OUVERTURE DU ZEITZ MOCAA MUSEUM

L’ouverture prochaine du Zeitz Mocaa Museum au Cap nous offre l’occasion de ce superbe périple en Afrique du Sud.

Tout y est à la démesure d’un pays envoûtant : la traversée des paysages grandioses du Karoo à bord du « plus beau train du monde » ( Rovos Rail, pré-arrivée optionnelle), le survol en hélicoptère du somptueux Cap de Bonne-Espérance jusqu’à votre hôtel, le parcours œnologique et gastronomique au cœur de la région des vins et de la paisible région de Franschhoek…

https://www.barter-paris.com/events/voyage-western-cape/

Designed by Heatherwick Studios, the impending museum sits on the V&A waterfront in the historic Grain Silo Complex. Designed as a space for Africa's artists to tell their stories through a variety of media, Zeitz MOCAA looks to stem the flow of creatives forced to look to venues beyond the continent to showcase their work.

Is this the new home of contemporary art?

 (CNN)Cape Town is about to become home to one of the most influential art institutions in the world. The 100,000-square-foot Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa will be the biggest museum to open on the continent for more than a hundred years. Clocking in at about $38 million, it just might shift the contemporary art world as we know it.

Africa's upcoming museum named after former Puma CEO 05:57

"There was a collection looking for a home," says Thomas Heatherwick, "and there was a building looking for content -- meaningful content."

Heatherwick reminisces about his first experiences of Cape Town, some 20 years ago, but says the industrial structures he remembers exploring on the waterfront were never that inspiring to the city's residents.

"It was 90 years old and (the Grain Silo Complex) was the tallest building in Sub-Saharan Africa for apparently half a century," he recalls.

"But it was sort of invisible in some sense to people in Cape Town."

Imbuing the site with a new sense of purpose required the designer to negotiate its difficult structural elements: namely 42 colossal concrete tubes.

Rather than tear down the tubes, he decided to incorporate them into the overall design. Cutting away slivers in their walls, Heatherwick and the project team have created a large atrium space with elevators, spiral staircases and a glass ceiling flooding light into the room.

The museum borrows its name from Jochen Zeitz, the former CEO of Puma. An avid collector of contemporary African art, he is loaning several pieces of his considerable collection for decades to come while they continue to build up their permanent collection. Nothing at the Zeitz MOCAA will predate the year 2000.

South African artist Mohau Modisakeng, sculptor Stefan Blom and photographer Zanele Muholi will be among those with works on display when the museum is inaugurated in autumn 2017. And when the doors do open, there could be a seismic change to the nation's art scene.

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/31/architecture/thomas-heatherwick-zeitz-mocaa-cape-town/index.html