Author: Beth Vale

Flipping the Lens with Fausto Becatti and The Bioscope’s Camera Club

Last week, The Bioscope Theatre, in collaboration with The College of Digital Photography, hosted its second installment of The Camera Club. The talk series aims both to showcase and inspire up-and-coming photographers, through intimate discussions between artists and audiences. In dialogue with a series of images, photographers unmask stories from the other side of the lens. It’s an account of the creative minutia: the seconds before the light hit that spot, the happenings outside the frame, the moments before a subject looked up at the lens just so.

This week showcased Johannesburg director and photographer, Fausto Becatti. Many will know his work from the Hunters Dry advert, ‘Global Love’, which featured artist AKA and was shot in multiple locations throughout the world. Becatti has also directed music videos, including Spoek Mathambo’s ‘Awufuni’, and more recently Alice Phoebe Lowe’s ‘Society’.

When describing the making of ‘Society’, Becatti articulates a rare moment of untampered creative freedom. It was as though he was adding motion to his stills: his photographic eye brought to the video image. It’s an example, he told us, of the ways in which creative practices feed one another. In developing his artistic identity, Becatti has discovered a seeping of one creative life into the next. A book, in dialogue with a drawing, in dialogue with music, in dialogue with an image.

Another piece of wisdom, drawn from Becatti’s creative practice, is to photograph daily. He speaks about his stylistic growth as a matter of habit: forcing himself to capture one image every day and upload it to Instagram, regardless of whether he deemed it perfect or not. Embedded in this practice has been a mantra to ‘do’ and ‘not think’. Indeed, in articulating how he works, Becatti seemed to be describing a meditative process, in which he learnt to set aside all preconceptions about ‘the good photo’. His own aesthetic expectations, as well as those of others, were presented as the biggest obstacle to his photography, which sought to move, uninhibited, with his inner intuition. “Honesty is original”, he told us.

Initially, Becatti found himself regularly photographing his subjects from behind, alone, in moments of reflection. It was a compositional pattern that developed organically, born of his intention to capture candid moments of stillness, when people were unaware they are being watched. More recently, he has been drawn to images with a story: the sort of shots that prompt viewers to ask questions about the scenes depicted, or to speculate about the lives and relationships of the subjects. Having travelled extensively around the world (the US, Germany, India, Mauritius, Japan, the UK), Becatti’s images also tell a human story — both of diversity and connection. It’s ordinary people, captured cinematically, with enough depth and colour, to reveal their (and our) extraordinariness.

Stay tuned for the next Camera Club. It offers a rare glimpse into a photographer’s worldview, through the people, colours, places, and juxtapositions that capture their attention. These conversations not only allow us to explore an image, beyond what is captured in the frame. They also shatter the boundaries between artist and audience, which so often inhibit us from making our first creative move.

20 March 2017
Ikonika’s Dancefloor Disruption

“I always had headphones on and I always knew I wanted to make music”, Ikonika told me. I sat down with the London-based electronic musician, producer, and DJ last week at KCB Braamfontein, where she and the Pussy Party posse were embarking on a nation-wide dancefloor revolution: a series of femme insurgencies to shake up club culture, forge new sound, and nurture emerging talent. With Ikonika as guest mentor, Pussy Party is launching a series of DJ and production workshops for femme-identifying artists in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban.

Alongside the workshop series, Ikonika will be pouring her bass-heavy, off-kilter rhythms and oozing synths over our urban dancefloors. In the process, she will be engendering a sonic dialogue between two parallel generations — across continents — each seeking to make a life radically different from that of their parents. Each born of collisions between multiple times and places.

As a kid growing up in London, Ikonika listened eclectically: metal and punk, alongside RnB and grime. “All the different tribes, I was hanging out with all of them”. Like many producers before her, Ikonika (Sara Chen) crafted her early sound from late nights and Fruity Loops. She remembers starting out as a DJ: a dingy Sunday night residency with an audience of five. Today, Ikonika has given us more than a decade of genre-bending, progressive electronic music. She has released two albums with Hyperdub Records (Contact, Love, Want, Have 2010; Aerotropolis 2013) and produced four EP’s (Edits 2010; I Make Lists 2012; Beach Mode 2013; and Position 2014). She has toured widely in Europe, Asia, Australia, as well as North and South America — all the while shifting between her roles as DJ/Producer.

