Notes for a Guide to the Ossuary

This essay considers the awkward 'life of the corpse' outside of the official spaces of the designated cemetery or burial ground in post-apartheid South Africa. We reflect on a new memorial building in Cape Town, an Ossuary named the New Prestwich Memorial. The memorial was built following a city-wide dispute over the 'accidental discovery' of the bones of thousands of people who were buried in Prestwich Street, close to Cape Town's harbour, but whose presence had been forgotten and concealed by colonial urban development. This essay considers the New Prestwich Memorial Building as an object of public culture. It emerges out of our own deliberate attempt to engage with the Ossuary as an object in history - incomplete, troubling and under construction. Mindful of the debates and texts written about the dispute circulating in Cape Town, we visited both the site of the 'discovery' of the bones in Prestwich Street and the Ossuary. We noted the elements in the visual landscape that alerted us to the work being done by this combination of material substances and design. Our essay is organised around six key terms or phrases that occur in the exhibition text, which guide the visitor's interpretation of the space. These words and phrases appeared to us to mark moments of intense symbolisation, signifiers in which the ideological work of the architect and the authors of the exhibition became most visible. The terms are: Gateway; Engraved Palimpsest; Mirrors; Visitors' Book; Concrete, Brick, Stone; and Closed.