Frontier03_Spatial Deltiology

"Wish you were here"
Collection of Johannesburg Postcards since the earliest dawn of the city over time. 

The city is considered as a multi-layered collection of interrelated stories and narratives, defining how it is perceived and identified. Deltiology, the practice of collecting & analyzing postcards, serves as a method of exploring the city and its expressed meanings over time. 

Postcards of the city, with a change in the "character" of the city, post 1994. The city is depicted with impersonal generalizations throughout the "stock standard" collection of postcards

A series of postcards made by myself of the various "everyday" experiences of the city. Johannesburg's "citiness" takes on multiple layers, reflecting the socie-economic shift at the entrance of democracy. 

The diverse layers of Johannesburg trace themselves to different historical and spatial beginnings. Through dismantling, re-ordering, translating, and imagining, the collective “everydays” that make up the city’s layers become tools for speculating and imagining the city’s future. By exploring the layers of the past and present, I explore what the city may become. 

An assembly and dismantling of the collection of Johannesburg postcards over time. The process of exploration and translation  of the different layers of the city, and thier relationships, to establish a further understood meaning of the city. 

CHANCE ENCOUNTERS:
Speculations towards the future of the city. The future identity of the city being an overlay of "chance encounters mediated by and existing within space. Iconographic translations of speculations of the city are  translated as spatial elements and questions towards the making of architecture, 

COLLECTIVE EVERYDAYS
The city is seen as a multilayered collection of stories of the various interelated users of the city. "Collective everydays" is a reference to notions of citiness and mundanity, captured and narrated through the stories and experience off the city.  

 What if architecture not only told the story of a city’s past and present, but became a means of scripting what the city could be for those who will inhabit it in the future?