Monica Eileen Patterson is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She holds a doctorate in Anthropology and History and a certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Michigan. Patterson is coeditor of Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge and Questioning Discipline (University of Michigan Press, 2011). As a curator, scholar, and activist, she is particularly interested in the intersections of memory, childhood, and violence in postcolonial Africa, and the ways in which they are represented and engaged in contemporary public spheres.

Project Description:

Refiguring Childhood is a proposed experimental and interactive exhibition to be collaboratively produced in three community centres in black townships outside of Cape Town, South Africa. The proposed exhibit will be anchored around a core collection of children’s drawings from the 1980s-early ‘90s in apartheid South Africa. Published in the trilingual children’s magazine Molo Songololo (Hello Centipede), these drawings were produced by children of different races in the Western Cape. They provide important visual testimony of children’s life experiences under apartheid – including police violence, forced mass eviction, and extreme poverty, but also joy, friendship, and play – as well as how “childhood” itself was understood in such difficult circumstances. Drawing from longstanding literary, music, and storytelling traditions, the exhibit will hinge on a curated collection of Molo drawings, augmented by crowd-sourced material provided by members of the host communities. Visitors will be invited to bring old photographs, letters, documents, and objects from their childhoods to be digitally documented, as well as to share memories, stories, and songs with local apprentice oral historians trained specifically for the project. Exhibit units will travel to three sites in the Cape Town area where the original child artists lived. This project’s key research question is: Can an exhibition create opportunities for former and current South African children, and academic researchers, to better understand and address the country’s current violence and inequality as embedded in enduring patterns of discrimination and suffering?