Travel Possibility

Cape Town is a spectacular place to visit, offering many new opportunities to get in tune with the world.  For arts and culture, there is always something exciting going on.  Cape Town has a fabulously complicated history in terms of performance and music, and there are hundred of groups here making new works that speak to the extreme moment, and are also variously influenced by the legacies of the artists who worked here during the last generation’s time on the world stage.  Of course, generations overlap, and there’s room for the very young as well as the very old, in the complex social structures that make up the art community in South Africa.  When it comes to speaking and creating new work simultaneously, the spirit of improvisation can fill the air, and suddenly everything that was known and solid become open for new questions again.

There are plenty of things to do in an evening in Cape Town.  Fine dining should always be on the agenda, because there is so much fantastic food here.  The unique mix of cultures and traditions bring their own sensibilities for taste and style, and the easiest access into another world is through the cuisine.  There are also plenty of world-class chefs working here, trained locally or elsewhere, who have a host of traditions in their arsenal, and are ready and able to compete in the world marketplace of culinary delights.  A sensational evening here can begin with local flavors, and then go deeper into the local flavors in the night life.  The visual art scene here is also particularly spectacular, with amazingly creative people coming here all the time.  You may have the chance to see work by South Africa’s own Strijdom van der Merwe.

He’s worked and shown all over the world, but has a very particular attachment to this place.  To say that Cape Town specifically, and South Africa in general, has an influence on his work is a bit of an understatement.  He describes himself as a land artist, and there’s probably no other way to describe his enormously beautiful and astonishing works.  He works with the land, using the materials that are here, and creating large sculptures that spread out before your feet, like a visual reminder of the presence of ancestors in all things.  Some of the work is more ethereal than others, with forms made at the edges of a beach, where the next wave is on its way to take it all away, and some are more permanent, lending themselves to installation work, but all speak of a temporal beauty that registers a knowledge of the memory in the soil.