<p><font face="Times New Roman"> <p align="left">This mini-thesis seeks to interrogate the interplay between memory and documentation in the process of exhibition-making by a looking at the preparation for and mounting of the exhibition, Museum. This will be achieved by looking at the institutional methodologies employed by the Museum in dealing with ex-residents of District Six, their memories and artefacts in the heritage practice of a Museum as a forum. This practice was put into effect as the District Six Museum engaged ex-residents of other locations of removal.</p> </font></p>

<p><font face="Times New Roman"> <p align="left">This mini-thesis seeks to interrogate the interplay between memory and documentation in the process of exhibition-making by a looking at the preparation for and mounting of the exhibition, Museum. This will be achieved by looking at the institutional methodologies employed by the Museum in dealing with ex-residents of District Six, their memories and artefacts in the heritage practice of a Museum as a forum. This practice was put into effect as the District Six Museum engaged ex-residents of other locations of removal.</p> </font></p>

Magister Artium - MA / This mini-thesis seeks to interrogate the interplay between memory and documentation in the process of exhibition-making by a looking at the preparation for and mounting of the exhibition, Museum. This will be achieved by looking at the institutional methodologies employed by the Museum in dealing with ex-residents of District Six, their memories and artefacts in the heritage practice of a Museum as a forum. This practice was put into effect as the District Six Museum engaged ex-residents of other locations of removal.

This paper examines how and to what extent the District Six Museum has contributed the current redevelopment of the District Six site. Since its inception, the Museum has challenged accepted definitions of heritage and has transcended common museological practices through its initiative as an institution to go beyond nurturing the memory of one of the most iconic sites of forced removal in South Africa, but to also contribute to the site’s redevelopment. The Museum grew out of an organisation that was dedicated to protecting the empty wasteland that the District had become since it was announced a ‘white area’ by the apartheid government and bulldozed. The same group of people became passionate not only about protecting the site, and conducting “memory work” surrounding it but eventually contributing to a process of restitution and rebuilding the homes and lives of those whose houses where destroyed and communities were fragmented. This paper considers such an initiative, which began in a pre-democratic environment where the concept of heritage was ill-defined and cultural institutions often served apartheid agendas. This consideration will involve an examination of the way in which the District Six Museum developed; the Museum’s role and how this role has evolved and the District Six that has been re-imagined through the Museum and how this “idea” is contributing to re-development.

<p>&nbsp / <span style="font-size: 12pt / font-family: &quot / Times New Roman&quot / ,&quot / serif&quot / mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman' / mso-ansi-language: EN-US / mso-fareast-language: EN-US / mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">District Six was a community that was forcibly removed from the centre of Cape Town after its demarcation as a white group area in 1966. In 1989, the District Six Museum Foundation was established in order to form a project that worked with the memory of District Six. Out of these origins, the District Six Museum emerged and was officially opened in 1994 with the museum in the 1980s occurred at the same moment that the social history movement assumed prominence within a progressive South African historiography. With the success of <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic">Streets, the decision to &lsquo / dig deeper&rsquo / into the social history of District Six culminated in the opening of the exhibition, Digging Deeper, in a renovated museum space in 2000. Oral history practice, as means of bringing to light the hidden and erased histories of the area, was embraced by the museum as an empowering methodology which would facilitate memory work around District Six. In tracing the evolution of an oral history practice in the museum, this study aims to understand how the poetics involved in the practices of representation and display impacted on the oral histories that were displayed in Digging Deeper. It also considers how the engagement with the archaeological discipline, during the curation of the Horstley Street display as part of Streets, impacted on how oral histories were displayed in the museum.</span></span></p>

<p>&nbsp / <span style="font-size: 12pt / font-family: &quot / Times New Roman&quot / ,&quot / serif&quot / mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman' / mso-ansi-language: EN-US / mso-fareast-language: EN-US / mso-bidi-language: AR-SA">District Six was a community that was forcibly removed from the centre of Cape Town after its demarcation as a white group area in 1966. In 1989, the District Six Museum Foundation was established in order to form a project that worked with the memory of District Six. Out of these origins, the District Six Museum emerged and was officially opened in 1994 with the museum in the 1980s occurred at the same moment that the social history movement assumed prominence within a progressive South African historiography. With the success of <span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic">Streets, the decision to &lsquo / dig deeper&rsquo / into the social history of District Six culminated in the opening of the exhibition, Digging Deeper, in a renovated museum space in 2000. Oral history practice, as means of bringing to light the hidden and erased histories of the area, was embraced by the museum as an empowering methodology which would facilitate memory work around District Six. In tracing the evolution of an oral history practice in the museum, this study aims to understand how the poetics involved in the practices of representation and display impacted on the oral histories that were displayed in Digging Deeper. It also considers how the engagement with the archaeological discipline, during the curation of the Horstley Street display as part of Streets, impacted on how oral histories were displayed in the museum.</span></span></p>

