Politics Makes for Good Cartoons

Design Indaba alumnus Zapiro receives award from Dr Robert Russell, executive director of the Cartoonist Rights Network.

Design Indaba alumnus Zapiro receives award from Dr Robert Russell, executive director of the Cartoonist Rights Network.

Two leading South African political cartoonists have both been honoured with international awards. Jonathan Shapiro – aka Zapiro – received the Cartoonists Rights Network 2007 award for courage on July 6.

Not to be outdone, graphic artist, muralist and political cartoonist Nanda Soobben scooped three awards in San Francisco on July 9. These comprised a Special Congressional Recognition Award at the World Affairs Council, an Amnesty International Award for "speaking the truth through the power of cartoons", and a Certificate of Honour from the mayor of San Francisco for "showing leadership through his work".

Nanda Soobben scooped three awards in San Francisco on July 9th 2007

Both cartoonists have long burnt the torch of truth through satire. Also recent winner of the Mondi South African Journalist of the Year award, Zapiro has been a political cartoonist for more than two decades. In the 1980s, he was detained without trial for his anti-apartheid activities. The demise of apartheid has not necessarily made it easier for him, as he currently weathers a R15-million defamation lawsuit from former deputy president Jacob Zuma.


As the only published black political cartoonist during the apartheid period, Soobben has also earned his stripes of adversity. Soobben moved to the US when he found his anti-establishment work could not be featured in local newspapers. Using this time to study and fortify international exposure, he returned in 1994 to establish CFAD (Centre for Fine Art, Animation and Design) in Durban.

Gold Loerie for Design Indaba

Interactive Africa clinched 10 Loerie awards at the ceremony held in Margate from July 28 to 29. The booty included Design Indaba's gold award in the Live Events category, Jupiter Drawing Room's Grand Prix award for its integrated Design Indaba campaign, "Ideas", and Gloo Digital Design's silver for their work on the Interactive Africa website.

Trashing the Concept of Luxury

Today we suffer from a surfeit of luxury. Designer labels are no longer the preserve of a wealthy elite; expensive watches, cars and holidays are no longer only for the jet set. To our parents, champagne and smoked salmon were considered rare delicacies; today they are the norm. Luxury has become democratised and, in order to stay ahead of the masses, the rich and famous have to engage in ever more extreme forms of hyper-consumption.

Curated by Marcus Fairs, Trash/Luxe at Liberty, London, in September, will feature designers who challenge the notion of "luxury" being defined by the opulence and rarity of materials. Instead, Fairs gathers designers who believe that the preciousness of an object has more to do with the attitude with which an object was created, the love that was put into its manufacture, and the story the finished object has to tell.

Cape Town’s Heath Nash elevates the local "backyard" craft technique of fashioning objects from discarded plastic bottles into an art form. Dutch designer Ineke Hans creates furniture from quotidian materials such as polystyrene, plaster of Paris and bandages. Yorkshire-born Stuart Haygarth collects and sorts objects he finds on beaches and in thrift stores before turning them into beautiful and often spectacular chandeliers.

Max Lamb creates huge, sculptural chairs from blocks of expanded polystyrene, which he "carves" with a claw hammer. Karen Ryan assembles second-hand furniture into dramatic new compositions. Random International create striking, kinetic light sculptures from cannibalised computer monitors. Durban’s Zenzulu fuse traditional techniques with modern materials in intricately woven telephone wire baskets.

Design Indaba Date Change

Design Indaba will fortify as the South African Design Week with the expo and conference programme running over a week from February 23 to 29, 2008. The expo will precede the conference next year and will be extended for an extra day, from February 23 to 26, followed by the conference from February 27 to 29. Due to demand from delegates to attend the Specialist Indabas, they will run parallel to the expo.

Hands-on Technology

Steel Seafront Café

Thomas Heatherwick continues to produce public monuments at the meeting point of architecture, sculpture and engineering in the recently opened East Beach Café in Littlehampton.

Instead of another yacht-club piece of seaside architecture, Heatherwick and his design team wanted to create a building that could be a popular local café and attraction for the area, an interesting place of refuge with generous views of the sea, and a cosy atmosphere whatever the weather.

"The seaside at Littlehampton has a raw beauty. It isn't fiddly or fuzzy, or about dolphins and anchors, and our building has been designed to fit into this context. Our challenge was to build a functional and durable structure on a tight budget, where you can eat a Mr Whippy or drink Dom Pérignon," said Heatherwick.

The result is a long, narrow building made of rust-patinated steel. It is lower lying than the previous application and takes the form of a rounded, stepping building in a location dominated by the horizon. The unusual form of the building is derived in part from its location and the long thin site, and partly from its need for roller shutters. Its contoured profile comes from elongating the roller shutter box above each glass window or door, winding it around the building and then tucking it underneath. This also gives the windowless inland elevation an interesting articulated form.

