In the Riddle of Power

The city is constantly engaged in a framework for repair – or, at least, as such a framework is delineated by Power Talks curators Danai Mupotsa and Naadira Patel. They write that ‘repair’ should be engaged as the reparative mode of relating to oneself and one’s community, and to the historical bearings of the city on one’s form, or ‘uniform’, as Frantz Fanon would have it. They write that the framework of repair employed in their conceptualisation and curatorial ideation and practice ‘emerges from an engagement with the aesthetic practices and interventions operating in the various routes by and through which Johannesburg comes to operate as a specific site of intensity, variously bound to, and yet often unattached to, a singular orientation to territory and space’. They continue by elaborating that ‘the forms of cultural and creative practice this programme draws its inspiration from are densely connected to the inter- and intramural modes of production, praxis and interventions with work, as well as with power.’

The first day of the Johannesburg Power Talks was hosted in Braamfontein, at the The Point of Order (TPO), an on-going project implemented by the Division of Visual Arts (DIVA), which functions as an experimental project space managed under the auspices of the exhibitions programme of the University of the Witswatersrand’s School of Arts (WSOA). (The exhibition and keynote speech were initially envisaged to be held at Nothing Gets Organised (NGO), an

arts-space in downtown Johannesburg; however, unforeseen events compelled the organisers to move these to TPO.)

The programme kicked off with an exhibition entitled ‘Practices of Repair’, which featured multimedia visual artworks by Lebogang Mabusela, Kundai Moyo, Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Nono Motlhoki, Khanyisile Mawhayi, Thulile Gamedze, Cheriese Dilrahj, and Donna Kukama.

Busisiwe Veronica Mahlangu opened the night by reciting a selection of her poems. Her poetry accounts for how the grave may be conceived as a repetitive space that ‘remembers the names of those who lay in it … as it feels any death that falls to the ground.’ The grave, like the body in Busisiwe’s work, is a gateway that ‘opens roads’ to different ways of disentangling the self, only to ‘begin each morning counting parts that escaped the night.’ The body in Busi’s poetry is constantly transforming into residues of a dead flame as she first evokes the element of fire in her poem Anger: ‘No one to blame when I turn to ash/ I have them drink that fuel that pours to my feet/ I moulded my chest as a shield/ Fought for women and children in my blood/ Volcano erupting to save us.’ Again, she transforms into a speck, but this time one that emerges from the element of the earth in Warship as she recounts: ‘Anthem inside throats with half prayers/ Fires a circle of fate/ Bricks fall to the floor like dust.’ Lastly, the poet’s body evaporates into air in the midst of Loss as she laments: ‘Loss is inevitable/ When my body is a mouth without teeth/ My body clings onto grief… You are an unending revolution/ Your wound is growing into a person.’

In her talk, which unpacked how struggle moves in and out of the body, keynote speaker Prishani Naidoo uncovered the affective tiers and layers of vulnerability. She questioned the political dimensions of repair and the various possibilities that pieces of demolished, oppressive time-zones generate in collective and communal attempts at conjuring new forms of spatial and institutional construction. She noted that it is always ‘okay’ to ‘begin from a point of not knowing’, because this strategy of initiating struggle and knowledge ushers in ‘new potentialities’ for recreating the world around us. She also recalled the different periods of sustained student campaigns for free education and dignified workers’ rights at the University of the Witwatersrand, from the dawn of democracy until the present day. She concluded by positing that struggles and communal work towards reparative justice ‘should not be prescriptive, but instead creative’. We should all consider practising repair ‘in ways that are unpredictable and uncertain, to allow something that could be’ to manifest itself into reality.

