HOBBS/NEUSTETTER

The Trinity Session was formed in 2001, as a collective response to self-sustainability against a dwindling creative economy in Johannesburg and lack of museum and gallery infrastructure. In time our practice grew from participation in international electronic arts festivals and cultural mapping of the arts and crafts industries in the SADC region for example, to securing bids for large scale public art programmes. And Johannesburg served as a critical mirror to the politics of urban transformation in our country. Through our various public art programmes, we had access to people and communities and were actively involved in shifting thinking at city level, around artistic and cultural production in the public domain. This in turn had a significant impact on our approach to co-authorship and production within the Trinity Session. By 2006 Hobbs/Neustetter was formed in direct response to the plethora of thoughts and ideas that emerged from city projects that due to the % for public art policy, at the time emphasized permanent pieces of work.

Hobbs/Neustetter was concerned with a more ephemeral and agile approach testing new ideas through experimental methods and activities manifesting as site specific performances, installations and interventions, on the continent and abroad. Many of the examples here served as a testing ground and a form of activism towards new culturally charged spatial practices in South Africa.