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More Vérité

La Gazette de l'Hôtel Drouot reports (in French) on the record-breaking Vérité sale held June 17-18, 2006, in Paris.

The price list for the sale is available as a Word  document : Download results.doc

Read our earlier posts about the sale here and here

< Pictured: Lot no. 165, Masque nda baoulé. Estimated to net 200 000-300 000 €, this mask sold for 1 100 000 € (source)  

Looters help team uncover 4,800-year-old ruins

from asahi.com

06/21/2006

BY HIROSHI ISHIDA AND KUNIICHI TANIDA, THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

CHANCAY, Peru--Japanese researchers said they believe they have discovered--with the unintended help of looters--the ruins of a temple at least 4,800 years old that could be one of the oldest in the Americas.

The temple was likely built before or around 2600 B.C. when Peru's oldest known city, Caral, was created, the researchers said.

The discovery was made in the ruins of Shicras located in the Chancay Valley about 100 kilometers north of Lima. The team started full-scale excavation work on Monday.

There are two 10-meter-high pyramid-shaped structures made of stone running north to south for about 50 meters and east to west for about 30 meters, according to Tetsuya Inamura, professor of cultural anthropology at Aichi Prefectural University who is part of the excavation team.

   Experts said they hope the discovery will shed light on the origins of ancient civilizations of Latin America.

"It can be regarded as a structure built using organized labor," Taiken Kato, professor of cultural anthropology at Saitama University, said. "If the excavation could confirm urban developments in a wide range of coastal areas in Peru, it would contribute to unraveling the formation of the Andes civilization."

In August last year, Hiroshi Sakane, chief curator of the Lima-based Museo Amano, and Masami Fujisawa, professor of seismic engineering at the Tsukuba University of Technology, found the ruins in a 4-meter-wide, 8-meter-deep pit apparently made by looters.

   The Amano museum was established by Yoshitaro Amano who spent his life collecting artifacts of the Chancay culture.

When the two researchers looked into a section of the pit, they found reed bags filled with stones and pebbles that were used as reinforcing material, scrapings of charcoal and fibers, and other items.

The researchers said the ruins were likely part of a religious facility, possibly a temple, because of the complicated construction method used and the traces of fire apparently used in rituals.

   Radiocarbon dating showed the reinforcing materials and scrapings of charcoal and fibers were up to 4,800 years old.

   There are also indications that the structure underwent reconstruction work seven or eight times.

A team comprising Japanese experts on archeology, cultural anthropology, seismic engineering and other fields, as well as a Peruvian archeologist from the Amano museum, was granted permission to excavate the site from the Peruvian government.

The past 10 years have yielded some remarkable findings at the archeological site in Caral, about 150 km north of the ruins, including a temple at least 30 meters tall built with gigantic stones, as well as a group of at least 30 large buildings.
(IHT/Asahi: June 21,2006)

Raw or Cooked? Philosophizing @ the Musée du Quai Branly

Photo: Ed Alcock for The New York Times.
The Musée du Quai Branly, opening tomorrow, intends to promote a respectful view of world cultures.

via NYTimes:
Imperialist? Moi? Not the Musée du Quai Branly
By ALAN RIDING
Published: June 22, 2006

PARIS, June 21 — President Jacques Chirac of France has always liked African and Asian art, as he demonstrated with a flourish this week when he inaugurated the Musée du Quai Branly, a large, eye-catching building costing $295 million and devoted entirely to non-Western art. Announced in 1996 and years in the making, it is the first major museum to open in Paris since the Musée d'Orsay in 1986.

The museum, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel, stands on a prime piece of real estate, on the Left Bank of the Seine, one block from the Eiffel Tower. Its gallery space is no less impressive. Half is used to display 3,500 objects from the museum's collection of 300,000 works from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas; the rest is given over to temporary exhibitions.

The museum's goal is simple and ambitious: to treat non-Western art with the same deference that, say, the Louvre gives to Greek, Roman and Renaissance art and the Musée d'Orsay gives to the Impressionists. In other words it is an artistic project with the eminently political objective of proclaiming France's openness to the world.

"There is no hierarchy among the arts, just as there is no hierarchy among peoples," Mr. Chirac said at the opening ceremony on Tuesday. "It is upon this conviction — the equal dignity of the cultures of the world — that this museum is founded."

The museum, he added, is a homage to peoples who have suffered conquest, violence and humiliation. "It aims to promote among the public at large," he said, "a different, more open and respectful view, dispelling the clouds of ignorance, condescension and arrogance which in the past have often nourished distrust, contempt and rejection."