“When I DJ, it’s about making people move and feel something, but when I produce my music, that’s really personal to me. That’s my own little world I wanna create. And if I can play those tunes and people feel them too, that’s really special to me. To be able to share my music, and music I’m feeling, my friend’s music”.

Dub-step holds special place in Ikonika’s origin story as a DJ/producer. “The sound systems were incredible. Mad Jamaican sound systems in places like Kitcheners. I’d never felt music like that physically.” In small basement clubs like Plastic People and parties thrown by DMZ, Ikonika was taken by the new dub sound. “The music would just shudder in your chest and you couldn’t swallow anything apart from bass.” Those were the days when Ikonika learnt the importance of sound systems and started infusing more base into her music.

Since these early days, Ikonika’s sound has broadened, spanning grime, RnB, dancehall, footwork, house and techno: spinning soundscapes at the underground’s most progressive cusp. Her sound is a testament to her love of nightclubs, to the dialogue between DJ and dancer, and to music itself. When I asked Ikonika about the supposed ‘death’ of London’s club scene, she said:

“We still keep it underground and we still find basements. Chuck sound systems down there. Could be a fire hazard, I don’t know. We always find a way to have our music because music means so much to us, and clubbing means so much to us. Dark room and a sound system is all you need right?”

In the club, Ikonika’s focus is on the dancer/DJ dialogue. I asked about the extent of improvisation in her sets:

“I used to plan a lot and that never worked out. You just don’t feel the room as much. If you’re just sticking to a set, it becomes very cold. You’re not watching people. For me it’s about interaction. It’s a team effort between me and the dancers. I’ll try not to plan too much. Maybe I’ll decide on the bpm range and take it from there”.

That magic that happens, when all of us collide in a dark room, with bass flowing down our throats needs to include women: especially behind the decks.

That has been the fuel for facilitating femme-focused DJ’ing and production workshops. “I would want women to feel a bit more comfortable in this industry”, Ikonika says. I’d never felt real sexism till I started in music. I’ve had a lot of guys come up to the mixer, and I’ll have like two faders up in the mix. They don’t believe that I’m mixing so they’ll come up to the mix and pull the fader down. Or like on a day I’m playing vinyl, they’ll put their hand on the vinyl to make sure it’s actually coming out of the vinyl.”

Alongside fellow artists E.M.M.A, Dexplicit and P Jam, Ikonika has co-facilitated a series of workshops in London, titled Production Girls. “We teach production at a beginner level. People are scared to try the software. They can’t navigate around it. We show them how to make drums, how to mix down, how to use the synths and that kind of stuff”. It’s no wonder then that Pussy Party, which provides ongoing mentorship for Johannesburg’s femme DJs, would partner with Ikonika on a femme-oriented club-culture intervention.

“Women as tastemakers is the best thing you could ever have. Cos if the girls aren’t dancing on the dancefloor, what’s the point?”

‘This article forms part of content created for the British Council Connect ZA 2017 Programme. To find out more about the programme click here.’

6 March 2017
Encounters with the Everyday: My Body My Space Rural Arts Festival

Perhaps because of the glamour attached to them, we forget what sterile spaces stages are. The craft of a set designer or performer often involves transporting audiences: away from cavernous auditoriums to other, imagined places. This past weekend I attended an arts festival without stages or tickets or curtains — barely a delineation between audience, public, and performer. The My Body My Space Rural Arts and Culture Festival had as its stages school playgrounds, corner shops, pavements, trees, lawns, floating jetties. Even a pile of bricks became a platform for performance.

My Body My Space is a project of the Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative. Through dance theatre, its two artistic directors, PJ Sabbagha and Fana Tshabalala, have sought producing work that mines deep personal and social dilemmas.

By creating happenings in and around the streets of eNtokokweni, artists at this year’s festival forced audiences into new confrontations with the everyday. Seemingly-mundane objects, movements and spaces were re-presented to us in ways that sometimes rendered them magic, and at other times obscene. The familiar became strange again, prompting us to look at ourselves in new ways.

It was particularly apt, then, that the festival’s opening performance, choreographed by Fana Tschabalala, functioned in conversation with Njabulo Ndebele’s critically-acclaimed work: ‘Rediscovering the Ordinary’. A physical embodiment of the ‘impossible dialogue’ between blacks and whites in South Africa, the work unpacked spatial intimacies and conflicts, as bodies wrestled for recognition amidst a floor of empty cardboard boxes.

