The inhabitants and multiple publics of the restless city constantly test the limits of the city’s freedoms, its rules and safety, in a myriad of ways, from the encroachment of unhoused people upon pristine city spaces, to the encroachment of estate agents and property developers, not only on every available piece of land, but also on the truth and realities of an untransformed city, anxious to mark the city as safe and saleable. It is the specificities of these actions that public artists draw from, and what makes their temporal work instructive in how we read the contemporary city.In ‘Temporality and Public Art’, Patricia C. Phillips writes: ‘The errors of much public art have been its lack of specificity, its tendency to look at society – at the public – too broadly and simply. The temporary in public art is not about an absence of commitment or involvement, but about an intensification and enrichment of the conception of public. The public is diverse, variable, volatile, controversial; and it has its origins in the private lives of all citizens.’ The writers in Restless Infections have focused largely on artists who eschew the pursuit of artworks with an enduring classic statement for the specificity of an action, of activism, a provocation – in some respects, an energy of deconstruction and reconstruction that matches the surge and restlessness of the city. Drawing from the notion of public life in South Africa as a tenuous balancing act, at times giddying and precarious, between personal subjectivities and received notions of what it means to be public, the writers in this book have created a context that artists draw from. This shift and turn, laid bare in the meeting ground of multiple public histories and personal desires, needs new imaginaries and visions, visibilising submerged pasts and intuiting futures. The grammar and forms that have been generated by artists as a result talk to a certain optimism that such an articulation is not just possible, but vividly so, within multiple publics in the throes of decoloniality.

The book, then, has centred around these imaginaries, public art that has spoken over the years to a restlessness in a city (and country), navigating its post-colonial shifts and the decolonial yearnings of the majority of its inhabitants.