Pictures by Paul Fetters 

Travelling into Durban’s CBD from the Berea, one is met by two iconic and historic city landmarks.  In the foreground the spires of the red brick Roman Catholic Emmanuel Cathedral while just behind, the two gilt-domed minarets of the Juma Musjid Mosque.

In what can be described as a profound demonstration of interfaith solidarity, respected leaders across the faith spectrum, including leaders of the Juma Musjid Mosque gathered earlier this year to pledge their support for the Denis Hurley Centre project: a community outreach initiative spear headed by the Emmanuel Cathedral under the guidance of Fr Stephen Tully and project coordinator Paddy Kearney.

The new centre will be an innovative outreach facility to better serve the growing number of poor and homeless people in the area.

The proposed centre is to be named after the late Archbishop Emeritus Denis Hurley who served at the Emmanuel Cathedral for 60 years of his life and is remembered for his many and significant altruistic contributions to the city of Durban. Read the rest of this entry »

A renowned hip-hop poet and Graffiti artist friend of mine and I recently engaged into a drunken dinner-party debate/row over the ubiquitous tagging of public property going down in Durban.

Tagging to my “mother-Grundy” mind, is a creatively hollow pastime appropriated and practised by bored “Banksy-befok” adolescents who like to think of themselves as “urban anarchists”.

The subject of our row was a local Durban tagger who had been recently trialed in court for 850 counts of tagging and now found himself slapped with a hefty prison sentence.

While I would not wish a prison sentence upon anyone, I would imagine that after 850 counts of tagging, one might decide to shift their lacklustre modes of rebellion in favour of a more effective means of urban commentary.

Time it would seem to grow up and move on. 

“It’s not considered vandalism” my friend had argued, “if it doesn’t break or defeat the purpose of the object. Spraying something on a wall doesn’t destroy its function, the wall still stands. How can you tell me this is a punishable crime” he ranted, “when murderers and rapists in this country get off from their charges scott free?”

While (sub)urban hip-hoppers may consider it an “innocuous” and even “subversive” act, one must pity the grouchy local residents digging weekly into pensions for the buckets of paint to erase the offending marks from their walls.

Offering a refreshing and very welcome take on the contentious art form, is a group of ex Durban Vega Brand and Communications School students, who were inspired by the work of British street artist Paul Curtis (AKA “Moose”) who began pioneering his form ‘Green’ or ‘reverse Graffiti’ three years ago.

Curtis (legend has it) first hit upon the idea while working as a kitchen porter in a restaurant scrubbing mountains of pots and pans. One dreary evening while trying to erase a grease stain on the sink wall before him, he discovered he had cleaned a large white patch onto the grimy surface.

It didn’t take long before the aspirant street artist began conquering the cityscapes of London, applying his vigorous selective scrubbing to more prominent walls and bridges. (see 2 images below)

Read the rest of this entry »

Durban based furniture designer and artist Xavier Clarrise is unmistakably French. French ,you could say, in the way film maker Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie) makes cinema and Marcel Duchamp once conceived sculpture.

He is a tempest of energy, ideas and creativity, speaking with a musical accent and at a rapid pace (his eeees elongated for emphasis.). He is unbridled in his levels of invention and flamboyant in his enthusiasms. Get him on a subject he loves (his interests are many and varied) and he will unleash a torrent of philosophical musings and observations. Get him on a subject he loathes (mention the word ‘Unique’) and he will pace the room, gesticulating like a conductor coaxing his orchestra towards a Wagnerian crescendo.

Clarisse was born in Lyon, France and claims that as long as he can remember he has been obsessed with making things.  He studied mechanical theory and technical drawing before attending the prestigious “L’ecole nationale des beaux art” of Saint Etienn. After specialising in sculpture and product design, he began to travel the world working as a freelance designer. It was in London that he met and married his wife Suzanne, relocating back to her hometown of Durban three years ago.

In recent years, Clarisse has applied himself in many areas and arena’s, working in furniture design, sculpture and installation. He has collaborated on various international and sight specific art projects in between launching a furniture range (vanities and the like) alongside Durban manufacturer Marco Bertacco for ITALTILE outlets.

His more idiosyncratic commissions can currently be found gracing many a trendy Durban household, eatery and more recently,  soccer stadium presidential suite. Read the rest of this entry »

To kick start each morning of the South African Military Societies International Anglo Boer War History conference, held in Ladysmith two weeks ago, a blank was fired from a British Naval 12 pounder. This I soon discover is the Military equivalent of slugging back a double Espresso first thing the morning. A reverberating shock to attendees’ ear drums and pace makers, prepping us all for the illuminating and often arduous day of battle-speak ahead.

Held at the Platrad Lodge, overlooking significant Anglo Boer War battle terrain, the conference boasted a range of international and local speakers talking on topics that ranged from this War’s many myths, tactics and military blunders as well as revisionist takes on controversial and largely misunderstood historical figures of the time.

With one hundred and ten years having passed since the War, it seems Boer and Brit can now comfortably share the same room without wanting to ‘bliksem’ each other every time things get a little heated. Throughout the conference, areas of research and interest were analysed with healthy amounts of objectivity and the atmosphere reminded one of a jovial old boy’s reunion.

The aim of the conference was to provide a new source of understandings around the causes, events and consequences of Anglo Boer War. As organiser and military historian Ken Gillings stated in his opening address: “Such a conference is arranged so we can learn from the past and ensure that such atrocities never again occur in the future.”

Certainly the seminal purpose of any historical gathering– the very hook on which history’s precarious future hangs– is how to ensure that younger generations of South Africans are made privy to such findings. Read the rest of this entry »

Working towards a philosophy of architecture without walls, Mauritian born and Durban based architect Doung Anwar Jahangeer’s guided  city- walks  have been  reshaping and shifting perceptions around the cities ’in-between’ spaces. Neil Coppen treads the pot- holed asphalt.

