TOPIC: Curating archival and material traces
SPEAKER: Tracey Randle
Vernacular architecture is a material expression of the way people live and adapt to the environment, available materials, as well as social and cultural imperatives. We start 2020 by looking at the way that this has been made manifest in exhbitions which move away from the old static displays of material culture. 2020 will see us coming to terms with the way people lived in the vernacular cultural landscape and how that impacted on the architecture.
Tracey will describe how she has used the archive and material records to reveal complex social lives of diverse people at the Cape in exhibitions.
Tracey Randle completed her MA at UCT in Historical Studies in 2004. From 2004 to 2015 she was the resident historian and curator for Solms-Delta wine estate, Franschhoek. Tracey’s archival research centred on the complex and nuanced contact zones between colonists, indigenous inhabitants and slaves, farm owners and farm workers.
The visual and physical expression of this research was the installation of a permanent exhibition called Museum van de Caab (opened in 2005), and its satellite exhibition Music van de Caab (opened in 2014) similarly themed on the contact zones omnipresent in the global and local influences in Cape music).
In 2016 she began work on curating a new exhibition for the Huguenot Memorial Museum (opened in April 2019) and has curated various other installations across the Western Cape. She is currently doing her PhD in Curation through Michaelis.