Infecting the City is an annual arts festival that takes place in communal areas of Cape Town and Mbombela, Mpumalanga, South Africa. The festival aims to bring socially engaged performances and visual arts into unconventional spaces around the city and outside of mainstream theatres and galleries. Infecting the City is freely accessible and open to the public, while it focuses on multi-disciplinary artistic excellence, it now includes performances and productions from both South African as well as international acts. Birthed in 2008 out of the vision of The Africa Centre to continue a spirit of diverse collaborations and performances once held by the annual Spier Summer Season, Infecting The City received funding for the project by Spier to create the festival with “a singular aim – to infect the city with performances that captures the complexities of our daily lives”.
Infecting the City is the only public arts festival that takes place in South Africa and it seeks to disrupt the everyday lives of the public with unexpected and astonishing works in attempt to transform the way we view these spaces. The festival challenges the conventions of authority, power, freedom of speech and the permission we have to acquire in order to speak, think or act. In this way, we deprive ourselves from the potential of growing and the opportunities we have to share our stories. Infecting the City directly interrupts these notions of needing permission to express ourselves in our human capacity by creating these spaces of interventions in public areas. These moments are intended to evoke empathy, curiosity, new ideas and a greater understanding of vulnerability and respect
The festival takes place over the course of one week in attempts to transform and open up a shared environment between people and spaces to make it more vibrant, stimulating and welcoming. The festival brings this to light through various programmes and disciplines such as dance, performance and visual arts, poetry and music. Audiences move from one performance, installation or intervention in a specific order and get an opportunity to discover the city in a way they wouldn’t have before. Cape Town programmes run both during the day and the evening, whilst Mbombela runs day programmes only. Although the festival is advertised to ‘expected’ audiences, the locations allow for the unsuspected passer-by to witness, participate and experience the intervention on their way.
Infecting the City has a different theme every year that the artists and performers are required to respond to in their works as a result the festival has grown tremendously through the years drawing in more artists and audiences – growing from 5,000 to over 36,000 between 2008 and 2014. Over the years, the festival has been curated by renowned artists such as Brett Bailey and Jay Pather. The festival also partnered with the Gordan Institute of Performance and Creative Arts (GIPCA) which emerges from the University of Cape Town’s Creative and Performing Arts departments in 2013. This partnership created a larger focus on interdisciplinary art forms that engaged with spaces in a more vigorous way. Furthermore, GIPCA partnered with the Public Culture CityLab (African Centre for Cities, UCT) with ‘Thinking the City’ to host talks and discussions that brings to attention the issues faced in surrounding spaces and strengthening the unity of cultures and diversity in dealing with these issues.
Throughout the years the festival has had performers and artists such as Mamela Nyamza, a highly acclaimed South African born choreographer, Nicola Elliot and the Michaelis School of Fine Arts.
In 2010 the festival became known as Infecting the City Public Arts festival in order to better reflect what the festival embodied. By making it a ‘public’ display of art, it challenges notions of an elitist art culture by bringing it into the streets and making it more accessible to everyone. Public Art in South Africa has become a platform of raising debate and shifting understanding of what society has come to view ‘identity’ as. These public art displays have come in the form of sculptures, murals, billboards and performing arts; placing them in the middle of society where it forces them to engage with it and consider the spaces it occupies. Infecting the City Public Arts Festival has made this a central idea by accommodating modern, contemporary and traditional ideas in the performances. It releases new and innovative creative ideas and makes these ideas accessible to receptive audiences. This also alters the audience perspective and stretches the boundaries of what society has set with regards to the arts.