Day 3: Friday,
16th September 2022
The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember
44 Stanley Avenue, Braamfontein Werf, 2021, Johannesburg
The programme on this day is offered in collaboration with The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember,
The Library is an interactive sound and visual archive of black resistance. It was founded in 2017 by Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai Chiurai. The archive includes an extensive vinyl record collection of music associated with the liberation movements in southern Africa from the 1970s-80s, rare recordings of political speeches and a collection of artworks, posters and pamphlets acquired by Chiurai. The Library exists in two forms: as a traveling exhibition which has been hosted by institutions including Palais de Tokyo in Paris and as a physical space at 44 Stanley in Joburg is where the public can interact with their archive, for free. The Library also hosts events and talks that further help our audiences - young and old - interact with the archive.
This panel draws on Care as a set of conditions, relations, registers and practices from which to engage with difficult territories of discussion, engagement and accountability. This conversation begins with how we can address intimate violence as it operates within our worlds, our practices and also in the manner by which it is shaped by and sutured into the conditions of study, mentorship, circulation and production in art and creative practice. Care is a critical frame to sit with the ways that the artist and their work are so densely co-mingled - the artist and their life a layer of the public and private often with few gaps for refrain in between. The intimate and violence share this layeredness, as the conditions by which we come to live in the world are so systematically framed by violence that it covers all territories of experience, including the terms by and through which we come to confront that violence itself. The assemblage of intimate violence is a means to confront the pervasiveness of gender based violence in the work and our living worlds that are so prevalent that they occupy the ordinary and spectacular of daily experience at once. This experience of violence bears the weight of race, class, gender, capital, space, labour, survival itself. This ordinary/spectacular also makes difficult the language for an oppositional stance, even while our opposition remains ever present. This ordinary/spectacular, while making provisionally possible public debates and confrontations to gendered forms of violence and harm, also make other registers of thinking, feeling and speaking of our experiences difficult to articulate.
Care is that difficult territory, where we are courageous and vulnerable enough to disagree, contest, contradict - to make provisional solidarities, plans of action, commitments for change - to wilfully engage the material precarities made and sustained by the institutionalisation of intimate violence within the structures of our living and our work.
Our panelists operate from an ethics of care in their engagements with intimate violence, with critical insights that draw from their work on art practice, political mobilisation, personhoods, policy, juridical and governance systems and structures, experience in the criminal justice system, anti-carceral politics, gender and sexualities, intimacy, love and feminist healing justice. Panelists will open up a conversation from a range of registers to speak to how we sit with the pain that we inherit that we carry prior to and after the conditions and experiences of harm. They engage with how we might enter and leave confrontational practices as a means to make our own survival. Panelists are asked to reflect on what accountability might look like and what this accountability means in an assemblage contracted to healing and justice. Panelists are also asked to open space from and by which experience and how it is expressed or articulated, can be held in multiple vernaculars, at various scales of speech and silence.
Panelists: Ncebakazi Manzi, Doreen Gaura, Gcobani Qambela, Shamim Meer
Facilitator: Danai Mupotsa
Your body carries programming that works against what you are fighting for. This is your undoing. We cannot build a world using the very mechanisms that were used to create the one we have fighting to destroy.
The change maker’s dilemma; fractured between fighting for the rights of the oppressed and envisioning and creating a future unattached to the atrocities of the past. Undoing or righting the discrepancies riddled in institutions or oppressive non-inclusive systems, requires the engager to immerse themselves in intricacies of the injustices. When experiencing this, not only is the body, psyche triggered as the encounter taps into the inherited memory of oppressive experiences, but the being imprints a new trauma. The body doesn’t know the difference between memory and reality, when an individual encounters violence from the past the body relives the experience as its own. How do we create a people unattached to past trauma, who can become changers of it without being triggered by it?
Keitu Gwanga and Kudzanai Chiurai explore Trauma Release as a process that connects with the work of memory, historiography, inheritance, the archive and repair with the body.
Keitu is a practicing Sangoma and artist whose work plays with and inhabits the distance between modern living and African concepts of wellness. She founded Africa Zazi, to hold platforms for discussions about cultural, ritual and spiritual knowledge systems of African societies. Keitu works in collaboration with artists that operate in different mediums. In this work, Keitu aims to bridge the past and the present, to make the practices, rituals and processes of culture more accessible and functional, evolving, unraveling, demystifying.
Kudzanai Chiurai is an artist whose work incorporates various media, with a focus on cycles of political and economic inequality and conflict in postcolonial societies. His work, The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember, is work he considers to be the work of a liberated zone where guests, audiences and makers can independently enter and engage with processes of cataloging in visual, aural, sonic and oral vernaculars with a critical emphasis on dialogue. This sense of ‘dialogue’ shares the orientation of Keitu’s instinct to approach the past and the present, gathering those things we might have forgotten - archival materials that function as a frequency that mobilises and energises struggle.
This workshop is an encounter with Keitu and Kudzanai’s engagements with form, power, healing, the body, memory and archive.
