The week we moved in to the house, the actual physical Democracy House, workers started tearing down the wall surrounding the house. Most houses in Cape Town have walls of the kind that keep intruders out and inhabitants safe.
Like many other walls in this area, this wall was built of red bricks covered with cream coloured plaster. A group of workers from a Rastafarian township are executing the job of literally hacking down the wall and then building it up again, brick by brick, cement in between, and all around. The taking down and rebuilding of the wall soon became a symbol of what was going on inside of the house.
We were working on the concept of the digital version of The Democracy House. How will it look? What are you supposed to do there? What’s the purpose of the house? How do we best get people to come to the site and make a statement or join the debate? Ideas were bouncing all over the place. Our minds were spinning. But as with physical building projects, the first draft is rarely the one used for the final building. We were constantly coming up with ideas, writing them down, collecting them under titles such as “Cataloge of ideas” or “Charlotte’s outreach” and “Press kits reduced”.
Every day, we had long meetings where we went through the day’s labour, discarded certain ideas, and developed others. Once or twice we had big meetings with Don (the man behind Steps), Paul (the web editor), and the others that are working with the Why Democracy project. Miscommunication were always present. “But how do you mean? Is that really possible? But I told you that… And I thought that… In order to do that we need some…” . This is the way it goes, I guess, when a lot of different people are involved in creating something new. Felt like we were building walls and taking them down every day. In a sense we were tearing down walls, our own mental barriers.
As the Rastafarians are reaching the end of their labor, we have but started ours. The plan is crafted, the to do lists are up, The Democracy House is slowly taking shape. But our house will not keep people out.
/irini
Friday, July 6, 2007
The wall
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