ABSTRACT
Starting with an analysis of El Anatsui’s ‘Crumbling Wall’ installation, then moving on to Blomkamp’s 2009 film District 9, documentary texts by Anton Harber and Steven Otter, poems by Sandile Dikeni, and a novel by Meja Mwangi, this chapter interrogates the humble building materials of the informal residences of the poorest township dwellers. It argues that it is materiality, epitomized here by the recycled building materials of the informal townships shacks, which best materializes the future and ways of theorizing it.
