Fire walker

About this book

"In 2009, William Kentridge and Gerhard Marx were commissioned to make a public sculpture for the City of Johannesburg to be installed in time for the 2010 Soccer World Cup. The sculpture is based on a drawing by Kentridge of a woman street vendor - known colloquially as a fire walker - carrying a burning brazier on her head. The eleven-metre-high striding figure would take her place at the foot of the Queen Elizabeth Bridge on a site formerly used by informal traders and taxi washers. Eschewing the bronze monumentalism of traditional public sculpture, Kentridge and Marx devised a figure made up of steel plates that resolves into a coherent image from one vantage point only. A pedestrian passing the sculpture has only a momentary view of the striding woman before the sculpture 'fragments' into its black and white parts. Fire Walker represents not a grand public office-bearer, but an ordinary citizen whose survival depends on her ability to negotiate often-contested urban terrain. began as a project to document the making of Fire Walker has evolved, in this book, into a number of conversations about - and meditations on - the meaning of public art. Essays by Mark Gevisser, Mpho Matsipa, Alexandra Dodd, and Jonathan Cane and Zen Marie prise open critical questions about public space in Johannesburg; interviews with the various collaborators on the sculpture reveal the complexities and challenges of creating such a work; and the extraordinary images of the construction of the sculpture, alongside two photo essays on street vendors and old city monuments, suggest the metaphoric…

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