What might an artistic engagement with The Everyday mean for our politics, and indeed our humanity? The first lesson is in the festival’s location in rural Mpumalanga. It is often understood that life only happens in big cities, outside of which the world is stagnant and empty. By propelling us into encounters with apparently ‘barren’ spaces, My Body My Space challenged assumptions about where life, and art, and politics happen — and which bodies and spaces are made invisible when we turn away from ‘everyday happenings’ in ‘everyday places’.

For most South Africans, ‘politics’ is less about the power games of political parties, or accusations of state capture, and much more about the stuff of bare, ordinary life: toilets, food, schooling, sanitary pads, medicine. The great dramas of politics — of power, privilege, gender, race and brutality — unfold in the most quotidian places: the bedroom, the office, a public bathroom, a playground, or the back of a bakkie. These are also the places of some of our greatest personal achievements, intimacies and joys. Paying attention to the ordinary is about giving witness to the stories of others, and testimony to our own. In this way, the artists called upon a politics of recognition, calling our attention to that which is perverse or beautiful or transforming within ‘the ordinary’.

By re-appropriating everyday spaces for unintended purposes, artists at My Body My Space were engaged in subtle forms of resistance. Turning the street into a stage, they halted cars. Hitting branches together, trees became instruments. In one performance, a ripped feather pillow transformed into wings. And as the audience walked from one site to the next, artists breaking into performance among them, the delineations between life and art became increasingly unclear.

Just as much as ‘art imitates life’, so too can ‘life imitate art’. Art can teach us how to see, make sense of, use, or resist the spaces around us. One of the techniques used by artists of My Body My Space was to expose the extraordinary in the ordinary. By de-familiarising The Everyday, we were startled by practices that had once seemed so normal. Two performances used public over-consumption to provoke questions about everyday waste, covering their mouths and bodies with food and discarding the leftovers. Another young actor posed angry questions about water shortages in front of a hotel pool and its elaborate fountain.

But in addition to these stark political meanings, My Body My Space also offered transcendent human encounters. It put performers and their publics into spaces of shared vulnerability, where each regularly encroached on one another’s space. In this was the possibility to jolt, protect, step away from, and move towards one another. A striking metaphor about our relationships with others, both near and far. My Body My Space encouraged audiences to listen, to look, and to feel in places that we would usually, dismissively, pass by.

22 February 2017
Turn-Up Talk Series Episode 4 – Mess in Melville

The ‘Turn-up Talk Series’ is a collection of discussions in which young Jo’burgers share their nocturnal lives: stories and reflections from the city’s dancefloors. The candid conversations explore nightclubs as stages for young people’s negotiations of identity, belonging and power.

“This week’s episode is a phat 20-minute story about one woman’s coming-of-age in Johannesburg nightclubs. It’s a tale of transition from the Eastern Cape to Gauteng, from childhood to adulthood. It’s about rumour, romance, space and belonging. An exploration of “How to be black, ‘middle-class’ and ‘hipster’ in a complicated city.”

16 February 2017
Dirty Dancing: Spoko and Aguayo Release First Single off Upcoming EP

Conjured from smoke fumes, long nights, and worn-out feet, DJ Spoko and Matias Aguayo will be dropping a new EP on February 28^th, titled Dirty Dancing. The music tastes of Southern Hemisphere fusions: the sweet velvet wallpaper lining Johannesburg’s Kitchener’s bar; the steam of a Cómeme night in Medellin, Cologne or Buenos Aires; the multi-rhythmic tongues of Tshwane’s Atteridgeville. All these timbers travelling to meet, somewhere after dark, in a dimly-lit studio.

Dirty Dancing will be released under the label, Cómeme: their first Johannebsurg recording project. Founded in 2009 by Chilean-German, Matias Aguayo, the label describes itself as a ‘collective fantasy’, drawing together an assemblage of sonic misfits, working on the frayed edges of musical genre and expectation. Its experimental artists weave sounds from London to Cologne, Santiago de Chile to Buenos Aires, Mexico City to Moscow. And now Johannesburg.

Cómeme has been in an ongoing auditory dialogue with Johannesburg’s electronic music scene. Tracks like Pata pata and El Sucu Tucu are laced with South African beat-making and lyrical contortionism. Meanwhile, Cómeme tracks have also animated some of Johannesburg’s most vibrant dancefloors.

