In March 2021, in an unprecedented move, South Africa’s Infecting the City (ITC) – the largest and longest-running public art festival in the country – sported a name change: (Un)Infecting the City. The ITC had always been a provocative suggestion of an artist-driven takeover of the city. Artworks by, in the main, marginalised artists infiltrated the city’s pristine public spaces, disrupting its apartheid-era topography and logics with an abundance of site-specific interventions.

In 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic, infection as a daring provocation had to give way to something more sobering. With actual infection of the body so confoundingly close, threatening to overwhelm with hospitalisations, long-term suffering and death, it became necessary to qualify the weighty connotations that ‘infection’ held at the time. (Un)Infecting the City, imbued as it was with some of the playful irony of its precursor, was, as it turned out, more than a nod to a global health crisis. The change of name took cognisance of the devastation that the pandemic wrought on publicness itself.

The series of national lockdowns and curfews that Cape Town and South Africa as a whole were forced to endure to ‘flatten the curve’ of infections and safeguard an already frail healthcare system had taken a severe and ghostly toll on the public life of cities. Against this backdrop, (Un)Infecting the City’s programme of both online and limited in-person interventions unfolded as an experiment at invigorating the city safely, while supporting and restoring the artistic impulse to create in a time of great loss. It brought into sharp focus a question that the festival had been probing since it first began, but never in so loaded a context – how we make meaning of place and public in a deeply fragmented society.

Even though the pandemic had intensified the book’s rationale, work on Restless Infections began long before Covid-19. South Africa is a country where publicness and public gathering are central to how we live and have immense historical and political importance. It is a country, too, where spaces for most of the population continue to be small, under-resourced and overcrowded. The production of a restlessness, concomitant with a desire for both personal intimacy as well as community engagement beyond spatial restrictions and lack, characterises our society.