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Since 1994, the District Six Museum, in constructing histories of forced removals from District Six, Cape Town, commenced as a post-apartheid memory project which evolved into a memorial museum. Design has been a central strategy claimed by the museum in its process of making memory work visible to its attendant publics evolving into a South African cultural brand. Co-design within the museum is aesthetically infused with sensitively curated exhibitions and a form of museumisation, across two tangible sites of engagement, which imparts a unique visual language

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Since 1994, the District Six Museum, in constructing histories of forced removals from District Six, Cape Town, commenced as a post-apartheid memory project which evolved into a memorial museum. Design has been a central strategy claimed by the museum in its process of making memory work visible to its attendant publics evolving into a South African cultural brand. Co-design within the museum is aesthetically infused with sensitively curated exhibitions and a form of museumisation, across two tangible sites of engagement, which imparts a unique visual language. The term design became extraordinarily popular in contemporary Cape Town, where the city was - in 2014 -the World Design Capital. Yet at the same time as design was being inscribed into the public imaginary, it was simultaneously curiously undefined although influential in shifting representational aesthetics in the city. This research seeks to ask questions about this proliferation of interest in design and to examine this through a close reading of the work of the District Six Museum situated near District Six. In particular, micro and macro design elements are explored as socio-cultural practice in re-imagining community in the city that grew out of resistance and cultural networks. Various design strategies or frameworks of representation sought to stabilize and clarify individual and collective pasts enabling and supporting ex-residents to reinterpret space after loss, displacement and separation and re-enter their histories and the city. Post-apartheid museum design modes and methodologies applied by the District Six Museum as museumisation disrupts conventional historiographies in the fields of art, architectural and exhibition design, where the focus is placed on temporal chronologies, in a biographic mode profiling examples of works and designers/artists. Instead, the research contextualises the work of design as making in a more open sense, of exploring the very constructedness of the museum as a space of method, selection, process and representation thereby asking questions about this reified term design as method and practice. The designing ways of the District Six Museum contribute to understanding idioms mediated through design frameworks allowing for a departure from the limited ways design history has been written. Through an unlayering of projects, practices and an examination of archival case studies, exhibition curation, the adaptive reuse of buildings and through institutional rebranding my argument is that the particularities of the claims to design work at the District Six Museum provide a rich case for relating to other contemporaneous processes of making apartheid’s spatial practices visible as projects such as this claim community. Therefore seeking to demystify how this community museum ‘making’ has been fashioned through an investment in various design disciplines, forms and practices revealing the inherent complexity in doing so.

<p>This thesis is largely about museums and their role and development in and for society. With a field/case study of the District Six Museum in Cape Town, we try to encapsulate a modern function for museums within a context of 1) the current worldwide discussion on museums and their future, and 2) the development of a new democratic nation in South Africa, and museums possible role in that process. Through analysis of interviews made with concerned people within and outside the District Six museum weintend to get a picture of the views on this particular museum and its role and function, for its community and society at large, plus for other museums, as a possible role model. We find that this museum might be close to a type of museum that has been asked for by museologists and others in recent times.</p> / <p>Den här D-uppsatsen behandlar museer och deras roll i den samhälleliga utvecklingen. Genom en fältstudie av District Six Museum i Kapstaden har vi försökt fånga och diskutera hur ett museum av idag kan fungera. Detta har skett utifrån två kontexter; dels den pågående och världsomspännande debatten om museer och deras framtid, dels utvecklingen av en ny demokratisk nation i landet Sydafrika och vilken roll museer har i den processen. Genom analys av intervjuer vi har gjort med aktiva inom och utanför District Six Museum försöker vi få en bild av just detta museums roll och funktion; för sina egna medborgare och samhället runt omkring. Vi diskuterar vidare hur District Six fungerar som förebild för andra museer och hur det faktiskt uppfyller många av de kriterier och önskemål som museologer idag sätter upp för hur ett samtida och aktivt museum bör arbeta.</p>

This thesis is largely about museums and their role and development in and for society. With a field/case study of the District Six Museum in Cape Town, we try to encapsulate a modern function for museums within a context of 1) the current worldwide discussion on museums and their future, and 2) the development of a new democratic nation in South Africa, and museums possible role in that process. Through analysis of interviews made with concerned people within and outside the District Six museum weintend to get a picture of the views on this particular museum and its role and function, for its community and society at large, plus for other museums, as a possible role model. We find that this museum might be close to a type of museum that has been asked for by museologists and others in recent times. / Den här D-uppsatsen behandlar museer och deras roll i den samhälleliga utvecklingen. Genom en fältstudie av District Six Museum i Kapstaden har vi försökt fånga och diskutera hur ett museum av idag kan fungera. Detta har skett utifrån två kontexter; dels den pågående och världsomspännande debatten om museer och deras framtid, dels utvecklingen av en ny demokratisk nation i landet Sydafrika och vilken roll museer har i den processen. Genom analys av intervjuer vi har gjort med aktiva inom och utanför District Six Museum försöker vi få en bild av just detta museums roll och funktion; för sina egna medborgare och samhället runt omkring. Vi diskuterar vidare hur District Six fungerar som förebild för andra museer och hur det faktiskt uppfyller många av de kriterier och önskemål som museologer idag sätter upp för hur ett samtida och aktivt museum bör arbeta.