The shell of the building provides both its skin and structure. It has a steel outer layer that has been allowed to weather before being fixed. The 60-seat dining room has an extensively glazed frontage to give views of the sea, with over-sailing eaves providing shade from the sun, so customers can dine both inside and out.

The Tale of Wins

Cape Town’s Blackheart Gang has received a special distinction award for Tale of How from Annecy, the animation equivalent of Cannes. This is the sixth award for the trio, which comprises Jannes Hendrikz (compositor and creative director), Ree Treweek (illustrator and character developer) and Marcus Wormstorm (musician and writer). Fuelled by their widespread success, the gang is now working on the third part of the Dodo Project trilogy, The Tale of Then.

Sustainable Office Furniture

Product designers Ayse Birsel and Bibi Seck have launched a new range of sustainably designed conference and teamwork tables entitled Motive. The collection was inspired by nature and uses the efficient 120-degree connections of a honeycomb and modular, universal legs. This makes it easy to snugly daisy-chain tables, creating grouped configurations that use the branch-like leg for computer wire management. Every element is designed for disassembly and can be easily separated for recycling.

Salzburg Goes Afro

10 Houses = 10 Families

Design Indaba’s 10 x 10 Housing Project has challenged 10 architectural teams to provide innovative and dynamic design solutions for the low cost housing sector. The allocation of the houses took place in mid-June, in the form of a lucky draw audited by KPMG. The emotional response of the winners was confirmation of the significance of the project. Currently the architectural plans are being finalised and building is set to commence in January 2008.

The architectural teams are: Jo Noero (Cape Town) and Cameron Sinclair (San Francisco); Vanessa September (Cape Town) and Lindy Roy (New York); Luyanda Mpahlwa (Cape Town) and Will Alsop (London); Andrew Makin and Janina Masojada (Durban), and Christoph Egret (London); Lesley Carstens and Silvio Rech  (Johannesburg), and Thomas Heatherwick (London); Stefan Antoni (Cape Town) and Eva Jiricna (London); Ruben Reddy  (Durban) and Mark Dytham (Tokyo); Martin Kruger (Cape Town) and David Adjaye (London); Henning Rasmus (Johannesburg) and Shigeru Ban (Tokyo); and Don Albert (Cape Town) and Tom Dixon (London).

Fashion the White Cube

She is Dancing for the Rain with her Hand in the Toaster saw Just Nje/Amper Couture’s Athi Patra-Ruga’s one-off garments suspended from butcher’s hooks to create abject body forms. Hosted by Cape Town’s Michael Stevenson Gallery during June, the clothes carried names such as Get in the Car, I Am Your Mother’s Friend, suggesting an undercurrent of abuse. The clothes were drenched in Rapeseed (canola) oil, an ordinary cooking ingredient also used as a substitute for lubricant in working-class communities. The darkness of these dripping outfits was offset by frivolous details such as zebra-striped gold lamé frills that recall the late Brenda Fassie’s iconic aesthetic.

The Campana Conscience

The Campana Brothers’s TransNeomatic is the newest design to be launched through Artecnica’s Design with Conscience initiative. This follows the success of Stephen Beck’s collaboration with South African artisans and Hella Jongerius’s work with Peruvian ceramists and bead-embroiders. TransNeomatic was produced in Vietnam as a response to the enormous amount of disposed tyres from the populace’s ubiquitous scooters and the highly evolved culture of handcraft skills.

Chimurenga at Documenta 12

While David Goldblatt, Churchill Madikida and Guy Tillim were recognised in the galleries, Chimurenga magazine was one of 90 international magazines to be represented in a dedicated magazine project at documenta 12 in Kasel from June 16 to July 23. Conversations With Poets Who Refuse To Speak, its latest edition, included a heady mix of words and images slashed throughout with an imperialist red pen. Contributors include Asef Bayat, Geoff Dyer, Gael Reagon, Sandile Dikeni, Achille Mbembe, Stacy Hardy, Suren Pillay, Ralph Lemon, Mario Benjamin, the Ramallah Underground and Gordon Parks.

Passport to Paris

Thabani Mavundla, David Tlale, Craig Jacobs and Thula Sindi were selected by Gavin Rajah and SA Tourism to represent South African fashion design at the 2007 Paris Fashion Week. The group spent four months putting their collections together under the mentorship of Rajah, before the C’est Couture showcase on July 5. Chosen for their original application of indigenous South African elements and commitment to empowerment through fashion, the show wowed international buyers and audience members. Rajah also took the opportunity to launch his own Autumn/Winter 2007/8 collection.

Illustration in Book of Best

Durban illustrator and designer Scott Robertson’s Green at the Gills has been selected for inclusion in the Lürzer's Archive special 200 Best Illustrators Worldwide. The illustration was first published in Design Indaba magazine in 2006.