Uniting a love of architecture with art and activism with imagining, Doung (who completed a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the then University of Natal in 1996) labels his city-walk initiative as an exuberant exploration, as well as a humbling cautionary tale, an allegory on the infinite complexities of spaces and timings in the city of Durban.

I have lived in Durbs all my life, yet after a five-hour meander alongside this urban Shaman and his toret’s of inner-city- insight returned feeling as if I had just visited a foreign country. The result is of course an unsettling wake-up call–one that tends to highlight the apathy with which engage the seemingly ‘inane’ everyday. Read the rest of this entry »

My brother Gregg and his wife Angella (a web developer and illustrator) live on a mountainside in Fishhoek in the Western Cape. Their house overlooks the main swimming beach. On a balmy summer’s day their lounge window frames an idyllic picture: a stretch of white beach lining an azure coastline littered with bathers, surfers, tourists and the like.

From such a height the people on the beach tend to resemble the miniature figurines populating a model train-set or the busy layout of a Where’s Wally picture book.

On Tuesday afternoon, around 15:35 Gregg and Angella heard a commotion on the Fishhoek beach and ran outside to see what was happening. Glancing down at the Fishhoek bay they spotted a giant shadow (of about 150m) gunning towards a colourful bobbing object.  From such a distance they were unable to make out whether this object was a bather, bouy or beach ball?

It’s now pretty well known that the shadow turned out to be a Great White Shark, a suspicion confirmed when they saw the creature break the waves and wrap its jaws around the bobbing lump before submerging itself again and taking the object with it. Gregg being the techno savvy guy he is– with i-phone permanently attached to hip– Tweeted the sighting on micro blogging portal Twitter as fast as it seemed to happen.

His first Tweet read……

Tue 12 Jan at 15:40: Holy shit, we just saw a GIGANTIC shark eat what looked like a person right in front of our house in Fishhoek. Unbelievable.

Seven minutes later he posted a new update……

Tue 12 Jan at 15:47: We are dumbstruck, that was so surreal. That shark was HUGE. Like dinosaur huge.

This was followed by further tweets over the next few hours that included details on the arrival of the emergency services and confirmation that the colourful bobbing lump was indeed a human-being.

What is both fascinating and disturbing to see was how quickly these ‘tweets’ were snapped up by Internet news agencies and how fast news, via the rapid and tangled broadband grapevine, is capable of getting around these days. Read the rest of this entry »

To this day the Art Deco style remains a contentious and oft disputed entry into the Architectural journals and history books. With its penchant for excessive ornamentation, non functional frills and outlandish colour schemes, the style is all too often dismissed by contemporary Architects as a brief and embarrassing rush of blood to depression era architects’ heads.  Certainly the conservative colonial population of Durban thought so, when in 1931 the veritable anti- Christ of architecture reared it unsightly head in the form of Art Deco apartment block known as the Enterprise Building in Aliwal Street. Unhappily for its detractors, the style would flourish like an overly flamboyant fungus in city and suburb across the country before petering out during the outbreak of the second -world war.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s vaguely terrifying speaking the words of a Pulitzer winning playwright as she sits inches away from you in an opening night auditorium. Almost impossible to inhabit any semblance of a character when you find yourself imagining her ears to be pricked by your mis-delivery or mis-interpretation of her precious prize- winning words.

Margret Edson, celebrated American Playwright of Wit, was recently flown out by the American Embassy to attend the opening night of Kickstart’s version of the production, directed by Steven Stead and featuring Clare Mortimer in the role of Professor Vivian Bearing. Read the rest of this entry »

Oscar Wilde once remarked: “fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” He does of course have a point. From the moment Neanderthal man first took bone needle and sinew thread to bear skin, fashion has ,over the ages, undergone a swift and radical series of transformations. The things we wear, or have worn in the past, providing us with a colourful record of humanities varying flashes of creativity and stupidity, vanity and ingenuity. Coming to think about it there is nothing –from glad- wrap to gall bladder– we have not tried to drape or dangle from our mortal frames.

The development of fashion, as Wilde wryly remarked, is not particularly easy to keep track of. It has, since the beginning of time, been a fickle art-form, with today’s cutting edge trends promptly resigned to tomorrow’s bargain bins.

Given the daunting task of rummaging through and conserving the contents of KZN’s second- hand closets, is the Durban Museums devoted textile conservator, Neil Stuart- Harris. On the morning of my visit, I find Harris doubled over a zinc-basin in a roomy old warehouse in down- town Durban, working with the focus and delicacy of a man in the process of defusing a time bomb. One wrong move and it seems the piece of 18^th century Bedfordshire lace he is handling might perish from out of his hands.

Read the rest of this entry »

I hate being advertised too, lumped into a demographic and assumed to be a certain type of individual, who will want to dress a certain way and drink a certain beer while driving a certain car. From a recent experience at the Gateway shopping mall (and more disturbingly a urinal in the gent’s bathroom) I have come to conclusion that advertising has officially gone too far.

Last Friday evening I made the dreadful mistake of braving Gateway (The theatre of shopping) to attend a movie at Cinema Noveau. One of the joys of Noveau is, of course, not having to endure the half- hour bombardment of trailers and adverts used to indoctrinate teeny boppers in the more mainstream movie houses. You know the drill—roller skating meerkats and offensive Kentucky fried stereotypes served up by the greasy bucket load. Teenagers at this mall thankfully avoid cinema Noveau like a plague of impending acne. This, you see, is the designated arena of the ‘arty fartsy’ types. Movies that are just like sooooo annoying cause you have to like read the film half the time. Read the rest of this entry »