The second day of Power Talks Johannesburg commenced with a panel on ‘Exhaustion’ at LAPA Project and Residency Space in Brixton. The panel was facilitated by Naadira Patel, who was joined by Dee Marco, Tiffany Ebrahim, and Tammy Langtry. Patel engaged the panellists on infrastructural, institutional, and political forms of exhaustion. She spoke about the team’s decision to identify an alternative venue for the previous day’s events, and was overcome with emotion when she reflected on the state of ‘forgetting about energies and the presence of those who are deeply connected to us because we assume they will always be there’. Patel urged us to think about the interplay between ourselves, the work we undertake, and the elements of being in the work we do. She pointed out how we ceaselessly pour ourselves into our passions, even as those same passions fashion us into the people and creators we become. She further probed the panellists to speak less about their disciplines and professional frameworks, encouraging them instead to tap into and unravel the different infrastructures and modalities of how people make things work, and perhaps even to critique the various modes of practice that engender and reproduce both negative and positive senses of exhaustion.

Dee Marco explored the multiple senses of gestation involved not only in the labour or work of carrying life in one’s body for an extended period of time, but also associated with the process of carrying, conceiving, nurturing and brining to fruition other invented forms of life, creative work, intellectual work as well as one’s own unending, holistic metamorphosis. Marco challenged us to think about the external life of the one / the body / the soul in gestation, and how exhaustion acts upon it. She further invited us to think about how exhaustion itself can act as a generative force of life-brewing, life-making artistry.

Tammy Langtry pondered the ways in which we make the spaces that we occupy, be it for the purpose of work, recreation, cultural production, or anything else. Langtry’s talk was more of an enquiry into how we can redeem time, how we can think about the different motions and affective dimensions of time in different cities, and the exhausted modes of production in disparate places. For us to get to the root of exhaustion, she argued, we must first diagnose the lines of production by way of negotiation, compromise, and – here she paused for the audience to complete her line of thought for themselves.

Tiffany Ebrahim made us think about the different elements of work, from the vocational to the functional, and the material elements of why and how we practise the concept of work. She posed the questions: do we model our entire being and its modes of operation via the work we choose to do, the work we do strategically, and the work to which we dedicate our lives? What makes us give so much of our time, energies and soul-force to the institutions and organisations we work for? And why do we build, reinforce, and reproduce such entities? Ebrahim argued that for us to get to the root of exhaustion and different spectrums of fatigue, we have to reconceive and restructure our relationship with time. By this she meant that we must be critical of the hegemonic ethic of time, and we should highly consider ‘taking back our time’ to invest it in other pursuits, passions, and creations. Ebrahim posited that perhaps we should even consider investing our time in nothingness.

A lunch interlude catered by Lady Day was followed by a zine workshop, facilitated by the brilliant trio of INVADE, a book and print-design company of young black women artists. INVADE took us through an interactive session, during which we each made our own miniature zine from cut-up magazine strips. We were taught to reconstruct the book form from remnants of what was, and what preceded curated, organised, packaged, and distributed forms of print media. Participants remarked that the workshop unravelled their ‘inner-child’s pleasures’ and ‘made us work without the compulsive drive to impress the next person’ or ‘compete on levels of perfection’. It inspired participants ‘to just do something and be free,’ and ‘have your mind quieten the noise in your personal work’.

The third day of the programme was hosted in Braamfontein at the Library of Things We Forgot to Remember, an interactive audio-visual archive of black resistance founded in 2017 by Zimbabwean artist, Kudzanai Chiurai. It opened with a panel on Care, facilitated by Power Talks Johannesburg co-curator, Danai Mupotsa, who was joined by Ncebakazi Manzi, Doreen Gaura, Gcobani Qambela, and Shamim Meer. Mupotsa engaged the panellists on the complicated mutations of care work. She provoked the speakers and the audience to think seriously about how we are trained to mistrust the body, and thus constantly pathologize it through public discourses of sickness, madness, and decadence. She illuminated the problematic roots of the concept of adulthood, asking what it means to become an adult, to walk into that construct, and perform by means of its modalities, only to deteriorate on its flaky grounds? And to then adorn one’s unsustainable adulthood with the poisonous garbs of coloniality? For her, ‘the body is soaked’ in a mound of bearings – some of them useful, but most of them perilous and harmful. She also spoke of how we are restrained from touching ‘members’ of the archive, whom she intentionally refrained from calling ‘objects.’ The consequence of this, she argued, is that we’re only allowed to engage visually with the artefacts that remind us of our Ancestral and pre-material lives, while muting the rest of our senses. These affective blockages affect how and why we conduct knowledge production, and account in part for the reproduction of hegemonic modes.