The museum opens to the public on Friday, but it has already been visited by museum directors, anthropologists, private sponsors and the news media. And, as occurred with Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin, among others, the first work of art to be examined here has been the museum itself. It is the third built in Paris by Mr. Nouvel, after the Institute of the Arab World and the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art.

While the new museum comprises four connected buildings, one with an exterior wall covered with vegetation, the dominant feature is a 600-foot-long exhibition hall, which mirrors the gentle bend in the Seine and is peppered with 26 multicolored protruding boxes. This pierlike structure is in turn suspended so that visitors can wander freely around a large and soon-to-be-lush garden that is separated from the busy traffic of the Quai Branly by a 39-foot-high wall.

Photo: Ed Alcock for The New York Times.
The Musée du Quai Branly is Jean Nouvel's third museum for Paris.

The museum's atrium is tall enough to accommodate a 46-foot American Indian totem pole from British Columbia, while a glass tower displays some of the museum's musical instruments. A curving 600-foot-long ramp, inevitably reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, then leads to the display area.

Unusually, this space is one large gallery, albeit divided by leather-covered partitions into the collection's four main geographical regions. Within each, free-standing display cabinets create a kind of warren, which encourages visitors to explore rather than to follow a particular path. From indoors, the mysterious boxes protruding from the building become small thematic rooms.

The museum spotlights individual objects in a generally dark environment, which is dramatic but also emphasizes a work's aesthetic appeal at the expense of detailed information about its origin.

The range of works is nonetheless impressive, with remarkable examples of the masks and statues from Africa and Oceania that a century ago so impressed Fauvist and Cubist artists in Paris. The Americas section embraces pre-Columbian and American Indian art, while the Asian works address daily life from Indonesia to Vietnam. (Ancient Asian masterpieces remain in the Musée Guimet, across the Seine.)

In all, a walk through the Musée du Quai Branly (pronounced kay bran-LEE) resembles a journey in which distances of time and space are telescoped into the here and now by the simple beauty and mystery of the works.

Yet even now the institution remains inseparable from politics. [read on...]

Museum to host Festival de Arte Prehispánico

On August 5, 2006, El Primer Contacto con el Arte and the Muticultural Audience Development Intiative of the Metropolitan Museum will present El Festival de Arte Prehispánico. This program of family activities, inspired by the exhibition Treasures of the Maya Sacred Kings, includes lectures and gallery chats, music, film and theater on Maya culture. Bring the whole family!

To learn more, Download MayaPoster_lores.pdf [yes, a pdf file]


El 5 de agosto 2006 El Primer Contacto con el Arte y Desarrollo Iniciativo para Audencia Multicultural del Metropolitan Museum of Art presentarán El Festival de Arte Prehispánico. Esta programa de actividades para la familia, inspirada para la exposición Treasures of the Maya Sacred Kings, se incluye lecturas y charlas, música, película y una representación teatral sobre la cultura Maya. ¡Asista con su familia!

Para más información, Descargar MayaPoster_lores.pdf [sí, un archivo informático 'pdf']

Vérité Sale: A Record

L: Auction sale catalogue; C: Statuette Punu Loumbo; R: Masque Grebo Krou.
(Photos: Boris Veignant)

via NYTimes:
African Mask Takes Record $7.5M at Auction
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: June 18, 2006
Filed at 9:19 p.m. ET

PARIS (AP) -- A celebrated 19th century mask by the West African Fang tribe fetched more than $7.5 million at auction in Paris, a record for a work of primitive art, organizers said Sunday.

The mask, which is said to have inspired artist Pablo Picasso, brought in four times its estimated price of $1.9 million on Saturday, organizers of the sale at the Drouot auction house said. The buyer's identity was not disclosed.

The mask was part of one of France's premier private collections of primitive art, which was on the block at Drouot this weekend. Started by Pierre Vérité and his son Claude in the 1920s, the collection features works mostly from France's former colonies in West and Central Africa.

Though it was kept out of public view for most of the 20th century, the collection made a big impression on celebrated artists such as Picasso, Henri Matisse and surrealist Andre Breton, who saw it in the 1930s.

More than 500 pieces were up for auction and were estimated to bring in between $19 million and $25 million -- though prices appeared to be rising far beyond those expectations.

Of 96 pieces sold Saturday, eight passed the mark of $1.27 million, said auctioneer Muriel Berlinghi-Domingo.

