The Make Art with Purpose Festival 2013 Catalogue

Edited by Janeil Engelstad

“Split the Village: A Project Reimagines Itself Amid a Fractious Election, a Series of Strikes and the Debate over Intangible Cultural Heritage.”

Split the Village was conceived as an experiment in using performance and installation to capture the essence of place, to create a transitory cultural archive. The project’s inspiration is a 14-kilometer stretch of the Phuthiatšana River in rural Lesotho, southern Africa. An area slated to be flooded in late 2013 or early 2014 when the Metolong Dam is complete. Multidisciplinary and collaboratively constructed, the project revolves around the increasingly controversial notion of “intangible cultural heritage” (ICH) – the practices, representations, knowledge and skills that communities, groups and individuals recognize as a part of their heritage. MORE