THE INTERVENTIONIST Coming from a successful advertising background, Porky has been equipped with not only the skills to understand the way people think, but also how you should bend the rules to make them think. To accomplish anything that instils positive change, he says you have to capture someone’s imagination – now! Not surprisingly, the advertising world was too prescriptive for this radical individual who doesn’t stand for any proverbial tails trying to wag this dog. So, Porky broke free from the norm, and established Animal Farm. Animal Farm is a creative consultancy that provides alternative business solutions for everything from branding to communication issues as well as being a place for design collaboration and innovation. His consciously-designed products have graced many a media page, such as his adult-sized weaver nest or ‘organic lounger’ (think, ‘pimp my treehouse’); ‘High Hopes, Big Dreams’, a ‘reuseable’ milkcratecome-stool; and ‘Lite’, pendant lights made from natural plantation wood and fitted with energy-efficient bulbs. Porky says he prefers the term ‘reuse’ to ‘recycle’, because ”it’s not second-hand and kak, it’s still good and useful“. He tells us about the urban sculptures of Frank Gehry in Barcelona and Anish Kapoor in Chicago and we realise just how well largescale, creative interventions can serve to bring about urban renewal. Porky’s own ideas for regeneration began with an art installation in the Table Mountain National Park. They progressed to address more pertinent issues, such as the unfinished highways that cut through Cape Town’s city centre. Many an urban legend has given a reason for this blunder, but after 35 years, little has been done. The National Roads Agency has made it a priority to fix them, but only by 2012, once the world has seen this ‘minor’ inner-city screw-up! In the meantime, they will probably just sweep the problem under a cellphone banner, we suppose.
african giants
Porky’s solution? Turn them into the city’s pride by making them beautiful. He’s suggested making them look like the ends of a Scalextric set, transforming the brunt of jokes into something that not only makes sense visually but financially too. The obvious question is where funding would come from, and this is where Porky’s long-term strategy comes into play. He proposes tactically placing parts of a Scalextric track across the city as advertising platforms, to contrast to the visual anarchy of billboards. Imagine the world’s eyes on a city that allows such an intervention that is beneficial to the population’s psyche. Another of Porky’s grand schemes to ‘reuse’ is to give the decommissioned cranes in Cape Town harbour a facelift – literally. He’s suggested adding giraffe heads to the tops of the cranes, to create moving light sculptures from the most visibly unused feature on the city’s skyline. Sadly, the idea has been put on the backburner as the 2010 FIFA committee fails to understand how it fits into the theme of a unique African experience. As with many of his ideas, foresight in governance is greatly lacking. Financiers only see as far as the bottom line, and if maximum advertising revenue means minimum expenditure without any ‘greater good’ being achieved, then so be it. Urban spaces go to the highest bidder and not the most innovative solution. But Porky will keep on trying as he believes there has to be a beneficial solution for all of us. Porky has a wealth of ideas hidden up his sleeve, most too exciting to mention just yet. One of the reasons they’re so difficult to execute is that they are just too big to imagine and not tangible enough. A digital image is too unreal and open to manipulation to believe, so the paradigm shift is lost on decision makers. Which is why he’s decided to take a step back to the corporeal and transportable and create equally wonderful, if not slightly more producible, products to build up his observers’ faith before bringing out the big guns. For now, Porky Hefer deserves the last word: “Creativity is creating something that represents a new way of thinking for the new world that we live in; thinking that represents the complexities that make present behaviour and ideas obsolete. So, how can we get together and blow the world apart?”
one small seed
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