''Prices are soaring in this sale, which is perhaps the last of this importance,'' she said. ''As this is a historic collection, and many of the objects have almost never been displayed, we're seeing a lot of competition.''

France will soon unveil the Musée du Quai Branly, a major new museum championed by President Jacques Chirac that will house the country's large and until now scattered collection of primitive art.

via ArtInfo:
On the Market: Tribal Art in Paris
By Amy Page

L: "Kota-Obamba reliquary figure," Gabon; R: "Punu Mukuye mask," Gabon                     

PARIS, May 22, 2006—June is a very important month in Paris for tribal art. The central event is the long-awaited opening of the Musée de Quai Branly on June 24, following a series of private openings.

The museum, which has been designed by Jean Nouvel and resembles a giant footbridge surrounded by a garden, will house arts of the indigenous peoples of Africa, Oceania, Asia and the Americas. It is intended to further Paris' claim of being the center of the tribal art world, outshining Brussels and New York.

Surrounding this major event will be a series of auctions and gallery exhibitions. The major auction is the collection of Pierre and Claude Vérité being sold at L'Hotel Drouot on June 17 and 18. The two-day auction is organized by primitive-art experts Guy Loudmer, Alain de Monbrison and Pierre Amrouche.

"Pierre Vérité bought at the very beginning of interest in tribal art," said Monbrison. "At the time Pierre started buying, just after World War I, African art was sold by paintings dealers, such as Paul Guillaume. It was not until the 1930s that a few dealers began to specialize in tribal art. The Vérité collection is the only one from the early days that has survived more or less intact," he says.

In the early 1930s, Pierre Vérité, who was an artist, lived in the artist colony known as "La Ruche" (the Hive) and opened his first gallery in primitive art. In 1937, he opened the Galerie Carrefour on the Boulevard Raspail, which was a hangout for artists and collectors such as Picasso, Helena Rubenstein, Nancy Cunard and Andre Breton.

In the 1940s, Pierre's son Claude became increasingly involved in the gallery. He went on African expeditions, collecting objects and information, and took photographs to document his travels. Later on, the gallery numbered important American collectors, such as artist John Graham and actors Edward G. Robinson, Vincent Price and Anthony Quinn among its clients. The collection stops around 1960.

"Many of the pieces in the collection are unknown," said Amrouche, "and have never been exhibited. They are all very old and have great patina that has never been touched. Seeing them for the first time was like opening Ali Baba’s cave."

The Vérité collection is comprised of 520 pieces and is expected to bring $15-20 million.

It is very broad in scope, encompassing virtually every African culture and also some Oceanic objects. Eclectic as it is, the collection is especially strong in material from Gabon and West African cultures, such as the Senufo, Baule and Bembe.

Many of the pieces are well known, having been featured in major publications. The star piece is a Fang Ngil mask from Gabon, considered by many to be the finest of its kind, which is expected to bring around $1.5 million.

The rare, large mask, which is made of wood covered with a layer of kaolin, has been published and exhibited many times, including at the important "Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art" show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984. Another star is a rare Congo reliquary figure of a man with a child from Gabon (est: $300-350,000).

The estimates for the pieces are "strong and realistic" says Amrouche, "reflecting the strength of the market."

All images courtesy Vérité Collection

More info:

La Collection Vérité,
Détours des Mondes, 5 juin, 2006

Collection restée assez mystérieuse, sa vente suscite un grand intérêt dans le milieu des collectionneurs. Elle est déjà annoncée comme vente «du siècle» (en référence au XXe !) car il n'y a jamais eu de vente de cette importance en «Arts Primitifs», et «importance» s'entendant en estimation chiffrée : 15 à 20 millions [read on...]

RFI Actualités:
Marché de l'Art: Plus de 500 œuvres d’art africain mises aux enchères, à Paris
By Dominique  Raizon, 16/06/2006

Libération:
L'entière «Vérité»:Arts premiers. Deux jours d'exposition précèdent la prestigieuse vente de la collection à Drouot.
By Henri-François DEBAILLEUX, QUOTIDIEN : jeudi 15 juin 2006

Le Nouvel Observateur:
Arts premiers: l'heure des Vérité à Drouot
By Thibault Leroux, AP | 15.06.06 | 18:45

Le Figaro:
Art tribal, le bal du siècle à Paris
by Béatrice de Rochebouët, 09 juin 2006

The Telegraph:
Art sales: great collectors unmasked
Will Bennett looks forward to the long-awaited auction of one of greatest tribal art collections (Filed: 23/05/2006)

Craig Morris, a Towering Figure in Inca Expeditions, Dies at 66

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD (via nytimes.com)

Photo source

Craig Morris, an archaeologist who helped transform modern knowledge of the Inca civilization and a leader of research and exhibitions at the American Museum of Natural History, died Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 66 and lived in Greenwich Village.

