gaelen pinnock

This project explores the idea of a personal spatial legacy. It has to do with personal artefacts; the things we gather; the physical marks and impressions we leave on our environment. This could be legacy when unfiltered, or heritage when treasured, inherited or documented.

Where heritage prioritises something by collective consensus, legacy is a less filtered, broader inheritance of things past. Heritage is about quality, selection, prioritisation, inheritance, documented memory and tradition. Legacy is about quantity, fate, circumstance and a past that is given to you and not selected.

Homeless people are excluded from almost all collective societal frameworks. They own very little and have no social capital. Also, with Cape Town following a neoliberal path of gentrification, sanitisation and public space controlled by private organisations, these individuals are increasingly marginalised. They are being pushed out of the city as parks are fenced, soup-kitchens closed and intimidation by city officials and other private or semi-private entities increases. They have little opportunity to build any form of heritage

Remnants is a growing series that looks at the artefacts of former use on the streets of Cape Town. These artefacts could be objects, surface impressions and markings or projected imaginings, things that hint at someones brief existence in an urban space. The series aims to capture and extract the constituent parts that make up this meagre legacy, in part to legitimise it and in part to make us aware of our corresponding excess.