Shamim Meer shared her experience as an organiser and facilitator of writing workshops for women in workers’ organisations. She spoke about the troubled and oppressive relations in trade-union and workers’ movements, which display a ‘mismatch of what the organisation wants to do in the world and what they do to themselves’. She spoke about the importance of retaining and reproducing critical work for structural change as we continue to do deeply intimate healing and care work in community organisations. As much as she works against racialised, gendered, and anti-queer violence, Meer wondered if we can employ alternative liberatory frameworks to unbind ourselves, while simultaneously enabling us to imagine ourselves out of these differentiating markers.

Doreen Gaura shared her journey as a custodian a Mhondoro Spirit, which is taunted by wounded masculinities and is itself – just as she, its vessel, sometimes collaborator, sometimes captive, is – on a journey of healing and restoration. She explored how the possession of the Spirit and her previous work with dispossessed children, particularly boys, led to her current restorative vocation in ‘criminal punishment centres’. As an abolitionist with historical and mnemonic bearings, her concept of care is focused on the abolishment of structures and systems that reproduce various forms of anti-black violence as ‘violence cannot be eradicated in our personal and localised spaces without first dealing with structural violence.’ She probed us to think critically about the victim-perpetrator binary because structural and interpersonal violence harms both actors.

Ncebakazi Manzi reminisced about her time as a co-founder and organiser of a post-transitional Black Consciousness movement in the first decade of the 2000s. Although the movement was found by a trio of black women, herself included, they hardly addressed issues on gender, intimate partner violence or sexuality due to the totalised force of anti-racism rhetoric. For her the #Rhodes Must Fall and #Fees Must Fall movements were successful in addressing those issues and modelling their activism, or at least parts of it, through intersectional practices of care. She then spoke deeply on the problem of accountability, inquiring if it is truly tenable and sincerely practised. Lastly, she expressed how her music, which is predominantly rhetorical and resistant, forced her to dive deeper into the depths of a sometimes troubled, exhausted, weary inner-self who endlessly worries about the state of a ruined and irreparable world.

In the last session of the day, Danai Mupotsa in the company of Keitu Gwangwa and Kudzanai Chiurai, explored different ranges of trauma release, healing, alternative forms of archiving and historiography. Gwangwa shared two visual performance pieces. The first was of her faceless body, as she releases trauma and mnemonic stress that has been locked in her limbs. She contemplated how trauma sutures itself into one’s body and to some degree animates its response to the internal and external worlds. She spoke of activists whose bodies are still imprisoned in ‘tremors’ that rattled their worlds as teenagers. The next video was of her legs walking through sifted flour that her arms pour to the floor. In both videos she wears a white dress, which she says symbolises how we create our journeys through and against retained and animating pain. As ‘we sift for gems’ in a heap of affliction, we start to recall our souls back to our bodies.

Kudzanai Chiurai recalled the life-history of the library. He explained that The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember is a collection of post-independence music vinyl from different parts of the continent. Some of this music contains lyrics expressing resistance against tyrannical and neo-colonial violence; other songs address life’s intimacies; while others are concerned with the waves of ‘good time’ genealogies. The library enables one to experience a sonic transcendental space, which allows us to ‘see ourselves and the histories of our people’. Chiurai reflected on how the traditional, colonial library ‘prepares one to become an Afro-Saxon subject’, but alternative forms of displaying and retaining archives moves us away from those constraints. A member of the audience challenged Chiurai's characterisation of the space as a site of ‘liberation’; but he insisted it was accurate, on account of the transcendental and historical-virtual potential it bears, which enables intergenerational memory, empathy, and pride. Chiurai maintains that the space, as any conjured in love, is alive and should be allowed to ‘live out the different stages of its existence’.