The cause was complications of heart surgery performed on Monday at NewYork-Presbyterian/ Columbia hospital, the museum announced.

Dr. Morris was a towering figure in pre-Columbian archaeology, colleagues said. His research on the Inca culture took him on expeditions to the heights of the Andes and down to the valleys of the Pacific coast for years of vigorous excavations.

One of his most intensive expeditions explored ruins of Huánuco Pampa, the huge Inca city at an elevation of 12,000 feet in the Andes. In the 1970's and 80's, he excavated more than 300 of the sites and some 4,000 crumbling buildings.

Other archaeologists said Dr. Morris's excavations and interpretations transformed understanding of Inca urban life before the Spanish conquest in the early 16th century. His more recent research concentrated on the architecture and ceramics of coastal Peru as a reflection of Inca political and economic structure. He also incorporated aerial and declassified satellite photography in his latest work.

For 10 years, until 2004, Dr. Morris was dean of science at the American Museum, overseeing the staff of curators and coordinating their work on public exhibitions. "He was a pillar of our community personally and intellectually," said Ellen V. Futter, the museum president.

Michael J. Novacek, senior vice president and provost of the museum, said that Dr. Morris had a major role in the renaissance of the scientific exhibitions at the museum in recent years. He took a direct hand in curating several temporary and permanent exhibits, including one on the royal tombs of Sipán in Peru.

But it was Dr. Morris's own research that dominated his 31 years at the museum, where at his death he was a senior vice president and curator of anthropology. His expertise in Inca culture and his scholarly publications earned him membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He was also vice president of the Institute of Andean Research, treasurer of the Peruvian-American Research Foundation and an adjunct professor of anthropology at Columbia ...

• Read full obituary here

Growing Wikipedia Revises Its 'Anyone Can Edit' Policy

By KATIE HAFNER (via nytimes.com)

Wikipedia is the online encyclopedia that "anyone can edit." Unless you want to edit the entries on Albert Einstein, human rights in China or Christina Aguilera.

Wikipedia's come-one, come-all invitation to write and edit articles, and the surprisingly successful results, have captured the public imagination. But it is not the experiment in freewheeling collective creativity it might seem to be, because maintaining so much openness inevitably involves some tradeoffs.

• Click here for the full story
  

At its core, Wikipedia is not just a reference work but also an online community that has built itself a bureaucracy of sorts — one that, in response to well-publicized problems with some entries, has recently grown more elaborate. It has a clear power structure that gives volunteer administrators the authority to exercise editorial control, delete unsuitable articles and protect those that are vulnerable to vandalism.

Those measures can put some entries outside of the "anyone can edit" realm. The list changes rapidly, but as of yesterday, the entries for Einstein and Ms. Aguilera were among 82 that administrators had "protected" from all editing, mostly because of repeated vandalism or disputes over what should be said. Another 179 entries — including those for George W. Bush, Islam and Adolf Hitler — were "semi-protected," open to editing only by people who had been registered at the site for at least four days. (See a List of Protected Entries)

[...]

From the start, [Wikipedia founder Jimmy] Wales gave the site a clear mission: to offer free knowledge to everybody on the planet. At the same time, he put in place a set of rules and policies that he continues to promote, like the need to present information with a neutral point of view.

The system seems to be working. Wikipedia is now the Web's third-most-popular news and information source, beating the sites of CNN and Yahoo News, according to Nielsen  NetRatings.

The bulk of the writing and editing on Wikipedia is done by a geographically diffuse group of 1,000 or so regulars, many of whom are administrators on the site.

"A lot of people think of Wikipedia as being 10 million people, each adding one sentence," Mr. Wales said. "But really the vast majority of work is done by this small core community."

[...]

Mr. Wales calls vandalism to the encyclopedia "a minimal problem, a dull roar in the background." Yet early this year, amid heightened publicity about false information on the site, the community decided to introduce semi-protection of some articles. The four-day waiting period is meant to function something like the one imposed on gun buyers.

Once the assaults have died down, the semi-protected page is often reset to "anyone can edit" mode. An entry on Bill Gates was semi-protected for just a few days in January, but some entries, like the article on President Bush, stay that way indefinitely. Other semi-protected subjects as of yesterday were Opus Dei, Tony Blair and sex.

