Cape Town, a starkly segregated and vastly unequal city, is a place where, undeniably, ‘apartheid is set in stone and poured in concrete’.The city is a microcosm of the larger South African picture: a perversely prime example of the confluence of spatial apartheid, neo-liberal economic development policy and the calcified social relations that are the legacy of our history. In South Africa as a whole, there is ‘perhaps no precedent of what a democratic and inclusive city, town and community borne from good policy could look or feel like’.The public art of Infecting the City under discussion in this chapter all took place in the city centre, an area that was historically the reserve of whiteness: white colonial occupation led to white-dominated businesses, residences and political power (from the Cape Colony onwards). People of colour have been categorically and violently excluded from this centre, relegated to the periphery and kept out of even peripheral access to the city. Recent development in the city centre has entrenched its inaccessibility and unaffordability. Private investment in buildings and public space is currently transforming the city into ‘a post-modern space of high-end production, service and consumption that is aestheticized, commoditized and historicized’.

Infecting the City invites artists to turn their attention to the city as a sociopolitical subject and a space for intervention. This often results in work that addresses not what is there, but what is absent. The festival was founded in 2007 and brings free, socially engaged performance and visual art into the public spaces of Cape Town. The programme is created through an open call and curators work with participating South African and international artists to put their work into dynamic tension with the city. For me and many other artists and curators, the festival has been an induction into the radical potential of applying critical, creative practice to our city by engaging directly with diverse publics, in public space, and intervening in the social fabric of our home. Its inclusionary and provocative ethos is a challenge to us as makers to work ethically and be bold in our aesthetic experimentation.