In 2013, events organised by the City of Cape Town, the Visual Arts Network of South Africa, the Africa Centre and the Infecting the City public arts festival coalesced around a project titled ‘2013 Ways to Do Public Art’. The project involved an exhibition at the City Hall, a series of policy engagements and artful experiments in public space that were focused on exploring the role of different kinds of public art in South Africa, paying attention to politics, publics and power dynamics. One of the performative interactions was entitled Food for Thought, the purpose of which was to engage in conversations about colonial monuments over food cooked and served in public spaces.

The provocation was conceptualised by Durban-based artist-architect doung jahangeer, who has conducted similar forms of public dialogue around urban issues in other parts of South Africa, as well as internationally. jahangeer is co-founder and director of an arts-architecture organisation based in Durban called dala, which uses artful tactics as a starting point for dialogue and considers how this dialogue can produce knowledge and action towards more just spaces. As Paolo Freire asserts: ‘Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.’

Food for Thought was a public art piece in three parts. Part one started with a process of asking for permission. Acts of public art are subject to permitting processes within the City of Cape Town and this iteration of Food for Thought was to involve setting up a shisa nyama stall next to colonial monuments depicting Edward VII and Jan Smuts.Lighting fires in the city centre is not ordinarily permitted under public space by-laws and cooking food on open flames is heavily regulated, if allowed at all. Acquiring permission was, therefore, the starting point for dialogue between the project organisers and the City of Cape Town and the cause of much anxiety. jahangeer notes: ‘I didn’t see this as an artwork, but rather as a provocation to start a conversation around the very issues that we were confronted with, to devise or set up a platform where dialogue would happen and to understand what the public is and means.’