To some critics, protection policies make a mockery of the "anyone can edit" notion.

"As Wikipedia has tried to improve its quality, it's beginning to look more and more like an editorial structure," said Nicholas Carr, a technology writer who recently criticized Wikipedia on his blog. "To say that great work can be created by an army of amateurs with very little control is a distortion of what Wikipedia really is."

But Mr. Wales dismissed such criticism, saying there had always been protections and filters on the site.

Wikipedia's defenders say it usually takes just a few days for all but the most determined vandals to retreat.

"A cooling-off period is a wonderful mediative technique," said Ross Mayfield, chief executive of a company called Socialtext that is based on the same editing technology that Wikipedia uses.

[...]

Mayan Treasures at the Met Reviewed

Metropolitan Museum of Art
A plate showing an enthroned king, dressed as the Maize God is one of the treasures at the Met.

via NYTimes:
Art Review
Mayan Treasures at the Met: Passing Strange Communications From the Beyond
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: June 16, 2006

"TREASURES OF SACRED MAYA KINGS," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gets a big gold "A" for truth in advertising, at least as far as its treasures go. They are plentiful, rare and splendid, and I'll start by pointing out two.

A carved wooden figure of a kneeling shaman, arms extended, time-scoured face entranced, is one of the greatest sculptures currently on view in the museum. Donatello and Tilman Riemenschneider would have loved it. And wait till you see the painted ceramic vessel known as the Dazzler Vase. With its red and green patterns like jade on fire, you'll know in a flash how it got its name.

Not everything here sends up "masterpiece" flares. Monumental stone sculpture of the kind closely identified with ancient Mesoamerica is largely absent. Much of the work stands at some remove from what many viewers would call beautiful. Certain items — a jadeite model of a pointed tool used for ritual self-mutilation — are just strange.

Once you introduce the strange and the unbeautiful to a treasures show, you create some confusion; you upset expectations, ruffle the aesthetic pleasure principle. The confusion increases if the show gives clear signs of wanting to go beyond the beauty pageant, to tell a story and puzzle out a history, as this one wants to do.

 

Lords of Creation is available at the Goldwater Library:see Watsonline record

It is useful to know that when the exhibition had its debut at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, it was called "Lords of Creation: The Origins of Sacred Maya Kingship." Was the New York name change an effort to give what sounded like an anthropological think-piece greater appeal? The word "treasure" in a show is a time-tested crowd-puller. It promises an easy, passive art experience, as diverting and undemanding as window-shopping.

But the Maya show feels far less like a stroll past Bergdorf's than like a visit to an archaeological dig. Some 150 objects, whole and fragmentary, fancy and plain, are spread through the galleries. Many are unfamiliar: they are recent finds from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Belize, traveling for the first time.

It's evident that they add up to something, though it's not clear, at least at the beginning of the show, what that something might be. You have to do some work, some sorting, sifting and piecing together to get your bearings.

Thinking With Things is available at the Goldwater Library:see Watsonline record

The wall labels are a help. So is the catalog edited by the show's curators, Virginia M. Fields and Dorie Reents-Budet, with its wealth of up-to-date information. But the most valuable guide may be one that has no direct connection to the show, "Thinking With Things: Toward a New Vision of Art" (University of Texas), a 2005 book  by the art historian Esther Pasztory.

Ms. Pasztory is a Mesoamerican specialist who has written, among other things, a fine book on Aztec art. But "Thinking With Things" is different. It is an extended theoretical essay, which attempts to create, with the tools of art history and anthropology, nothing less than a pan-cultural definition of what art is and what it is for.

I worked as a graduate assistant to Ms. Pasztory years ago when the book was germinating. And although it changed shape over time, its basic proposal remains intact: Many of the things we now call art — the very concept was largely a product of 18th-century Europe — were originally significant not primarily for their visual appeal but for their use as tools for thinking about, coping with, probing the world. Thought, not aesthetic taste, was art's essence.

It is this use-value that has made art a universal phenomenon. Far from being transcendent and timeless, art was, and remains, a product of its culture and time.

These proposals are not in themselves radical, but the breadth and intensity with which Ms. Pasztory applies them are. And when her view is brought to bear on the Maya show, a quirky treasures compendium becomes something else: a speculative study, through objects, of how political power developed in that culture and what it said about the Mayan's approach to the world.
[read on...]

