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TRACE PERSONNEL Lauren Segal | Managing Partner Lauren Segal specializes in the research and development of communication strategies for large multi-media projects and campaigns. These have included books, television series and – since 2002 – heritage sites and exhibitions.
After completing an MA in Media Studies in London, Lauren worked for many years as an independent producer. She later joined Ochre Communications, where she worked on several leading film and television projects. Her main role was to bridge the divide between educational needs and creative execution. On Takalani Sesame she led the development of an HIV/AIDS curriculum, and produced the guidelines for the development of the first Sesame Muppet with HIV/AIDS in the world. She was the executive producer of Gazlam, a prime time educational drama series aimed at youth, which won the award in 2002 for the most popular At Ochre, Lauren was also part of the team that won the bid for Khomanani – the large-scale government multi-media campaign to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS. She then became the lead consultant to develop the feasibility and business plan for Heritage, Education and Tourism (HET) at Constitution Hill. Leading up to the opening of the site in March 2004, Lauren managed the delivery of the visitor experience. This involved coordinating a large interdisciplinary team that delivered the exhibitions, marketing material, a website, tour guides and an opening programme for the Hill. Since the site opened, Lauren has managed the curatorial process for the Women’s Jail exhibition and is also the director of public programmes. She has been integrally involved in fundraising for the HET activities, writing the proposals for grants to the value of R50 million. She set up the Constitution Hill Trust chaired by Cyril Ramaphosa. Most recently, Lauren has curated the exhibitions, 466/64 – A Prisoner in the Garden for the Mandela Foundation and Gandhi: A Prisoner of Conscience at Constitution Hill. She was also editorial coordinator and writer on the books, Number Four (published in 2005) and Mapping Memory (published in 2006).
Education Clive van den Berg | Managing Partner One of South Africa’s most renowned artists and curators, Clive van den Berg brings to trace a wealth of experience in the art world and in the development of public projects. He has had several solo exhibitions at the Linda Goodman Gallery in South Africa, and his work is regularly exhibited abroad. He curated the Brett Kebble Art Awards, and is currently the curator of Spier Contemporary. His public projects have included the artworks for landmark Northern Cape Legislature and, since he has joined the trace team, museum projects for the Nelson Mandela Foundation and Constitution Hill. Clive has much experience working on large-scale institutional projects with teams representing diverse constituencies: urban planners and policy makers, architects, landscape designers, museum curators, historians, community liaison officials and representatives of local governments. In the Northern Cape, for example, where he worked with the Luis Ferreira da Silva architects, he pioneered a new strategy for integrating forms of the local landscape and indigenous aesthetics into the overall building design, while also training local artisans as part of a skills transference project aimed at long-term sustainability. The result is a world-renowned and uniquely South African state edifice: a monument to the people of the Northern Cape. At Constitution Hill, his design ethos strove to fuse old materials with new curatorial strategies: to preserve individual and collective memory about the prisons and experiences that people had in them, while also educating future publics about the place of the prisons in South African history, and creating aesthetic forms appropriate to the institution. In contemporary South Africa, much public institutional design is aimed at the cultivation of memory and the memorialization of the past. Van den Berg’s integrative approach to art, design and architectural construction has allowed him to produce spaces in which previously unheard or even suppressed narratives can be articulated. His design work on the exhibitions for the Mandela Foundation have been oriented toward this end: in showcasing materials from the Foundation’s archive, he has developed exciting new formats and vocabularies in which to reveal a past that had hitherto remained largely unknown, making it accessible to a new generation of South African citizens.
Education Nabeel Essa | Partner Nabeel Essa is a registered architect with the South African Council of Architects and a member of the Gauteng Institute of Architects. He acts as an architectural consultant specializing in designing and developing museum, exhibition and cultural information projects. Skills lie in combining spatial understanding with new ways of re-interpreting museums. Such conceptual ideas act as driving forces that continue to inform the design at its most detailed level. Experience ranges by playing different roles in the architectural process from brief formation to detailing and building supervision. The body of work is about constructing concepts. The practice involves specific integration with other diverse professions and the construction of ideas. At Constitution Hill traditional notions of museum were questioned as the fragmentation between heritage and new developments led to a decentralized interpretive experience across the Hill. The scope of work included feasibility studies, interpretive experience, heritage policy, business planning, programming, exhibition strategy and supervision of the restoration. At the Kliptown Museum the project began with developing strategies to integrate a community with its heritage, new developments and housing and its potential as a visitor destination, as a living ‘open’ museum. As the spatial consultant key issues involved the reuse of heritage buildings and the development of a framework armature that defines the urban precinct on multiple levels from heritage, exhibition, recreation and community. The constructed outcome was a heritage renovation and restoration of an old hardware store into a museum space that evokes the past and allows the present re-use. Nabeel runs a theoretically driven contemporary design practice aware of its local context and ethics and in keeping with global ideas. The practice is also involved with the Limpopo Public Works department office project and private residential work such as House Goldblatts gallery additions and the upgrade of the Hillbrow Police Station Client Services Centre. Nabeel has a Masters degree in landscape urbanism from the Architectural Association in London. The Masters involved the understanding of growth, evolution, change and scale in informing urban development and regeneration. The role of diagramming as a way of informing design allowed for new possibilities. The thesis at Wits looked at critically engaging marginal histories; this spurred an interest in issues of identity and difference and its construction in post-apartheid South Africa. Academic contribution has been made as an invited visiting juror at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, the University of Cape Town and Tec de Monterrey, Mexico City.
