Clive van den Berg is responsible
for the art and design of several of South Africa’s most prominent
public projects, including the landmark Northern Cape Legislature, the
Mandela Foundation museum exhibitions for the Center of Memory, and the
museums of Constitution Hill. On large-scale institutional projects,
van den Berg typically operates with teams representing diverse constituencies:
urban planners and policy makers, architects, landscape designers, museum
curators, community liaison officials and representatives of local governments.
At
Kimberley, where he worked with the Luis Ferreira da Silva architects,
van den Berg pioneered a new strategy for integrating forms of the
local landscape and indigenous aesthetics into the overall building design,
while also training local artisans as part of a skills transference
project
aimed
at long-term sustainability. The result is a world-renowned and uniquely
South African state edifice: a monument to the people of the Northern
Cape. Every project commences with an assessment of the history of
the location,
its social possibilities and its aesthetic needs. Van den Berg endeavors
to incorporate art into all aspects of the design - and never leaves
it as a mere afterthought to site construction.
The museums of Constitution
Hill, which van den Berg designed, informed by a team consisting of
Lauren Segal, Steve Mokoena, Audrey Brown, Sharon Court, Mark Gevisser
and Churchill Madikida, were produced in spaces that had once served
as prisons,
and
their transformation
is
intended
to achieve
a
threefold goal: to preserve individual and collective memory about
the prisons and
experiences that people had in them; to educate future publics about
the place of the prisons in South African history; and to create
aesthetic forms appropriate to a hybrid institution where the work of
the museum
is combined with that of ongoing research and policy-making. The
visual organization of Constitution Hill, the use of both old materials
and
new
curatorial strategies, is based in the belief that institutional
space shapes social relationships.
In contemporary South Africa, much public
institutional design is aimed at the cultivation of memory and the memorialization
of the past. Van
den Berg’s integrative approach to art and architectural construction
has allowed him to produce spaces in which previously unheard or even
suppressed narratives can also be articulated. His exhibitions for the
Mandela Foundation
have been oriented toward this end: in showcasing materials from the
Foundation’s
archive, he has developed exciting new formats and vocabularies in which
to reveal a past that had hitherto remained largely unknown, making it
accessible to a new generation of South African citizens.
Several of these
monumental projects has been the subject of a major book. Both “A
Prisoner in the Garden,” the exhibition curated for
the Mandela Foundation, and the Constitution Hill museums are the objects
of books published by Penguin Press.
Text © Rosalind Morris 2005