On the final day of the event, Toby Ngomane walked the audience through a fantastical range of performances collectively titled Loss, and the Silent Room. Each performance took place in a separate room of the Windybrow Arts Centre in Hillbrow, and Ngomane ushered us into each as if its doorway were a threshold to a remote and self-sustaining parallel universe. We were also treated to a quadrant of theatrical solo-performances by Uvile Ximba, Belita Andre, and Masai Sepuru . All performances were incredibly trans-dimensional as they channelled both performer and audience through passages of deep memory, phantoms, spirit enchantment, mourning, recall, deconstructing the self only to create it anew, shadows, and sinking into liquid depths while ascending in tranquil spectrums of light. These performances challenged traditional modes of theatre-engagement, which not only enabled audiences to participate spiritually in the private and metaphysical worlds that were being recalled on stage, but also to sink, soak, float, and bask in their truthful depths.

The programme came to a close at the Forge, in Braamfontein, where Buntu Fihla shared his experience as the curator of this year’s Power Talks Eastern Cape installations (hyperlink to articles that the two EC sites share). He spoke profoundly about how his rendition of Power Talks allowed the community to engage with multiple forms of visual art, and to speak critically about the different masquerades of power in the local and provincial levels. He also unravelled the incredible archives of memory and history-building concealed in abandoned government buildings, which expose the Apartheid, and now post-Apartheid, imaginary of state-building and subject-binding. His speech was followed by a round of commentary by the audience, which enabled ten-year-old Selah Galeta to emerge from the shadows cast upon her by the adults in the room. Galeta unpeeled the matters that concern and affect the soul of a young child, such as alienation, classism, racism, perversion on the internet, nightmare states of perceiving and experiencing the world, the dreams harboured in her spirit, the pursuit and appreciation of soul mates, and, she confessed, having a ‘mind that thinks and worries deeply about the world’. Selah’s touching revelations ushered us into the final part of the night: the musical performances by her mom, Ms G, and The Wretched – an experimental jazz and rock group of exceptional musicians.

The Wretched and Ms G treated us to an explosion of sonic-scapes, through an exploration of new-age jazz mixes offered by the latter and avant-garde, experimental and conceptual aural and sonic plays of the former. Their performances made us think about how integral sound is to life, thought, and practice; and permitted us to sit in the ante-discursive dimensions of sound, which are not only precursors of spoken and seen worlds, but are the very fibre of everything on the cusp of existence.

It is safe to conclude that Mupotsa and her co-curator Patel conducted the entire series of Johannesburg Power Talks on motions of critical affective power, the force of subversive and anti-hegemonic communities, a multi-disciplinary curatorial ethic, and a potent engagement with enclosed space and the built environment that holds us in its captive grasp. The curators were effortless, yet careful, in how they brought disparate practitioners together in spaces that allowed them to collaborate and inspire their works to entwine in larger forces of care and creation. They enabled people to craft their own spaces, their own engagements, and their own consumption of each other’s work. Their curatorial strategies allowed us to think about power outside stringent paradigms of socio-political resistance, and instead to think of power more expansively, as a multitude of divergent, antagonistic and synthetic forces that act within us, drive our agency, cultivate our passions, spur our authorial will, and push us towards communal and collaborative life-labours. Their practice opened channels to transcendental, ephemeral, warm yet deeply critical and introspective transdisciplinary exhibitions of passions embroiled in the riddle of power.

Ayabulela Mhlahlo can be reached at Ayabulelamhlahlo1@gmail.com