete failure. The "Corporates"
and the Corporate governed Governments declared it a
huge success.
No surprises there.
To the rest of the
world The Jo'burg Summit it was just another prime
time TV event; a well executed production of comedy,
drama, celebrities and suspense. Something
like the Miss World Pageant in reverse; all the ugly
people of the world got
together for one day in one place ...
The proceedings had
a familiar tone; we had the benevolent host, Thabo
Mbeki, floating about with the air of a Franciscan
monk completely oblivious to the crisis that besets
his country. We witnessed Robert Mugabe deliver yet
another brilliant oratory on a familiar subject and
Sam Nujoma reminded us again of why political
assassinations are common in Africa.
Then we had Colon
Powell shows us just how much America cares and Dubya's lapdog Tony Blair gave us yet another fine
display of British hypocrisy. And so it went - for
hour upon hour of TV broadcasts.
It was during one of
these broadcasts that I learned that the large
circus tent which had been erected up the road from
my studio was "the largest mobile Tensile
Structure in the world". And so my curiosity
was aroused and I decided to brave the masses and
visit the Ubuntu Village to see "The
Tensile" for myself.
Parking was no
problem and the organisation was faultless. In no
time I was running the gauntlet through a thousand
curio, T-shirt and CD vendors arriving at the
"biggest and bestest" circus tent in the
world somewhat out of breadth but otherwise intact.
The tent, or
"tensile" as the organisers like to call
it, was indeed large and filled to the brim with
exhibitors of all types and from all corners of the
world. I noticed that the South African Revenue
Service had outdone itself - once again - blowing
thousands of taxpayers Rands in opulence and magnificence.
The irony of such wastage at an exhibition on
Sustainable Development was my lasting impression.
I met and spoke with
some very nice people with very hopeful messages, I
came across the odd misguided fool, marveled at the spatial
quality of the tent and bounced about on its spongy
floors for a very entertaining and informative hour.
The call of nature
finally forced me out of the tent and I set about
exploring the rest of the "village". There
was, of course, nothing ubuntu nor village
about the exhibition. The feel of the place was much
like that of a tented refugee camp with lots and
lots of plastic bins and portable toilets. (Port-a-Loo
City might have been a more apt name.)
I had noticed on my
way into the tensile that there was a large white
tent of "Persian Style" surrounded by
Toyota heavy duty trucks and tons of rubbish camped
out on what used to be the old Wanderers soccer
fields.
It was the Antarctica
Exhibition and I walked into it with great
expectations. I walked out twenty minutes later
completely convinced that there will never again be
a World Summit on Sustainable Development.
The entire Antarctica
Exhibition experience exemplified corporate
ignorance at its best and human greed at its worst.
How anyone can possibly justify the entire exercise
is well beyond my reasoning powers.
The long walk back
to sanity and my African reality was paved with an
array of wind driven "sculptures" made
from rusty metal scrap which generated a cacophony
of such discordant magnitude that one could be
forgiven for thinking that the Mozambican army was
on the move up Corlett Drive.
Several metal
shipping containers had been filled with yet more
garbage arranged in various patterns and shapes,
pretending to be useful in some way or another but
failing miserably. The rich have an obsession with
garbage which the poor do not share. There is a
stupid perception that the Developing World is
populated by morons which are somehow especially
suited to making useless objects from garbage.
Shell-shocked and
dazzled by the futility of it all I sat down on the
grass to have a cigarette and marvel at the sight
before me. For the first time I looked beyond the
immediate perimeter of the Ubuntu Village and caught
an eyeful of the rear end of the new Ernst and Young
building which provided the western backdrop to the
exhibition.
The
all new (White) Corporate Power Salute |
I am not
partial to the building. It falls into the
"Pastiche" category as do most corporate
headquarters in Johannesburg and hence not worthy of
more than a casual glance. But something about the
odd signage layout caught my eye.
Any first year
architecture student will tell you that it is
fundamentally important to run vertical signage
"upwards" - it is a positive statement,
reads better and has more impact than signage which
runs "downward" into the ground.
Yet this lot chose
to run their name into the ground; the payoff, of
course, was the instant delivery of a white power
salute over the entire Ubuntu proceedings - the
first honest gesture I had seen all day. And I'd
seen enough ...
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