Africa Cluster's contents tagged with "johannesburg working group"

“Letter writing as a technology of the past present and futures”: A New Project for 2020

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 13:47:23 +0000

When the project “Letters to/from Cairo, Dehli, Gwangju/Cologne, Johannesburg & Richmond: Letter writing as a technology of the past present and futures” started, the method was a meditation on “Fantasy, Thought, Feeling and Speculation as Action” through a set/suite of questions, prompts and propositions:

How do we, in the year 2020/10 or whenever think of letter writing as a technology of the past present and futures?
How does it look, feel, and dream like to write letters to the past, present and future?
Can letter writing be read as a technology of waiting – waiting as technology of speculation?
This is to say, while waiting for the reply, or even for the ‘letter’ to reach recipients – if it does at all (no blue ticks) – we could speculate.
We don’t only speculate in the mind that wanders/loiters or the heart that yearns and anticipates, but also speculate through translations that invites expansive responses – acts of/in Sebakanyana, Solanka, In The Meantime.
In a hyper-capitalist world of un/paid labour, AI-robotic labour and rising ‘unemployment’, can ‘we’ conceive of waiting as a productive act?
If we dare to conceive such, what are the ethico-political consequences/implications of such a thought act?
Can we write letters to the Moon, Venus, Jupiter – Earth, for the Sebakanyana, Solanka, In The Meantime?

The first call and response in this letter writing began in Johannesburg to Cairo and back to Johannesburg. Poetically, all things considered, it is significant that the very first letters were carried by Rangoato Hlasane (member of Another Roadmap Africa Cluster, Wits School of Arts and Keleketla! Library) to visit the Contemporary Image Collective at the invitation of the Temporary Gathering collective from 10 to 15 March 2020. The embodied mediation deepened the notion of letter writing in practice at the cusp of social distancing. At Temporary Gathering, Rangoato co-led a workshop and mediation on letter writing, as well as deliver a lecture on “post-Apartheid” South Africa’s vernacular visual cultures through the lens of kwaito music videos and their articulation of race, gender and nationalism. The lecture was also part of a ‘print party’ in which all participants continued printing, making and remixing letters to Johannesburg, and of course, as per the tradition of ARAC, taking turns at the mixing desk sharing playlists, dancing together, a volume .0 of ‘People Who Think Together Dance Together’. Throughout what was then unbeknownst to us all the last day of such kind of social/intellectual gatherings, participants made stencils and screens, printing onto a collective banner of a letter. The aim was that this banner will continue to evolve on arrival in Johannesburg...

What is striking is that all the Letters/Responses to/from Johannesburg/Cairo do not engage Covid-19. Rather the Letters/Responses grapple with the tensions, contradictions, ironies and pleasures of correspondence, and serve as a portal to share thoughts and experiences that remain consistent with our time. These include, but are not limited to; intersections of language and race, complexities surrounding biographies and geographies, fault lines of nation-states and citizenship, identity and collective universalism. As the letters to Cairo were welcomed and engaged in Cairo, in Johannesburg the cohort in Drawing and Contemporary Practice III students at Wits School of Arts (University of the Witwatersrand) have turned their horizons towards Dehli, where ongoing protests were unfolding…

Within a few weeks of this seemingly unusual call and response engagement, the planetary universe came to a grip due to the Covid-19. For Rangoato, to travel back home on the day when our country’s president was to address the nation for the first time on Covid-19 and to announce a ‘state of disaster’ was surreal: “I couldn’t access the Cairo Airport Wi-Fi, so there I was with a mask on, Letters to Johannesburg in my carry on luggage, speculating on the president’s speech that took place two hours before boarding… everything was a blurr.”

He arrived to a 14-day self-isolation, including the letters. By the time the letters had reached their own quarantine period, a date for South Africa’s hard national lockdown was announced. While the students had access to photographs of the letters, it became clear that the Letters/Response from Cairo will introduce a level of depth and intensity that none of us could have imagined. The novelty of a ‘letter’ had temporally re-surfaced. The invitation of “Fantasy, Thought, Feeling and Speculation as Action” became charged. Currently, the Drawing and Contemporary Practice III cohort is currently ‘packaging’ Letters/Responses to Cairo, as well as Dehli, Gwangju/Cologne and Virginia, and other geographies…a new Instagram will announce forthcoming blog and the continuing correspondences.