DJ Spoko has been at the centre of Cómeme’s love affair with Gauteng. Partner of DJ Mujava, he wrote and produced the dancefloor anthem ‘Township Funk’. Propelled by the groove, Township Funk fused dark sultry base with a vexing hook — the twisted, teasing funk of your ninetees dialup tone. Founder of Bacardi House, DJ Spoko says his music has had one purpose only: to make people dance, to make them sweat. His production, a tribute to life, was spawned in Atteridgeville Pretoria, where he lived with his father, alongside a grave site. In the late 90s, cue marshals at the taxi rank helped disseminate Bacardi House through the province’s mobile sound systems.

It’s no wonder that the final track on the new EP is titled Taxi Rank Closing, inspired by the rev and reverberation of South Africa’s informal music promoters. The EP includes collaborations with Elbee Bad and Moonchild, and is crafted unapologetically for the dancefloor. Each track — Dirty Dancing, Ghost of Dombolo and Something About the Groove — calling us to move.

It’s an EP to anticipate: music for pure pleasure, molded from our after-dark creativity.

13 February 2017
DJ Capital (Siyabonga Sibeko) and the Dancefloor Dialectic

DJ’s write our nocturnal soundtracks. Spinning the energy in the room, they ease their audience in; build them up; hold them in suspense. They have us clawing for the next big drop, then reeling from the release. This week, I met with Siyabonga Sibeko (DJ Capital) to talk about the art of the DJ. In the nightclub, there is a dialectic: audience and DJ in communion and conversation. The DJ attunes themselves to the energy of the audience, reading their desire or distaste through their bodily responses, their calls, the extent of draw to the dancefloor. “You can’t really plan a set because you never know what kind of crowd you’re gonna get”, Capital says. “You’ll have 5 big songs that you will play. But for everything else, it’s a ‘feeling’ thing. When I play a song you haven’t heard before, you are going to stand and look at me. You have to find a way to ease them into it”. The task of reading the crowd demands high-level intuition and improvisation. “If the time now is 1.27am”, Capital says, “[Often], I don’t know what I’m playing at 1.30am”. And the audience, too, has ways of asking, thanking, sharing and validating their DJ.

For Capital, music festivals are the epitome of the DJ experience. “You’re this one human being, controlling five to ten thousand people. They’re all looking at you. It’s a crazy feeling.” The tacit conversation between DJ and audience harkens back to an ancient ‘call and response’ tradition: a leader calls out, signaling the song to be sung, and the crowd echoes their response. A DJ spins a track and watches the reverberations through the crows. As with our ancestral forebears, Capital describes this sonic communication as eliciting a type of trans, an out-of-body experience, in which he is as intoxicated by the audience as they are by him. Recalling a recent festival in which he threw his chain into the crowd, Capital says, “Afterwards, I remember asking out loud: ‘what did I just do?’”

Some clubs, Capital says, have lost this energy. “Parties in the North are not really about fun anymore. It’s about how can I stunt on you – more bottles, more ‘chicks’. People get so caught up in that competition that they forget we actually out here to have fun.” Capital prefers the small towns: the audiences who come with the sole purpose of hearing the music, entangling themselves in musical ties with the DJ and others on the dancefloor.

The dialectic between DJ and crowd has been the driving force of Capital’s art. He first tried his hand at DJ’ing — not in a basement studio, or on a friend’s PC, or in his bedroom — but in the club. As a student at Wits, Capital began throwing parties at what was then Keys club: already an architect of ‘the good night out’. One night, when a headline DJ failed to pitch, Capital found himself behind the booth. “I literally ran to my car, where I always had the latest music. Got all my CDs and I just started playing. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just putting a CD in and pressing play. No sense of mixing whatsoever. It was terrible. But luckily I was playing all the right songs. After that I was like, ‘Yo I can actually do this if I actually learn what I’m meant to do’”. From there, Capital was self-taught and dedicated, dropping out of his final year at Wits. “I was so scared to tell my parents I actually wrote them a letter”.

