An exciting week ... - Thought Leader

… for those who live in Cape Town and are interested in design of every shape and colour.

Yip, it’s Design Indaba week — beginning with the conference on Wednesday (Thursday, Friday) and with the expo carrying on all weekend. You might remember I blogged about the expo last year, all I remember is being blown away by the extraordinary creativity of South African designers — in clothing, jewellery, furniture, bags, toys and everything in between.

This year I’m going to the conference too, which looks like a three-day inspiration injection. I’m particularly excited to find out what Ferran Adria — the world’s best chef — has to say. According to Wikipedia, “Adria is also well-known for creating “culinary foam”. In his quest to enhance flavour, Adria discards the use of cream and egg. Foam is made exclusively of the main ingredient and “air” (combined in a whipped-cream maker equipped with N2O cartridges). Adria’s foam creations include foamed espresso, foamed mushroom and foamed beetroot.

Mmmm … foamed beetroot. Sounds delicious!

Also in Cape Town this week is the Spier Performing Arts Festival — Infecting the City. Check out www.infectingthecity.com for a full line-up — the theme this year is “home affairs” and there are some fascinating performances (many of them interactive) being held all over the city — from the Castle of Good Hope to the Adderley Street Fountains, Riebeeck Square and The Assembly nightclub.

Of particular interest to me is Talking Heads this Thursday evening, partly because I’m taking part in it but also just because it sounds like such a unique concept. They’ve billed it as “speed dating for your brain” and the idea is that 60 “experts” (from cosmologists to trends analysts, nuclear physicists and, it seems, writers) are placed at numbered desks, and then given an audience of one to two people and allowed to speak on the topic “These are the times that we’re talking about” for 20 minutes. The audience members pay R100 to attend (numbers are limited to 120 people) and are then given four numbers for the four sessions that evening.

Who knows what you could learn? It’ll either be totally fascinating or you’ll be stuck listening to something dull for 20 minutes … but it doesn’t sound like there are too many dull experts on offer!

So there you have it — a particularly exciting week for those of us living in the Mother City.