At the beginning, on method, we wrote, and we quote in full:

While we will not do away with the Internet and in person exchanges, we aim to underwrite the exchanges through postal correspondence. Thinking with the Otolith Group’s ‘In the Year of the Quiet Sun’, how do we read the graphics of/on postal stamps as miniature posters? We are reading postage stamp marks as signifiers of where objects have been, as additive layers. How do we read postal stamps as documents of historical, social, mineralogical and epistemic spaces in times and spaces?

We are intrigued by the intrigue generated by something that has to be opened. How do we think of the reader as co-author from not only the point of opening (the ‘letter’ or object/parcel), but also from the space of anticipation/speculation? We are fascinated by the possibility of objects changing in transit. Not only in terms of the eventual change in the shape and form of the object, but also through being stunted in time – the situations and conditions that rendered the ‘letter’ relevant at the time of writing may have changed at the time of departure, during transit and at the time of arrival/reception. These changes may be geological, social, political, personal etc.

While not doing away with English, we wish to complicate the desire and habit of reverting to mono-lingualism (or oppressive bi-lingualism as reflected in the Suid/South Africa postage stamp). This way we can open space to visual, the oral/aural, the mathematical, the comical, the diagrammatical, the chemical etc and to speculate, re-search, re-discover and hopefully re-engage.

Much of what was assumed above changed drastically, yet much remains the same and ‘new’ practices experiences emerged almost immediately, and continues. For example, colleagues at Ambekdar Univeristy Dehli turned inward in their letter writing. Disrupted by the pandemic, lockdown and online learning, the cohort in the MA Visual Art at School of Culture and Creative Expression write letters to each other and to a wide range of phenomena. As they write in their beautiful online manifestation (part of their graduation web exhibition), letter writing became a “a sense of communion” and led to “a collection of love letters to each other”. For course leaders Santosh S and Vidya Shivadas “The question of address also changed—distance, proximity, and duration took on new meanings as did the terms friends and strangers.” While the digital collection of letters evoke a sense of tactility, S and Shivadas point to the provisionality of the medium as an apt “testament to our historical present”. Visit their MA Visual Art exhibition and their Letters Project here.

As the title indicates with reference to correspondences to/from

Cairo, Dehli, Gwangju/Cologne, Johannesburg & Richmond the engagement continues with various intensities and tempos. We look forward to share more on this blog as the correspondences unfold. Indeed, the project’s ambition is to engage with colleagues in Entebbe and Lubumbashi. This project has been and continues to be a significant exercise in temporalities and continuities, so it will continue to be defined by starts and stops; waitings and speculations; arrivals and departures; all bounded by contexts and localities. The letter-writing in the expanded sense premise owes much of its genesis in one of the thematic threads of the Intertwining Histories Cluster of Another Roadmap School (and shout out to the London Working Group in introducing the notion of a ‘Letter to a Future Self’) and practices of the Medu Art Ensemble as revisited by the Another Roadmap Africa Cluster.

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About the 2020 Drawing and Contemporary Practice III

The 2020 Drawing and Contemporary Practice III cohort at Wits School of Arts have been operating as an umbrella of ephemeral collectives, namely: 15172264, Are We Safe, Assume Form, Bayazi, Nagaram, Open Questions, RE: Write and SONA. This umbrella has now given rise to four Fronts, in the light of continuing Covid-19 restrictions namely; Editorial Front, Graphic Front, Digital Pre-Production & Online Space Front and RISOgraph & Bookmaking Front.

The collectives are responding to a constellation of invitations, prompts and provocations under the thematic: Letter writing as a technology of the past present and futures. With colleagues in different parts of the globe, the collectives have been writing letters to, and hopefully receiving responses from Cairo, Dehli, Gwangju/Cologne & Richmond.

While different groups are engaging specific topics and investigations, each group is engaging letter writing as a process of pulling together collective editorial frameworks/questions and sub-questions therein towards publications in the second semester (2nd half of 2020). Each collective’s letter writing exercise serves as beginnings of editorial frameworks/propositions/questions. Each collective is, at the time of writing this, engaging in rigorous editorial processes to contribute to a collective publication, unpacking, expanding and exploring key aspects emerging from the ongoing letters and inviting further exchanges in the process.

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About Temporary Gathering

Temporary Gathering is an educational programme on the history and practice of self-organised forms of publishing organised and taking place at Contemporary Image Collective - CIC in Cairo, Egypt. The programme brings together a group of 10-14 cultural workers with backgrounds in graphic design, photography, cultural theory, poetry, dance and visual arts.

