Belief as a Material

I have never thought of a wall as a surface. A wall is a body. It sweats, it cracks, it carries the damp of the building behind it. When I paint a figure onto a wall in Salt River or in the Bo-Kaap, I am not decorating it — I am asking it to hold a belief for a while, knowing that it will not hold it forever.

People ask why I make work that I know will be painted over, weathered off, or demolished within a year. They mean it as a criticism. To me it is the entire point. The work is not the image. The work is the act of believing in something publicly, in a city that has spent centuries telling certain people their beliefs were illegal.

The wall remembers

When the municipality began clearing a row of buildings near the old slave lodge site, the demolition uncovered something nobody had planned for. Beneath the foundations were bones — a burial ground that the city's own maps had forgotten. The arborists I had been arguing with for months, about a single tree I wanted to leave standing, suddenly seemed like a smaller conversation.

"The work is not the image. The work is the act of believing in something publicly."

I repainted that piece three times as the heritage negotiations dragged on. Each version was a little more faded than my plan, because the wall kept telling me what it wanted. There is a humility in that which I think design, capital-D Design, often refuses. We are taught to impose. The street teaches you to negotiate — with weather, with people, with the dead.

Designed to disappear

Faith, the word I have carried as a name for twenty years, is not religious for me. It is a discipline of attention. It is the decision to make something carefully even though — especially though — it will not last. The most honest object a designer can make is one that admits its own ending.

That is what I would say to anyone starting now: stop designing for permanence. Permanence is a fantasy that mostly serves power. Design for the conversation the work starts, and let the wall have the last word.