Today, Capital is a three time SA Hip Hop Award nominee and has opened for major international acts: Usher, Wiz Khalifa, Lil John, DJ Drama, Deadmau5 and more. In July 2015, he embarked on a European tour, headlining shows in London and Moscow. He is host of the Capital Rap Up on Touch Central, and presenter of ETV’s Club 808. It’s part of his acknowledgement that a DJ is not simply a music vessel, but a personality, such that music somehow tastes different depending on who’s delivering it. Capital has produced several tracks with some of the country’s best Hip-Hop acts, including Hell of a Life (ft. Reason and AB Crazy), What You Like (ft. Kwesta x Kyle Deutsch) and All to You (ft. Dreamteam). “Hip hop has influenced so much of my life – the way people talk, the way people dress, even hip-hop sports like basketball”, he says.

Few people know just how much DJs, and club culture, have had to do not only with the success of South African Hip Hop, but also its sound. “About 5 years ago, all the [Hip-Hop] DJs and all the artists met at the Radisson in Sandton. We were literally having this huge argument. Rappers were like, ‘Why don’t you DJ’s play our stuff?’ And we were like, ‘Why don’t you give us stuff we can play at the clubs?’ Back and forth, DJ’s and artists. At the end of the night we were like, ‘There’s obviously a problem here. Let’s work together. And that’s when DJs started putting out songs with artists. And that’s literally how South African Hip Hop changed”. It’s not simply that many clubs now sound like hip-hop, hip-hop has increasingly been made to sound like the club.

Despite his own production success, it’s the energy of a live audience that is still primary for Capital. He tells me he once done six gigs in a single night, starting in the late afternoon. “In December, I did three provinces in one day”. There’s a reason Capital defies time and space to play for a crowd.

As author Bill Brewster said, it’s “because DJ’ing is not about choosing a few tunes. It’s about generating shared moods; it’s about understanding the feelings of a group of people and directing them to a better place. In the hands of a master, records create rituals of spiritual communion that can be the most powerful events in people’s lives”.

2 February 2017
If Kitchener’s (KCB) is like a home

“There are venues and there are institutions”, I was once told: a friend attempting to draw categories in Johannesburg’s night-time cartography. Undoubtedly, Kitchener’s (or KCB) falls into the latter group. It’s the ‘go-to’ club when you have no prior plans. It’s the comfort of knowing the sound and crowd to expect when you arrive. It’s the ease of no dress code and affordable entrance fees. It’s the knowledge that you’ll likely see at least ten other people you know. “If the question is, where do we go to party [tonight], we are the first call”, says DJ/manager Andrew Clements.

Among the audiences, artists and curators of KCB are those who speak of it as ‘home’. “Home isn’t where you come from”, said author Pierce Brown, “It’s where you find light when all grows dark.”

If KCB is a home, it is one whose family stretches back generations. The pub/hotel was built in 1902 and is regarded as the second oldest building in Johannesburg. It is a testament to the historical centrality of our night venues. Radium Beer Hall, Kitchener’s Carvery Bar (KCB), Guildhall Pub have watched generations of dreamers and workers spill their histories over bar counters — wrestling with the possibilities and futures of the city. Marc Latilla, one of the first DJs to ever play at KCB, has sought to archive the venue’s history: another indication that night-dwellers are often keepers of suppressed urban narratives.

According to Latilla, by the end of the 18^th century, Braamfontein had transformed from farmlands into a thriving middle-class suburb. The Milner Park Hotel, now known as Kitchener’s, was built in 1902, surrounded by German businesses. It served as a drinking hole for British troops, as well as postal riders on their way to Pretoria. In 1902, towards the end of the Second South African War, Lord Milner had a meeting with the notorious commander of the British forces, General Lord Kitchener, in the newly-built hotel. Kitchener had been a brutal warlord: primary instigator of South Africa’s concentration camps, in which thousands of Boers and black Africans were killed, mostly women and children. The name ‘Kitchener’s’ is thought to have arisen from this “auspicious” meeting.

If KCB is a home, this is the family’s ugly origins: it’s ancestral elder, a colonial brute, whose legacy continues to cause disquiet among his descendants. Still, his portrait hangs from the mantelpiece, above the figurative fireplace, where his great grandchildren dance and cuss and caress and worship, along with the descendants of his victims. These young ones burst through at night, trampling on grandma’s wooden floors, spilling on the old carpet, brushing past the velvet wallpaper. Each time, confronting history with a cocktail of detachment, denial, and dissent. It is a story of “dancing on graves”, of repossessing haunted spaces. You see it not only here but in the parties at the old train station, Halloween blowouts at the Voortrekker Monument, projected images of Hector Peterson at Soweto’s Zone 6.

