Basic Design and the Semiotics of Citizenship: Julian Beinart’s Educational Experiments and Research on Wall Decoration in Early 1960s Nigeria and South Africa

Basic Design and the Semiotics of Citizenship: Julian Beinart’s Educational Experiments and Research on Wall Decoration in Early 1960s Nigeria and South Africa

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From 1961 to 1965, Julian Beinart, an architecture lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, embarked on a series of basic design workshops in Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Rhodesia, and Kenya.Inspired by his MIT instructors Kevin Lynch and György Kepes, Beinart was interested in the development of a new popular visual language, one that would mediate African nacrack.com societies’ transition to postcolonial modernity.Concurrently, Beinart documented and analyzed wall decorations made by the residents of the government-built houses of Western Native Township in Johannesburg.

Home to black Africans who were subject to racial segregation and displacement policies that whole wheat phyllo dough predated the apartheid regime, the Township’s residents faced another eviction in the early 1960s.By using photography, analytical drawings, and diagrammatic maps, Beinart created a counter-archive against the state, in which he interpreted the residents’ beautification and improvement of their houses as acts of resistance; an expression of civic pride where the urban poor performed citizenship under extreme social-economic duress.Analyzing the decorations as a system of communication that transcended ethnic traditions, Beinart used them as an “index of de-tribalization” that could set the ground for the creation of an African urban modernity.