Africa Cluster's contents tagged with "wits school of art"

“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.

ARAC Partners with Arts Research Africa to Convene a Symposium on Artistic Education in Johannesburg (10-18 February 2020)

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 10:53:44 +0000

At the invitation of Arts Research Africa (a research initiative of the Wits School of the Arts, the Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC) convened a Symposium on Artistic Research in Africa that took place at Wits University, Keleketla! Library and other sites of knowledge production and speculation in Johannesburg, 10-18 February 2020.

Another Roadmap for Arts Education Africa Cluster (ARAC) convened a symposium in the framework of research on the history of arts education undertaken within a network of educators, artists and researchers working in 23 cities around the world, initiated by the Institute for Art Education at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). The symposium was composed of internal working sessions alongside public workshops, exhibition, evening programmes, live music, performance, site visits, film screenings and coincided with Lephephe Print Gatherings 4.

At the level of the African continent, the working groups of Another Roadmap included members of Keleketla! Library, Keep the Dream Arts, Wits School of Arts (University of the Witwatersrand) and independent cultural workers who compose the Johannesburg Working Group; the Kampala Working Group in Uganda, operating at Nagenda International Academy of Art & Design (NIAAD); The Lubumbashi Working Group, operating at Centre d’art Waza; the Nyanza Working Group in Rwanda, working from the former Nile Source Polytechnic of Applied Arts (NSPA); the Maseru Working Group in Lesotho, at Ba re e ne re Literary Arts; and the Cairo Working Group in Egypt, hosted by the Contemporary Image Collective (CIC).

ARAC’s symposium, which took place in conjunction with Arts Research Africa (Wits School of Arts), aimed to reflect on the localised and collective researches since 2015 and the present, shared outcomes, and paved the way forward by hosting internal and public workshops that aimed to transfer, to publish and to expand the histories, conditions, concerns, processes and methods that are particular to each of the working groups that compose the ARAC.

Timelines, learning units, and exhibition kits are some of the interfaces through which these research outcomes have been rendered, and the symposium aimed to make the outcomes available in Johannesburg, through the medium of zines which could be easily reproduced within limited resources.

The symposium hosted a keynote lecture and masterclass on "why the arts dont do anything" by Ruben Gaztambide- Fernandez, one of the founding members of Another Roadmap, whose work with indigenous communities in Toronto, Canada, has informed the concerns of Another Roadmap. The symposium also hosted visiting colleagues such Oluwasegun Quadri from Lagos, and Jean Kamba from Kinshasa. The symposium facilitated exchanges between the working groups and community members working in the arts in South Africa at various locations in Johannesburg.

The overall programme of the symposium highlighted the relevance of the historical knowledge of art education, the antecedents of oppositional, anti-imperial and decolonial impulses practiced by art collectives, the spiritual merit and pedagogical value of dance, forms, images, movements and sounds located across the Africas and their diasporas, and the solidarities between alternative pedagogies emerging through South to South alliances among the Africas, Latin Americas and First Nation North Americas. With this approach, the symposium aimed to make relevant the intertwined histories that inform the inhospitable conditions of the present and to intervene by rethinking how to convene, to gather and to assemble beyond the spaces and the times that are officially sanctioned as learning environments.

This project was supported by an ANT Mobility Grant from Pro Helvetia Johannesburg financed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) with additional support from Arts Research Africa at Wits School Arts.

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DETAILED REPORT

In May 2019 Arts Research Africa, a project of the Wits School of the Arts that aims to spark dialogue, stimulate practice, enable research and inspire collective engagement in developing artistic research in the African university, invited ARAC to tender a proposal for a symposium on artistic education in Johannesburg. We decided to use this as an opportunity to arrange a cluster meeting to which we invited as our ‘critical friends’ representatives of the Lagos and Kinshasa working group.

During the closed sessions, we reflected on the work we have done over the past five years, collectively edited our zines, and began to explore new strategies for disseminating what we have learned and what we have been thinking about in the work we have done together. This resulted in the collation of cross-cutting questions and provocations, which we began printing as postcards on the Johannesburg working group’s risograph machine.

Thursday 13 February 2020

Launch Event (The Point of Order, Braamfontein)

During the launch at The Point of Order (the WSOA project space) on Thursday 13 February, we gave an introduction to the work and the goals of ARAC – introducing, in addition to the zines and the postcards, the Johannesburg Working Group’s Un/Chrono/Logical Timeline and the Intertwining Hi/Stories Un/Chrono/Logical Timeline game.

Friday 14 February 2020

Masterclass: Why The Arts Don't Do Anything by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernañdez (The Point of Order, Braamfontein)

As well as accompanying and contributing to our discussions in the closed sessions as our invited expert, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernañdez (Toronto Working Group) offered a masterclass on his renowned 2013 essay, ‘Why The Arts Don’t Do Anything’ at The Point of Order (the WSOA project space).

Saturday 15 February 2020

ARAC at the 4th Lephephe Print Gathering (King Kong Building, Troyville)

ARAC partnered with the 4th Lephephe Print Gathering on Saturday 15 February. Alongside the book fair and the live zine-making session led by the artistic collective INVADE (who had generously volunteered to help ARAC co-ordinate the public sessions), we organised an iteration of the Johannesburg Working Group’s Un/chronological Timeline, presented the ARAC zines, the Intertwining Hi/Stories Un/Chrono/Logical Timeline game, and we encouraged attendees to engage with our questions and provocations. We provided notebooks in which they could gather copies of materials alongside their own questions and ideas. Rubén Gaztambide-Fernañdez gave a keynote on ‘the orders of cultural production’. The evening culminated in People Who Think Together Dance Together – our (by now) traditional dance party.

