Containers

Photos to accompany a forthcoming toli project titled Containers and Networks. Taken in Accra, Ghana, New York City, Oakland, Khayelitsha, South Africa and elsewhere by myself, The Wife, and DK - the brother-in-law with the keen architectural eye.

In New York the containers were an aesthetic and artistic display. In Oakland harbour they were functional, serving their original purpose in intermodal transportation from the container shipping port to the connecting road and rail networks. In Ghana and South Africa they were reinvented, appropriated and used as storefronts, as offices and as shelter. Thus a new architecture of utility and expedience borne of necessity is developing in my homeland.

The energy of the urban slums and the strength of our market traditions, communities and social living belie the current depictions of Brand Africa and the souls designated as the bottom of the pyramid. Like our bags and stamps, our containers and the globalized networks they encapsulate are forging new forms of markets, architecture, folklore and indeed historical memory. In many ways we are better equipped to inherit the wind - modern travelers adept at the hustle of modernity and the game of cultural interplay.

Containers and networks
Infrastructure and exigency
Markets and shelters

I love tomorrow.

Preliminary soundtrack: Sassafras - Boxcar Hobo

139 photos | 966 views

items are from between 21 Feb 2007 & 26 Jul 2007.