Temporary Gathering consists of group based research and critical discussion of local histories and contemporary practices of self publishing and of making publications by use of affordable means, such as photocopied zines and silkscreen printing. Temporary Gathering is trying to build a context for learning from and through forms of working together collectively and tries to reflect on the role of often dissident, ephemeral and marginal forms of expression in our specific time and place and the related economies and socialities.

Temporary Gathering is interested in learning from each other and trying to develop forms of knowledge exchange through a combination of organised week long workshops facilitated by invited guests and the availability of time and resources for participants to develop, organise or facilitate part of the programme.

Temporary Gathering was initially planned for 8 weeks starting in late January this year. After an interruption in March due to the pandemic, the group continued to gather online for a couple of months and most recently more and more in the space again to print the various projects. In July, the group also decided to build two working groups, one working on documenting and the other on public events that speak to the questions, discussions and print productions made as part of the Temporary Gathering.

Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC) participation in the #Im4thearts Capacity Building Winter School (22-24 June 2020)

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 14:32:11 +0000

Formed in January 2020, #Im4theArts is an artist-led movement for the rights of all workers in the South African arts sector with 18,000 Facebook and 800 formally registered members that are working for accountability and economic sustainability in the creative sector. The #Im4theArts Winter School was a response to members’ needs for capacity-building. As part of the Winer School, ARAC members Christian Nyampeta (Nyanza Working Group) and David Andrew (Johannesburg Working Group) participated in the first of three online Zoom sessions on the State of Arts Education in South Africa.

Speaking first, David Andrew offered an account of the process that resulted in the UNESCO Road Map for Arts Education. He did this with reference to the aims of the document presented at the World Conference on Arts Education in Lisbon, 2006, and the subsequent world conference whose findings are recorded in ‘The Seoul Agenda: Goals for the Development of Arts Education’ (2010). David ended his presentation with a discussion of Michael Wimmer’s blog piece titled From “The Seoul-Agenda” to “Another Road-Map for Arts Education” (March 2018) in which he acknowledges the deep-set problematics of the UNESCO processes and identifies the work of ARAC as constructively addressing these concerns.

Christian Nyampeta then went on to sketch the history and genesis of the history of the Another Roadmap School and the Africa Cluster in particular, spotlighting our efforts to supplement and critique the UNESCO processes, emphasising our focus on the histories of art/s education and our commitment to producing and sharing knowledge in forms that can be used meaningfully in African teaching and learning environments.

Johannesburg Working Group organises two further Iterations of the Un/chronological Timeline in April and May 2019

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 14:11:31 +0000

Two further iterations of the Un/chronological Timeline have taken place in Johannesburg - one at theSymposium ‘Rorke’s Drift, Histories and Pedagogies’ at the Bag Factory and the other at Wits University Braamfontein Campus during Africa Month.

5-6 April 2019
Rorke’s Drift, Histories and Pedagogies: A symposium

The Bag Factory Artists’ Studios, The Swedish Embassy in Pretoria, the Wits School of Arts, and the Department of Visual Arts and Sloyd Education at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design (Stockholm, Sweden) held a two-day symposium. Following the Rorke’s Drift and Konstfack – Stories told and yet not told seminar held at Konstfack on 18 April 2018, the symposium took as its starting point the shared history Sweden and South Africa have in relation to the specific connection to the Evangelical Lutheran Church’s (ELC) Arts and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift.

Today, over 56 years since its inception, some of this history is known, but few people know about the impact ELC Arts and Craft Centre has had on the South African art scene. Equally, few know that it was a young Swedish art teacher trained at Konstfack, Peder Gowenius and his wife Ulla Gowenius, a textile
artist also from Konstfack, who played a key role in establishing the Centre in 1963.

What can we learn from histories about (the fight for) democracy, culture, education and the arts? South African photographer and filmmaker Cedric Nunn’s documentary film Rorke’s Drift Revisited, was screened along with a film made by Konstfack lecturer Viktoria Kindstrand. In the latter film, Kindstrand
interviews Peder Gowenius who tells his story about both struggle and success with the ELC Arts and Craft Centre. These screenings, in conjunction with a panel discussion and presentations, framed a wider discussion about bilateral collaboration, the need for ongoing research, existing projects and artistic and
pedagogical exchange.

Visit the Bag Factory website for further information.