Sunday 16 February 2020

PERFORMANCE/LECTURE: ‘Deaesthetic(s): A performance of and from a space of dislocation by Tumi Mogorosi (Hillier Street)

The domestic setting of the ‘bring and braai’ served for a formal academic examination of Johannesburg Working Group member Tumi Mogorosi, who gave a performance lecture entitled ‘Deaesthetic(s): A performance of and from a space of dislocation, a critical analysis of the violent aesthetic imprisonment(s) in/of knowledge production’ from a sofa in the garden in the middle of the afternoon.

Mogorosi’s MA work aims to offer a a critique of the classroom – which is to say a critique of the constituting modes of how knowledge is produced, quantified and disseminated. His critique poses a fundamental question to the legitimacy of the obviousness or normativity in western formulations of knowledge making or knowledge production found in the assessment and grading apparatus. Necessitating a search for, and from a space of (dis)location outside of the traditional classroom, Mogorosi seeks to identify and promote practices of knowledge production and knowledge exchange beyond the wall of violent terrains of the institutionally quantifiable/recognisable apparatuses of grading, in the ‘elsewhere’ of knowledge production: the historical spills, the invisible spaces, the spilling out, the excess, and thereby make possible a theory of the non-location/non-locatability (dislocation) which marks an opening for a theory outside of the normative parameters of quantification which can be considered being outside recognition. This is what Mogorosi terms "Deaesthetic(s)".

Daily

SCREENING AND DISCUSSIONS: École du Soir (Various Locations)

Alongside the closed sessions and the public events, the International Symposium of ARAC in Johannesburg also featured an iteration of École du Soir - a multiform hosting structure for collective feeling, thinking, action and reflection convened by artist Christian Nyampeta and the Nyanza Working Group. The iteration of École du Soir in Johannesburg was made financially possible with the European Union Prize that Nyampeta received at the Rencontres de Bamako in 2019.

École du Soir in Johannesburg was inscribed in a long line of activities that consist of a scriptorium (a place for writing, and in particular, translating), exhibitions, public programmes and publications, concerned with ‘how to live together’ then, now and tomorrow. The overall programme is resourced around the idea of an ‘evening school,’ following the Senegalese writer and film director Sembène Ousmane, who saw cinema as “cours du soir” or “evening classes.” This concept was informed by the traditions of orality, sensuality, and conviviality within the realm of learning and making in his region. Sembène saw cinema as a popular information system in the service of education, aesthetic experience, and public dissemination. His methodology concerned the use of cinema’s collective production, and investing in its viewing methods that draw from different uses of time, visual and textual histories, social struggles and hopes, in mutuality between his own locality and the world at large.

One of the films presented in this programme A Walk (2018), a short film by Nigerian artist Rahima Gambo. A Walk is a psycho-geographical survey from Lagos and Abuja, conceived as an interior cartography mapped from the external environment traversed by the artist. Gambo uses walking as a narrative, mobile and open-ended mechanism, with no beginning, middle or end, that yields stills, moving images and an assemblage of found objects sculpted together from objects pick up on her ‘path.’ In effect, Rahima Gambo’s walk retraces the rising incident of female suicide bombers in North eastern Nigeria and she describes the experience thus: ‘I saw my body as a porous tool where all sorts of multi-sensory information could be gathered. Entanglements with unfolding landscapes before me and “found things” that could be the sound of birds, video of neatly cut lawn grass, it could be torn photographs, discarded lace material, a stick or a leaf.’

The motive of movement across time and space was at the heart of the programme of École du Soir in Johannesburg, and this is a shared strategy among the ARAC Working Groups. Already for some time, the Kampala Working Group has been exploring ‘walking’ as a pedagogical tool, whereby students undertake walks as part of curricular activities that encourage them to pay attention to their environments and surroundings. ThroughÉcole du Soir, these pre-existing movements extended into memories, images, bodily, material, spiritual, formal and conceptual registers. But also, the movements included temporary inter-institutional collaborations (between and across institutions) and intra-institutional (within institutions).

One notable moment took place at the screening held at Trackside Creative – a creative hub space in Orlando West, Soweto, that offers possibilities for design and print, visual arts studio, events space, and is a home for artists to imagine, create and collaborate. Rahima Gambo’s A Walk was screened there, alongside Day in Life, a new work by Karrabing Film Collective, an indigenous media group based in Australia’s Northern Territories that uses filmmaking and installation as a form of grassroots resistance and self-organization. Both these films were received with enduring resonance: The ensuing discussions and whistling of the soundtracks demonstrated how artists separated by expansive spaces, social injustices and prohibitive bureaucracy may find communion beyond the limits imposed by their respective societal struggles.

Other screenings, reflections, gatherings and discussions were held at the Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Study (JIAS); at Keleketla! Library; at The Point of Order, at Wits School of the Arts; and also at a Bring and Braai hosted by artist and JWG member Rangoato Hlasane’s own home.

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:

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.