MADEYOULOOK
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Sermon on the Train

MADEYOULOOK, Johannesburg based arts collaborative, have since 2012 tested the authority of colonial style monumentalism, and in its placed offered the potentials for Oral Histories as a rethinking of how we remember and how memorialise.

 

Sermon on the Train

Sermon on the Train was a project that explored possibilities for new ways of producing and disseminating knowledge by facilitating university lectures by well-known academics on Johannesburg’s Metrorail.

By pushing the boundaries of the 'publicness' of public lectures, Sermon on the Train sought to challenge the dogma of the university as place of knowledge production. The Sermon on the Train brings academic lectures onto the South African Metrorail. Well known academics are encouraged to give a lecture on their topic of specialisation in such a way that imparts some knowledge on whomever cares to listen but does not ‘dumb down’ the material. Each lecture is a symbolic and practical addition to public debate. Each lecture indicates to those on the train that there is a public arena in which academia and its institutions in particular are available and in fact in indebted service to the public. But even more so, each lecture is a challenge to the academy on the relevance and applicability of its hold on knowledge production. Sermon on the Train has had four iterations with lectures by Anitra Nettleton, BlackLinesonWhitePaper, Isabel Hofmeyr and Marc Bijl. Each lecture was accompanied by easy to distribute fold-up publications to contextualise the project for commuters.

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