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A further iteration took place in collaboration with schoolchildren at the Braamfontein Campus of Wits University as part of the celebrations for Africa Month:

ARAC Will Convene for its 3rd Colloquium in Maseru (7-13 January 2017)

Tue, 28 Nov 2017 13:00:51 +0000

Excerpts from an Interim Report: Activities of Johannesburg, Lubumbashi and Maseru Working Groups (2016-2017)

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 11:08:03 +0000

The Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC) aims remain to: make a critical and timely contribution to the development of practice and policy in our field. To this end, the project strives to support the development of innovative arts and education projects at grassroots level while at the same time networking Africa-based scholars and practitioners, and enabling them to advance research and practice in arts education, share knowledge and nurture further practice and scholarship and contribute to an African and global discourse on arts education. These broad aims are being met at this interim across the different working groups. This report should be read with the ‘mother website’ of Another Roadmap for Arts Education, Another Roadmap School.

Background

Johannesburg
The Johannesburg is developing a framework that is generative – we are identifying the key presences in our research project, many of which are found in the practices of Medu Art Ensemble:

Intergenerationality of research teams, debates, information gathering and decisions. This extends to the collective, ensemble-like methodologies present for the research;
Dialogue/talks/conversation and re-enactment sessions;
Decentralisation of learning sites;
The potential for a “festival” format that authorises itself, has broader appeal and crosses disciplines;
The centrality of grappling with language – and ideological languages;
The working group has considered a set of tactics that might be described as both metaphorical and methodological, drawing from Eduoard Glissant’s understanding of histories as processes that highlight the following guiding metaphors:
To exhaust
To realise
To endlessly discover
To illuminate and then retreat

These presences and metaphors have enabled a working process that maps the research scope in generative ways. The working group is entering a dynamic phase in which students and a broader consistency may begin to interact with the research material and processes.

Lubumbashi
In Lubumbashi, we have organised a meeting every second month, we have had 3 meetings now. We have conducted the preliminary research and identify 4 axes of our work:

Self writing and decolonising practices of arts education: Pierre Romain-Desfossés and le Hangar, Ecole d’art d’Elisabethville
Highlighting informal / alternative education: Research on artists workshops in the 1980s and 1990s
Rethinking the dichotomy elite vs popular: The question of “authencité”
Art education as space for political and social emancipation: Knowledge production under Mobutu dictatorship

Maseru
Maseru Working group’s practice-based research seeks to study current teaching practices/methods in primary schools to identify plausible strategies to advance the level of language literacy that student and instructors alike have in the Sesotho and English subjects. In performing the research, the team will survey students and teachers, each with a different questionnaire, to evaluate the baseline environment and identify opportunities for improvement.
The research approach includes interviews ad data analysis and interpretation as practice. The multi-tired research thus aims to respond, in so doing:

Evaluate curriculum to identify places where locally relevant examples could be incorporated;
Consult with Another Roadmap partners about instruction best practices and applicable educational literature;
Eventually share suggested curriculum with the Ministry of Education;
Develop and offer exercises that will be used as a measuring device of change, both in approach and student achievements results garnered;
Workshop with teachers from target schools on how to apply teaching methods not conventionally found in prescribed teaching resources

Success and/or Achievements of the Project

Johannesburg
The Johannesburg working group have had sparse but rich and rigorous working sessions. The first one was attended by Thembinkosi Goniwe (independent curator, writer and artist), Chepape Makgatho (artist), Molemo Moiloa (Director Visual Arts Network of South Africa), Sipho Mdanda (Freedom Park), Tracy Murinik (independent curator and writer), Rangoato Hlasane and David Andrew. The session emphasised the importance of methodology, particularly methods that contribute to a decolonial project. The Intertwining HiStories public project in which the Johannesburg working group ‘re-‐enacted’ the keynote address by Prof Keorapetse Kgositsile at the Medu Art Ensemble (Botswana, 1982) took place in October 2016 in the midst of the 2016 #FeesMustFall. It was an event that attracted not only Prof Kgositsile himself, but also people who were present in 1982 at the conference, and former Medu members. A strong representation of students and academics, as well as artists and activists found the event enriching and rare.

Lubumbashi
During this first phase, we have worked to develop mutual understanding and a common methodology among a very diverse group of participants. Going forward, we plan to expand the working group beyond Waza to incorporate academics from Lubumbashi University and teachers from fine art schools to enable us to better achieve our broader mission. We have had positive and in-depth contact with other working groups of Another Roadmap School - both in Africa and beyond.