Education Mark Gevisser | Associate Mark Gevisser is one of South Africa’s leading journalists. After graduating from Yale University in 1987 with a degree in comparative literature, he worked in New York, writing for Village Voice and The Nation before returning to South Africa in 1990. In South Africa, his work has appeared in the Mail & Guardian, the Sunday Independent, the Sunday Times and many magazines and perioficals. Internationally, he has published widely on South African politics, culture and society, in publications ranging from Vogue and the New York Times to Foreign Affairs and Art in America. In 2001 he won a Mondi award for his series of articles in GQ on cities and space in South Africa. Mark has published two books – Defiant Desire, Gay and Lesbian Lives In South Africa (Routledge, 1994), which he co-edited with Edwin Cameron, and Portraits of Power: Profiles in a Changing South Africa (David Philip, 1996), a collection of his celebrated political profiles from the Mail & Guardian. He has also published widely, in anthologies, on gay and lesbian history in South Africa, and developed a Queer Johannesburg Tour for the Gay and Lesbian Archives of South Africa. His feature-length documentary, The Man Who Drove With Mandela, made with Greta Schiller, has been broadcast internationally, and won the Teddy Documentary Prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1999. The film is an excavation of the life of Cecil Williams, the South African gay communist theatre director. Mark was one of the leaders of the team, together with Lauren Segal, that won the tender to develop the heritage, education and tourism components of Constitution Hill. That year, he co-curated Constitution Hill’s first exhibitions, and was one of the project leaders of the Constitution Hill feasibility study for the Johannesburg Development Agency. As well as being chief content advisor for Constitution Hill, he was a lead curator of the site’s first phase of permanent exhibitions, in the old Number Four jail and The Old Fort, and part of the curatorial team for the second phase, at the Women’s Jail. He also assisted with the curating on 466/64 – A Prisoner in the Garden for the Nelson Mandela Foundation. In all the above projects he has worked closely with Lauren Segal, Clive van den Berg, Steve Kwena Mokwena and Nabeel Essa. In 2002, Mark served on Education Minister Kader Asmal’s Ministerial Committee on History. Jonathan Ball will publish his long-awaited biography of Thabo Mbeki in 2007.
Education Steve Kwena Mokwena Born in Soweto, South Africa, Steve is a trained social historian who has worked mainly in the area young people and social change. Since 2000, Steve has also worked as a communications strategist for key government and non-government initiatives. His clients include, the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR), The Khomanani Campaign for the Department of Health, Umsobomvu Youth Fund and the Gauteng Housing Department. Steve has also worked as a curator for the Number 4 (the black male prison at Constitutional Hill.) He has also worked with other government agencies to develop localised exhibition strategies. He was also the curator for the People Shall Govern” permanent exhibition developed as part of the Walter Sisulu Square of dedication. Before working in communications and exhibition design, Steve was the youngest director of the Joint Enrichment Project, A leading youth Development Organization working with young people seeking education and employment. Working on the firm belief that with the right support and environment all young people can thrive, Steve conceptualized, implemented and managed successful programs for young people and their communities. The programs ranged from community youth service programs, arts and culture in schools, employment training programs and young women’s development programs. In 1995, Steve became the first Chief Executive Officer for the National Youth Commission, based in the office of the president Nelson Mandela. Because of this work, he was invited to join the International Youth Foundation (IYF) where he managed IYF’s strategy for learning and knowledge exchange. Steve has done work in Africa, Latin America, North America, Asia and Europe. Steve has written and published papers on youth development, youth culture and youth policy. Among other things Steve has also managed a cross-sectoral and multi country projects on Youth & Community Development for IYF/Ford Foundation International Learning Group involving researchers from Asia, Latin America, Europe and Africa. Steve edited an international study on youth participation in governance and policy making for the UK based Carnegie Young People’s initiative. Steve is frequently invited to collaborate with international agencies interested in crafting strategies for children, young people and their communities. Steve is frequently invited as a speaker by leading organisations across the globe.
Steve Mokwena nominated was the distinguished visiting fellow to the Institute for Social Studies in The Hague – Netherlands for 2005. Current projects include research on memory and history for the Cultural Heritage and Legacy project (hosted by the Gauteng Provincial Government).
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