The new generation of revelers took root at KCB in 2009, when Andrew Clements began using and hiring out the old hotel for parties. “This used to be just an old man’s club”, Andrew explains,“where a bunch of 60-year-olds would come every day at lunchtime, have a few beers, and then come back again after work. By 6 or 7 the place would close up”. But as DJ’s re-imagined the dusty Bar and Carvery, and the parties grew, and KCB quickly became a living room for young creatives, experimenters, hipsters, and students.

If KCB is a home, then, like any other home, it is not just about love, safety, memory and identity. There is also domestic power and sources of conflict. A strong sense of community often comes with a shared culture: away of dressing, speaking, moving on the dance floor, that has the potential to alienate others. Money, too, can also mess with families. One regular told me that he experienced a class territorialism that would make it difficult for someone who regularly partied at a tavern to party at KCB. To add to this are gender disparities, with femme bodies particularly under threat. Elders and relatives may try to intervene: we’ve seen dance floor dissent at the monthly Pussy Parties, the introduction of a female bouncer, regular and recognizable door staff, and a huge diversity of music genres to boost inclusivity. But families, inevitably, are sources of both contest and comfort.

If KCB is a home, it is one built on music. For years, DJ’s Rosie Parade and Danger Ngozi, of Broaden a New Sound, have curated its sonic identity,rooted in quality, pioneering music. There are family reunions with regular artists and promoters: 2 Sides of the Beat, Kid Fonque, BeatNN and Subterranean Wavelength. And then there are visits from distant relatives. This year: Tendai ‘Baba’ Maraire, Hussein Kalonji, Tama Sumo and Lakuti. And of course there are family events: Disco de la Mode is a group trip to the beach; Below the Bassline a spiritual gathering around the dinner table, and Zonke Bonke like your uncle’s birthday party.The soundtrack is not from your radio or television. It’s the specially-curated playlists that this family has come to love: exchanging sounds, travels and collections across time and space. Like all good household gatherings, the food keeps coming till the early hours of the morning. At 4am, you’re helping your exhausted cousin out the door. And, as author Wendy Wunder once said of a home: “It feels good to leave. Even better to come back”.

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1 February 2017
Turn-up Talk Series Episode 3

The ‘Turn-up Talk Series’ is a collection of discussions in which young Jo’burgers share their nocturnal lives: stories and reflections from the city’s dancefloors. The candid conversations explore nightclubs as stages for young people’s negotiations of identity, belonging and power.

‘In this episode, we talk about music, moves and what they say about us’

20 January 2017
The Creative Self, According to Scoop Makhathini

Over December, Johannesburg is a city that empties. Residents escape to their family homes or holiday beaches, leaving the once-bustling metropolis surprisingly quiet. The Eastern Cape experiences a reverse effect as its towns and villages swell with relatives returning home. In Port Elizabeth, one of these returnees is Siyabonga Ngwekazi, who most of us know as Scoop Makhathini.

A prolific television presenter, and a high priest of South African street culture, Scoop serves as a cultural medium, a multi-spectral prism of the country’s street artistry.

‘Music and the arts, they come from this place that’s very godly, very heavenly’, Scoop says. Like any other medium, his talent has been to interpret the divine for an everyday audience; to draw linkages between past, present, and future; and to serve as an interpreter for the creative world.

“I think that’s why I’m here — it’s to take these pieces, or blocks, of creative South Africa. Because I understand where they’re coming from. And I can chop it up into little bite-sized pieces for your mainstream audience to understand to be able to digest: to be able to understand the weird crowd, the off-centre crowd. In a medium that’s easy to them. Most creatives can’t speak about themselves. They can’t explain. It’s hard for them because they feel like they leave it all out on the canvas, or they leave it all out in the sculpture, or they leave it all out in the track. So analyzing them and getting someone to understand, ‘Oh this is why this person paints like this or uses these colours. Oh I get it. It’s also relatable to who I am’”.

Often there is a chasm between Scoop’s TV audience, and the creative world he spends his time in, where so few people access media through television. His ability to reach across this gap, to a multiverse of audiences, is part his own artistry. “Anyone can be a TV presenter”, Scoop says, “but it’s about ‘What are you saying? Who are you speaking to?” In presenting, Scoop not only showcases local creativity to a mass audience. In doing so, he also interprets it, diagnoses it, and drives some of its biggest trends.