44 Stanley Avenue, Braamfontein Werf, 2021, Johannesburg
The programme on this day is offered in collaboration with The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember,
The Library is an interactive sound and visual archive of black resistance. It was founded in 2017 by Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai Chiurai. The archive includes an extensive vinyl record collection of music associated with the liberation movements in southern Africa from the 1970s-80s, rare recordings of political speeches and a collection of artworks, posters and pamphlets acquired by Chiurai. The Library exists in two forms: as a traveling exhibition which has been hosted by institutions including Palais de Tokyo in Paris and as a physical space at 44 Stanley in Joburg is where the public can interact with their archive, for free. The Library also hosts events and talks that further help our audiences - young and old - interact with the archive.
10h00 Care
Panel Discussion in collaboration with The Library of Things We Forgot to RememberThis panel draws on Care as a set of conditions, relations, registers and practices from which to engage with difficult territories of discussion, engagement and accountability. This conversation begins with how we can address intimate violence as it operates within our worlds, our practices and also in the manner by which it is shaped by and sutured into the conditions of study, mentorship, circulation and production in art and creative practice. Care is a critical frame to sit with the ways that the artist and their work are so densely co-mingled - the artist and their life a layer of the public and private often with few gaps for refrain in between. The intimate and violence share this layeredness, as the conditions by which we come to live in the world are so systematically framed by violence that it covers all territories of experience, including the terms by and through which we come to confront that violence itself. The assemblage of intimate violence is a means to confront the pervasiveness of gender based violence in the work and our living worlds that are so prevalent that they occupy the ordinary and spectacular of daily experience at once. This experience of violence bears the weight of race, class, gender, capital, space, labour, survival itself. This ordinary/spectacular also makes difficult the language for an oppositional stance, even while our opposition remains ever present. This ordinary/spectacular, while making provisionally possible public debates and confrontations to gendered forms of violence and harm, also make other registers of thinking, feeling and speaking of our experiences difficult to articulate.
Care is that difficult territory, where we are courageous and vulnerable enough to disagree, contest, contradict - to make provisional solidarities, plans of action, commitments for change - to wilfully engage the material precarities made and sustained by the institutionalisation of intimate violence within the structures of our living and our work.
Our panelists operate from an ethics of care in their engagements with intimate violence, with critical insights that draw from their work on art practice, political mobilisation, personhoods, policy, juridical and governance systems and structures, experience in the criminal justice system, anti-carceral politics, gender and sexualities, intimacy, love and feminist healing justice. Panelists will open up a conversation from a range of registers to speak to how we sit with the pain that we inherit that we carry prior to and after the conditions and experiences of harm. They engage with how we might enter and leave confrontational practices as a means to make our own survival. Panelists are asked to reflect on what accountability might look like and what this accountability means in an assemblage contracted to healing and justice. Panelists are also asked to open space from and by which experience and how it is expressed or articulated, can be held in multiple vernaculars, at various scales of speech and silence.
Panelists: Ncebakazi Manzi, Doreen Gaura, Gcobani Qambela, Shamim Meer
Facilitator: Danai Mupotsa
14h00 Sift… A Look into Trauma Release as an Active Decolonisation Process
Screening and workshop in collaboration with The Library of Things We Forgot to RememberYour body carries programming that works against what you are fighting for. This is your undoing. We cannot build a world using the very mechanisms that were used to create the one we have fighting to destroy.
The change maker’s dilemma; fractured between fighting for the rights of the oppressed and envisioning and creating a future unattached to the atrocities of the past. Undoing or righting the discrepancies riddled in institutions or oppressive non-inclusive systems, requires the engager to immerse themselves in intricacies of the injustices. When experiencing this, not only is the body, psyche triggered as the encounter taps into the inherited memory of oppressive experiences, but the being imprints a new trauma. The body doesn’t know the difference between memory and reality, when an individual encounters violence from the past the body relives the experience as its own. How do we create a people unattached to past trauma, who can become changers of it without being triggered by it?
Keitu Gwanga and Kudzanai Chiurai explore Trauma Release as a process that connects with the work of memory, historiography, inheritance, the archive and repair with the body.
Keitu is a practicing Sangoma and artist whose work plays with and inhabits the distance between modern living and African concepts of wellness. She founded Africa Zazi, to hold platforms for discussions about cultural, ritual and spiritual knowledge systems of African societies. Keitu works in collaboration with artists that operate in different mediums. In this work, Keitu aims to bridge the past and the present, to make the practices, rituals and processes of culture more accessible and functional, evolving, unraveling, demystifying.
Kudzanai Chiurai is an artist whose work incorporates various media, with a focus on cycles of political and economic inequality and conflict in postcolonial societies. His work, The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember, is work he considers to be the work of a liberated zone where guests, audiences and makers can independently enter and engage with processes of cataloging in visual, aural, sonic and oral vernaculars with a critical emphasis on dialogue. This sense of ‘dialogue’ shares the orientation of Keitu’s instinct to approach the past and the present, gathering those things we might have forgotten - archival materials that function as a frequency that mobilises and energises struggle.
This workshop is an encounter with Keitu and Kudzanai’s engagements with form, power, healing, the body, memory and archive.