Revolution Room

Revolution Room was a public art programme developed by the Visual Arts Network of South Africa (VANSA) and situated in Cosmo City, a large mixed-income housing development on the north-western edge of Johannesburg. The programme ran from 2013 to 2016 and was funded by Arts Collaboratory, Doen, Goethe Institut and Pro Helvetia. Vaughn Sadie served as lead project manager and researcher throughout.

Cosmo City was deliberately selected as the site for the programme. Designed in 2001 as South Africa's first fully integrated mixed-income housing development, it represented one of the more ambitious attempts to address the housing shortfall and challenge apartheid urban planning by placing affordable housing closer to urban centres. At the same time, it was a context in which, as VANSA noted at the time, insufficient attention was given to the provision of broader social and cultural infrastructure. While locating a public art programme, the project sought to understand what new forms of cultural programming might be possible in that context.

The programme was developed across two phases. The first involved commissioning four artist-led projects in Cosmo City, developed through an international research partnership with PICHA from the Democratic Republic of Congo and microsillons from Switzerland, which ran a comparative process in Kinshasa in parallel. The shared question across both contexts was how artists and organisations could mediate and reflect on their processes in the public realm through participatory practice and interventions in common space.

Out of that work grew the Cosmo City Knowledge Project, a community-led research process in which residents were supported to identify themes and questions that mattered to them, conduct their own research, and make that work public. The Knowledge Project shifted the emphasis from artists working in a community toward a model in which the community itself was the primary researcher and producer.

The programme culminated in a joint publication with PICHA, Revolution Room, produced by VANSA, which brought together documentation and critical reflection on the work from both countries and serves as the primary record of the programme and its outcomes.

Organisation: VANSA
Lead project manager and researcher: Vaughn Sadie

‍Partners: PICHA (DRC), microsillons (Switzerland)
Funders: Arts Collaboratory, Doen, Goethe Institut, Pro Helvetia