Ashraf Johaardien: A brief meditation on the harder measure.

It is November 2026.

On the desk is a folder. A few cuttings, some emails, a photograph of lighting gels, sound equipment and a beaded prop goat in the back of a bakkie. My archive is partial, so I can only report what others recorded.

Open the folder and it is October 2017. Really it isn’t, but let’s play pretend.

I have my first Cape Town Fringe behind me. It has left City Hall. Thirteen venues. Ten locations. Khayelitsha, Nyanga, Philippi, Delft, Observatory, Rondebosch, Retreat. Saying them now still feels like reciting a bus route I never quite memorised.

In my welcome I write that a true reflection of the Mother City must reflect its complexity. I still believe that. Reflecting complexity is easier than producing a festival across it. The city has roads. The festival has a budget. These two facts do not always work together.

In July I tell the Cape Times that transport costs too much for many communities, so we will bring the work to the people. There is something peculiar about a fringe asking people on the margins to travel to the centre to experience their own marginalisation. So we move the centre. Centre of gravity, I call it. More elegant than saying we were trying to get everything to ten places at once without losing anyone. Or the lighting desk. Or the prop goat.

Ticket sales retreated to 2015 levels. I said so at the time, adding that access was far greater. More rooms being used does not mean more artists getting paid.

The Fringe still markets the festival and produces the work selected. Technical Director Nicci Spalding proposes that part of the available budget be reallocated to upgrading existing venues on the margins. We only augment venues with an existing audience network, I tell the Cape Times. Door sales are split between artist and venue, with a nominal share to us.

We distribute the venues. We do not distribute the authority, the programming or most of the machinery. Power travels remarkably well. Audiences still need a bus.

What remains is uneven. At Makukhanye Art Room in Khayelitsha, a journalist recorded new acting boards, curtains, working toilets, a laptop and Wi-Fi supplied by the Fringe. The lighting was there for two weeks only. At the Theatre Arts Admin Collective in Observatory, owner Caroline Calburn said a struggling space had become a theatre artists could use all year. I haven’t been back to Makukhanye since 2018. I don’t know if the acting boards are still there or whether the Wi-Fi password works. Photographs of interventions have a way of looking more permanent than the interventions themselves.

Mandisi Sindo, then director of Makukhanye, told the journalist that artists should not rely on door takings. Interesting, given that my own model included a split of door sales. He had also called a meeting and mandated the Fringe to examine its structure, so artists could earn all year.

The venue was asking the platform to account for itself. Now someone was asking what happens when the festival leaves. Fair question. Slightly inconvenient. Probably necessary.

I am Writer-in-Residence at the Fak’ugesi African Digital & Innovation Festival in Johannesburg. Sindo tells an interviewer about organisations bringing arts into townships, wonders what happens when they stop coming, and asks, “Would the arts disappear from our doorsteps?” He has since left Makukhanye to open another room. Capacity isn’t just curtains and toilets and a laptop that may or may not still connect. It’s Mandisi deciding to leave and open another room anyway.

The National Arts Festival recently posted a video of Sindo inviting artists to apply for the 2027 Fringe, noting he has brought work to the Festival for many years. That doesn’t tell me whether a room stands or an artist is paid, or whether the infrastructure depends on the next festival arriving with good intentions and equipment in the back of a bakkie. What survives the visit is the harder measure.

Fak’ugesi, which ran 13 to 17 October, makes a different argument. Its venues in and around Braamfontein have distinct roles: the Origins Centre hosts the day devoted to memory; the Digital Dome hosts a networked visual music festival inside its fulldome; Tshimologong receives the festival’s people; a music hall and an independent cinema take sound and film. Memory Engines, Imagination Engines and Future Engines give audiences a reason to travel between them. Each space lends a capability to a larger proposition.

I write this with my Fak’ugesi lanyard off, but still from within its walking distance, so read me with that proximity in mind. Apply the morning-after test and the answer is plain. Those venues were open before the festival arrived and are open now. Fak’ugesi visits rooms that already stand, and what it adds is five days of attention and an idea of how to move between them. That is real. It is not redistribution. Its venues gather largely within one university’s reach. You can put everything within walking distance and still leave the decisions where they began.

Then there is Art Week Tokyo, which closed on 8 November. More than fifty museums and galleries connected by a free white bus over the final three days. I watched a clip of people queuing in the rain to get on it. The initiative runs in collaboration with Art Basel and with support from Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs. The institutions keep their identities and, in the galleries’ case, their markets.

Here the bus is the platform. Sometimes people just need to get from one place to another without inventing a theory of change about it. But coordination is not redistribution. The bus makes the journey easier. It doesn’t change who owns the destination. On the morning after, it answers only whether audiences can find the doors. The galleries open and pay their people with or without it.

Three mechanisms. Fak’ugesi integrates what exists around an idea. Tokyo coordinates what exists. Cape Town attempted something harder: adding to what exists. We distributed the venues and kept the authority, and the morning after is where that shows. One venue asked what happens when we leave, which is the question the design should have answered before we arrived.

Judge a distributed platform on the morning after.

Can the venue open its doors? Can it pay the people who work there? Does its audience know where to find it?

If it can, the platform left something behind. If it cannot, it borrowed the room very elaborately and called it development.

There is a difference.

Image: Illustration by Me.

Ashraf Johaardien is a South African writer\artist working across literary, dramatic and visual forms.

Ashraf Johaardien
ashrafjohaardien@me.com
M\e.
http://www.ashrafjohaardien.com