"Treasures of Sacred Maya Kings" remains at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue (at 82nd Street), through Sept. 10.

Google Book Search and A View From Europe

via The University of Chicago Press website [thanks Ross!]:

Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge : A View from Europe
by Jean-Noel Jeanneney, Ian Wilson (Foreword), Teresa Lavender Fagan (Translator)
Hardcover: 96 pages
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press (November 1, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN: 0226395774

The recent announcement that Google will digitize the holdings of several major libraries sent shock waves through the book industry and academe. Google presented this digital repository as a first step towards a long-dreamed-of universal library, but skeptics were quick to raise a number of concerns about the potential for copyright infringement and unanticipated effects on the business of research and publishing.

Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of France's Bibliothèque Nationale, here takes aim at what he sees as a far more troubling aspect of Google's Library Project: its potential to misrepresent—and even damage—the world’s cultural heritage. In this impassioned work, Jeanneney argues that Google's unsystematic digitization of books from a few partner libraries and its reliance on works written mostly in English constitute acts of selection that can only extend the dominance of American culture abroad. This danger is made evident by a Google book search the author discusses here—one run on Hugo, Cervantes, Dante, and Goethe that resulted in just one non-English edition, and a German translation of Hugo at that. An archive that can so easily slight the masters of European literature—and whose development is driven by commercial interests—cannot provide the foundation for a universal library.

As a leading librarian, Jeanneney remains enthusiastic about the archival potential of the Web. But he argues that the short-term thinking characterized by Google's digital repository must be countered by long-term planning on the part of cultural and governmental institutions worldwide—a serious effort to create a truly comprehensive library, one based on the politics of inclusion and multiculturalism.

For those who are interested in this issue, a video stream of an argument offered by Lawrence Lessig [or else here] in favor of the Google project; or else read his article:

Google's Tough Call
By Lawrence Lessig (Wired Magazine Issue 13:11, Nov 2005)

And more info here:
Another Google Book Search Commentary Roundup
By Andrew Raff (IPTA Blog, Dec 2005)

Southbank competition: Architecture, Sustainability + African Arts

via e-flux:

Southbank competition
Architecture, Sustainability, and African Arts
Call for entries

Submission Deadline:
7 August 2006

Rules and information relating to the competition can be downloaded at: 
http://www.southbank-competition.org
or Hannah le Roux/Daniel Irurah
info@southbank-competition.com

Southbank is an international competition for the design of a new environment that will encompass residential space, landscape elements and space for the production and exhibition of art from Africa, on a site near Stellenbosch in the Western Cape. The competition is open to architects, artists and designers from around the world. The sponsors of the competition are a leisure and wine company, Spier Holdings, who plan to use the forum of the competition, and the building of the winning community, to construct new models for the integration of spaces for living, working, learning, and creative expression. The brief calls for the practice of social equity, environmental conservation and creative freedom on the site, in dialogue with the rich history and contemporary contribution of African heritage and culture.

Integrated into the competition brief is the design of the new Africa Centre. The Africa Centre is both a physical entity and an ongoing process. Meant to grow spatially and conceptually over a period of years, in time it will emerge as a multi-sited, multiple-usage space where the visual and performance cultures of Africa South and North, present and past are celebrated, studied and brought to life for diverse audiences in innovative ways.

In order to serve diverse communities of users, the Africa Centre plans to sponsor a range of different types of programs. Among these will be residencies for visual and performance artists, intellectuals, scholars, instructors and activists, to take place in the Southbank and nearby communities. The Africa Centre will encourage joint endeavours among residents and maximize interaction through activities such as conferences, workshops, classes, discussion groups and open studio sessions led by residents and open to the public, on the Southbank and in nearby communities; and an ongoing series of temporary exhibitions and performances showcasing works in progress and finished pieces in dedicated exhibition and performance spaces.

The Southbank competition will be run in two stages. The first, open stage, called image/bank, will be focused on visualisations of the environment, and the second stage, south/centre, will see five finalists refine their ideas into tangible plans. The winner will be announced on January 20, 2007. Prize money of US $225,000 will be awarded. Entrants will have to register by July 16, 2006 to enter the competition, and submit their first ideas online by August 7, 2006.

The competition jury is Spier CEO Adrian Enthoven, Salah Hassan, (curator and art historian), Mike Keniger (architect and academic), Anne Lacaton (architect), Luyanda Mphalwa (architect), Ikem Stanley Okoye (architect and academic), and Mike Rainbow (engineer).