Maseru
We have focused on developing insight into the factors affecting artistic education in our localities. We have received ground-breaking information that paves the way for further research and possibilities of reform based on best practices Lineo has been exposed to in the United States as a Humphrey Fellow. And we have been learning from one another by sharing our varied bodies of knowledge and practice. To be more precise Keleketla! and Ba re e ne re have a lot in common and it was agreed that it will serve both groups to collaborate on facilitating workshops and creating resources that can benefit all audiences involved, especially given the shared history and proximity.

Challenges and Lessons Learnt

Johannesburg
Some difficulties: Foreign exchange and labour laws, as well as differing currencies affect the budget considerably. (For possible solutions, see “Interesting Info”, below.) Difficulty in securing regular meetings – there is a desire to grow the working group, especially streching to a wider local constituency. To this end, we plan to develop research ‘hubs’ in different parts of Johannesburg, in informal and formal education spaces. For example: the ‘unchronological timeline’ could be housed and developed in the Wozani Block studios of the Wits School of Education and the RISO duplicator for independent publishing at Keleketla! Library.

Lubumbashi
Difficulty to have regular meeting as some members are not permanently based in Lubumbashi (Johannesburg, Likasi, etc.). The working group is exploring practical solutions towards increased stability in phase two.

Maseru
Red-tape in relation to getting approval from school administrations and the government. Time restrictions and remote overseeing of projects. Visual documentation of activities due to school opting to monitor proceedings themselves.

ARAC participates in the 2nd NEPAD Regional Conference on Arts Education in Africa (23-27 May 2017)

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:35:39 +0000

The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), an economic development program of the African Union, launched regional Arts Education Conferences in 2015 to bring together various stakeholders to share learning experiences and best practices and work together in a consultative manner towards developing a continental framework to guide the implementation of Arts Education in Africa. The 1st Arts Education Conference was held in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2015. Building on the success of this Conference, the 2nd Arts Education Conference took place in Egypt from 23 – 25 May 2017. Dubbed “the Cairo Conference,” it was produced by NEPAD in collaboration with the Government of the Arab Republic of Egypt. The Cairo Conference sought to promote the cultivation of innovation and creativity for social cohesion and a unified economy. It highlighted the importance of using indigenous cultural expressions to develop the thinking and problem-solving skills of African learners and researchers.

During the Cairo Conference, participating countries delivered national reports on participation rates in Arts Education across the spectrum from the lower levels all the way to tertiary level, review of Education Policy and how it approaches Arts Education, status of Learning, Teaching, Support Material (LTSM) on Arts Education (including E-learning materials), advocacy and formalization of Arts Education in Curricula as well as assessing teacher support in this area to improve teaching of the Arts.

David Andrew (Johannesburg Working Group) and Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa (Kampala Working Group) both attended as speakers, with support from the floor from the Cairo Working Group.

Africa Cluster Colloquium 2 (April 2017) Public Programme

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 14:14:40 +0000

The Another Roadmap Africa Cluster held their Second Colloquium from 3-7 April, 2017. We reserved the Thursday and part of the Friday for public events hosted at the Wits University School of Arts and School of Education.

Highlights

Thursday 6 April, 8-11am, Public timeline making event at Wits School of Education

ARAC members were invited to create a timeline that was juxtaposed with the history of visual arts in South Africa and the world at large. In this exercise, people added dates that held significance to them personally or in their work in order to demonstrate how history intertwines and mark one's place as part of history.

Lunch:13.15 – 4pm, Wits School of Arts (The Point Of Order)

Members introduced themselves and shared their research and experiences with the public. The timeline created earlier in the day was rolled out on the floor as part of the conversation and a symbolic representation of what brought the different working groups together. The gathering included an interactive writing exercise as well as music session to help bring working groups and audience members closer together.

Friday 7 April

1.15 – 4pm, Semi-Public: The Point of Order
Wits School of Arts Fine Arts ‘Drawing & Contemporary Practice’ III: 3rd year student made presentations on Medu Art Ensemble Newsletters in groups. The activity was followed by casual discussions between working groups and students about archiving, recovering and disseminating knowledge.

Evening: 6pm onwards, public
The cluster hosted a reception and dance party to wrap up the weeklong discussion, presentations and deliberations. Every member was invited to play a DJ set as part of the mutual exchange and connectivity of the group. The event offered everyone the chance to recap on an intense yet fruitful week while brainstorming ideas for the way forward.