MONUMENT TO WWI AFRICAN LABOUR CORPS
In 2022, Meshworks participated in the Commonwealth War Graves Memorial Competition. South African architecture practices were invited to design a memorial to the South African military labour units who served in World War I. Their substantial role and sacrifice were foundational to the Allied victory. The CWG Commission identified a prominent portion of the Company Gardens in Cape Town for the memorial and invited submissions.
Meshworks proposed a structured landscape that symbolically assembles and bears the material weight borne by those it commemorates. Our proposal challenges classical and Western memorial tropes by countering symmetry, monumentality, and centrality while retaining legibility through a simple strike in the landscape expressed in an intricate assemblage.
Our proposed language:
Abstraction: littering the neoclassical, heroic memorial landscape, creating the possibility of a more authentic vision.
Founding: exposing and celebrating the essential but mundane drudgery of the task that faced the servicemen: propping, digging, supporting, feeding, cleaning, supplying, loading, clearing, carrying, and transporting.
Fragmentation: in which a broken topography acknowledges the brutality and loss suffered by the men and their communities.
Excavation: consisting of material layering rather than an imposed authoritative image or proud object for contemplation.
Our proposal does not intend to offer a full resolution but rather to provoke viewers to confront the sense of absence and unknowing about the loss of over a century ago of their countrymen. The assemblage is a representation of the goods carried by these porters of the war; it is an abstract composition of people, as in a portrait or a group of human figures; it is a piece of a woven basket; it is the fragmented components of classical monumentation; it is an abstract rendering of a topography, perhaps even of Table Mountain itself.
