Jo Noero and Heinrich Wolff put twelve free-standing boxes of rusted steel inside a saw-tooth shed and called them memory boxes, after the trunks in which migrant workers kept everything they owned while they were away from their families. Each box is about six metres square and twelve high. Nothing about the arrangement prescribes an order: the visitor picks a way between them, which was the point, since the building was meant to refuse the single authorised narrative that a conventional museum imposes. The shed matches the corrugated iron of the settlement around it. It opened on 10 November 2006, won a string of awards including the RIBA Lubetkin Prize in 2010, and in October 2013 was closed by the people of Red Location, who shut the museum, the library and the gallery in protest at the state of their houses. It has not reopened.
New Brighton is one of the oldest townships in Port Elizabeth, now Gqeberha, laid out for Black residents after 1900 on ground that had held a Boer War concentration camp, and the museum was built to keep the record of the anti-apartheid struggle waged from it. In October 2013 residents of Red Location closed the museum, the library and the art gallery in protest at the condition of their houses, many of which had been declared structurally unsound. An agreement between the government and the community to demolish and correctly rebuild 288 of those houses was not carried out. The museum has remained shut ever since.
Wikidata Q7304546 · Commons: File:Red Location Museum Exterior.jpg · Photo: Joziboy · Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0