Trust Exercises
A curator’s reflection

All struggles
Are essentially
Power struggles,
Who will rule,
Who will lead,
Who will define,
Refine,
Confine,
Design,
Who will dominate.
All struggles
Are essentially
Power struggles,
And most
Are no more intellectual
Than two rams
Knocking their heads together.

-- Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

It may be helpful to provide a refresher on what we aimed to do with the Durban Power Talks programme: I, as curator, together with co-producer Mary-Anne McAllister, proposed an experience conceptualised around the number three: three days, three facilitators, three themes. Provocation, reimagining, and reflection were the pillars we hoped would support a holistic dialogue on power.

We aimed for a deep dive into how space, people, art, and politics influence local creative dynamics. Over the three days, three facilitators would respectively assume the roles of provocateur, animateur, and reflecteur, with the aim of provoking critical reflection on the form, function, dynamics, and implications of power for Durban’s cultural scene.

The programme was centred on the spaces and figures tasked with carefully curating conversations with our Power Talks guests. Our three facilitators were: Ismail Farouk, director of Art for Humanity, an art-based, non-profit organisation at the Durban University of Technology (DUT), as provocateur; Russel Hlongwane, a Durban-based cultural producer specialising in curatorship, writing, research, and design, as animateur; and Nocebo Bucibo, lecturer in photography at the DUT, as reflecteur.

We tried to start at a difficult point with a provocation designed to surface, confront, and address the issues of power pertinent to our site. We wanted, by acknowledging and addressing power problematics, to leave those issues behind, and to move forward by facilitating imaginaries grounded in positive potential futures that would be catalysed by those in attendance.

We imagined power as people and places. Who was invited was key; who performed was key; and where we performed and convened our talks was carefully considered. We wanted to bring together people we perceived to have gravitas and influence in Durban’s creative and cultural sectors; we wanted to take them out of their day-to-day environment and invite them into spaces historically loaded with power – power in the political sense – to encourage their full presence and participation in challenging conversations about power, in all its complexity. Our desire was for power to be conceived in all the different ways it manifests in the city’s cultural sector – from the power wielded by persons of ‘gravitas’, to the dynamics between themselves and others in this cultural ecosystem; from the power exerted upon the various stakeholders represented, to the power dynamics they observe in the various spheres that impact the cultural sector. And so on.

The question of who was not in the room became a popular point of reference. Even the Artthrob online review of the POWER exhibition, held as an opportunity to decompress after an intense week, belaboured this point. Looking back, this preoccupation seemed to detract from those who were in the room, and it is important not to lose sight of the intentions behind who was chosen to be a part of the Power Talks Durban programme. Perhaps this intent might only be understood by those who were more intimately involved in the process.

 

No amount of planning could have prepared us for what our participants experienced; the programme was thus essentially an emergent process. There was a great deal of discomfort, emotional barriers were very high throughout the process, and the theme of provocation refused to be put to bed, bleeding into successive themes. Ultimately, it seemed to us that reflection happened more concertedly in smaller groupings, and in quiet corners, away from the plenary, with a similarly micro approach adopted in respect of post event debriefs. (Several participants reached out to the organisers independently after the event to discuss issues and questions that continued to linger for them.)

Reimagining is the theme that received the least attention – far less than it was due – as participants held onto the conversations from day one and day three. The practice of reimagining is, perhaps, the ‘failing’ or ‘sticking’ point for the city of eThekwini, and holds the city’s cultural sector back from achieving positive momentum.

Since the ethos of our programme was, as far as possible, to ‘include everyone’ (or as representative a sample of guests as possible), the attendees comprised a wide mixture of directors, artists, cultural and heritage practitioners, scholars, and students. During the implementation of the programme, however, it felt as if there was a disconnect: our perception, as a young team of co-curators and producers, was that we were not taken seriously. Whispers along such lines were overheard in conversations among some attendees. Anger was a perceptible and persistent undertone in the spaces in which we convened Power Talks Durban, with the final day in particular giving rise to unrestrained feelings. This could possibly be attributed to underlying, interpersonal politics, or the conversations (and charged silences) experienced during the programme. In some ways, the planning and curation that went into the programme was potentially more meaningful than the Power Talks programme itself. I say this because the discourse was able to percolate over months and weeks, with trust deeply accumulated in the collective, allowing for difficult conversations to be broached and, even where not resolved, to be comprehensively addressed.

An observation made by imaginateur Russel Hlongwane was that there is a trust deficit in Durban. The participation in the programme of the donor institution, the Goethe-Institut, and its research collaborator, the African Centre for Cities (ACC), without their being formally introduced to other guests, only exacerbated this sense of anxiety and distrust. Guests expressed concerns about potentially being expected to ‘perform’ for research purposes, and questioned whether there was a distinction between the role of guests versus those of the Goethe Institut and the ACC. Perhaps this sentiment was emblematic of a more general mistrust, observed by Hlongwane and others, in the broader creative arts scene in the city. This mistrust is rooted in concerns about misplaced or poorly justified allocations of funding, and the mistreatment of artists, many concrete examples of which were shared by guests during the programme.

Some questions shared during the process included: How can we build a thriving ecosystem (in Durban)? And: What can / will we make for ourselves? The questionof ‘personal power versus institutional power’ also revealed itself to be a primary concern. Many people invited to the talks were affiliated with institutions but expressed feeling incredibly stuck/neglected/powerless both within the bureaucratic systems of these organisations as well as in the face of the politics influencing access to funding resources, opportunities, prospects of collaboration, and so forth.

A beautiful thing about the Power Talks Durban programme was that performance collaborators did more than just perform, as S’bu Shabalala, bandleader of Bandless, demonstrated on day two. His planned musical performance transitioned into an improvised verbal meditation, which served as an important catalyst for discussion. Shabalala’s reflections addressed questions of empowerment, access, visibility / ‘being seen’ (who exhibits and performs?; who is invited to do so?; by whom?), and fair compensation. Really important considerations for artists operating in Durban’s creative landscape, who are often failed in one or more of these respects.

Collaborative performers and the works they staged embodied the more positive aspects of power. The younger and less ‘experienced’ were a highlight, and this demographic expressed appreciation for the programme, from which they perceived themselves to benefit.

I believe that Hlongwane captured the most important take-away from the Durban Talks, when he asked, ‘Where do we go from here?’ And if I were to offer a personal response to this question, I would say that individual agency remains crucial. Every person can choose whether, when or how to act or react, no matter the perceived or relative scope of their power. The decision whether to add one’s voice to a conversation, dialogue, debate, or disagreement – or to withhold one’s voice – is a fundamental human prerogative. Perhaps there is another name we need to assign to this experience to make space for the complexities inevitably involved in that decision.

During the process of conceptualising the programme and exhibition, the project team turned consistently to Audre Lorde’s writings on power, which became core reference points for reflections on why we wanted the Durban iteration of the talks to unfold as they did. As Lorde wrote in her 1985 essay Poetry is not a Luxury, ‘As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualisation of any meaningful action.’