Stories collective: assembling the Westbury archive

Abstract

Stories Collective questions the role of the archive in a post-colonial, post-apartheid South Africa and its resultant, hybrid typology. Stories Collective explores how architecture can be used as a systemic tool to positively restore heritage, memory and knowledge production within critical urban communities, specifically in Westbury, Johannesburg. Stories Collective investigates the architecture of a community theatre as a living archive to rectify disparities caused by the oppressed, selective archiving of Westbury’s past; while simultaneously empowering a community hindered by incredible socio-economic issues today. The Westbury story has always been told, historically and today, as an ugly, hopeless and crime-ridden story through the eyes of popular media and the official narrative of selected state archives. This project argues that Westbury is not a place of lack, but rather a place of a rich, layered repository that run the risk of being swept away with the social memory of a colonial and apartheid past. Central to the Stories Collective is to render visible the stories of Westbury, by allowing for the relatively static archives to be brought into connection with a dynamic, current external world, in which it serves as an active, working memory