FALLING MONUMENTS, RELUCTANT RUINS, the persistence of the past in the architecture of apartheid

318pp., illus., paperback, Johannesburg, 2021

"Falling Monuments, Reluctant Ruins offers a nuanced perspective that critically engages with historical spaces, events and monuments. It advances current debates, as well as calls into question how to move forward (or not) in processes of memorialising and reusing spaces in which oppression was enacted or challenged. It addresses important questions about the ways in which history, memory, agency and transformation are actively socially constructed and reconstructed within landscapes and, in particular, through public spaces, land, buildings and statues." Jennifer Houghton, Urban Futures Centre, Durban University of Technology

Contributions include:

"Land Dispossession and the Ghosts of the Medupi Power Station" by Faeeza Ballim

"The Persistence of Robben Island: abolition and the prison museum" by Kelly Gillespie

"Ejaradini: notes towards modelling black gardens as a response to the coloniality of museums" by MADEYOULOOK

"The Apartheid Pass Office in Johannesburg and a Heritage of Destruction" by Hilton Judin

"Facing (Down) the Coloniser? The Mandela Statue at Cape Town’s City Hall" by Cynthia Kros

"‘Where’s Our Monument?’ Commemorating Indian indentured labour in South Africa" by Goolam Vahed.

Architect Hilton Judin is Director of Postgraduate Architecture in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand. Together with the History Workshop, he developed the exhibition [setting apart], and was curator and co-editor with Ivan Vladislavic of blank____Architecture, apartheid and after. He is also the author of Architecture, State Modernism and Cultural Nationalism in the Apartheid Capital.