Part of what allows Scoop to translate across diverse peoples and places is that he, like so many generations of men before him, moves in a cyclical way from Johannesburg to the Eastern Cape, and back. Siyabonga grew up with three siblings. His mother was a teacher and his father a truck driver. He talks vividly about the bleak representations of black men in his 1980’s neighborhood: “the emerald green hat, the blue overalls, the checkered shirt, the denim jeans, and finally, “that boot”. “Those brown army boots with the steal toe that dads used to wear for MK or marches or toyi-toyi.”

Amidst all this, Siya dug his dreams into hip-hop and basketball, reaching through his television screen for portrayals of powerful blackness, thousands of miles away. “Rap and [American] sports were the first time in the 80s you saw a black guy look like something. You saw guys with the cars and the clothes and the jewelry and the girls and the confidence and the bravado. That’s when you knew the difference between America and South Africa. And even though they were oppressed, at least they could be this.” It’s clear that from very early in Scoop’s life, clothes, television and street culture carried powerful identity politics, and emancipatory potential.

Today, Scoop has 12 years of industry experience under his very-fashionable belt and a blossoming career.

As a trend-spotter, pioneer, and supporter of the country’s creative industry, Scoop’s notoriety has come from his ability to bring attention to others. “I think it’s because when I started getting cred, I never kept it. I see who’s next. I hear who’s next. I’ve seen what notoriety can do for someone’s life. Be it bills, or be it the confidence, or be it helping out the family”.

But there’s “this thing in Jo’burg”, he told me: “hoarding the props”. “People are very scared to tell someone how good they’re doing, or how that person inspired them, or how they’ve got respect for that person”. All for fear of losing their position. “When there’s nothing, it’s amazing how close everyone gets. But as soon as a breadcrumb lands in between two people, watch them scramble in the dark to find a crumb. Not even look for the loaf. Or the bakery.”

Scoop’s vision now is retrospective, focusing his prism on the knowledges of his ancestral past. “I’d really like to be home in Port Elizabeth, learning about how to slaughter a cow, how to clean its insides. From birth to death, I need to be able to recite which ceremonies need to be done, which liquor is needed, which rooms certain things are kept in.”

Always a medium, Scoop’s own reflections serve as a refracted mirror of a generation — their conflicts and their creativity.

“I [like so many others] have learnt about Jordan’s and Nike which has nothing to do with me! I’ve been to a school where all I’ve learned has fuck all to do with me! So I just want to learn about me. It’s been such a long road travelled now. What I’m really yearning for is to stay next to my father and have him teach me how to be black again.”

For Scoop, the biggest risk to the creative industry is the loss of self. Especially since, “the creative realm is just a realm in search of self. These kids think they’re searching for a label or a t-shirt. Everybody’s just searching for themselves”. And that ‘everyone’ includes Scoop Makhathini himself.

“I go to PE and it’s always where I learn how far I’ve drifted from being a normal person”. It’s clear that despite being a celebrity, and having unique access to ethereal artistry, Scoop remains deliberately (and sometimes controversially) committed to his own messy personhood. His Twitter feed and his show ‘Forever Young’ offer intimate access to Siyabonga the person, beyond Scoop the persona.

“I think it comes from a place [of] just wanting to be a human being, to experiment, to have views, even though they’re wrong. So often [in the industry], people have to fight to get liked. Everyone likes being liked, but I think I also like being disliked, because at least then I don’t have to retain that approval”.

Although we expect celebrity role models to strive for exemplary leadership, there is something powerful in Scoop’s embrace of the imperfect: it gives others the audacity to lead when they might have once have been off-put by the pressure to be faultless.

Like so many mediums before him, Scoop often speaks in metaphor. “I just like swimming upstream”, he says. “There’s not much to discover if I go that way with everyone else. There’s not much to discover about myself, about the world that we’re living in, about the people around me”. And that is what creative ‘success’, he believes, should be about. “What really pains me?”, he says. “We’ll excel at so many things, but we will not excel at being ourselves”.

Photography by Jamal Nxedlana

Assisted by Lesole Tauatswala

12 January 2017
Running with Gods: Daniel Ting Chong X Puma

It’s 8.30am on the 26^th of December and I’m wondering the still-desolate mall at Cape Town’s VnA Waterfront. In one of the passageways, I collide with an unusual hive of activity: a rapidly-growing line of expectant shoppers have converged outside the closed entrance of the PUMA store. They’ve come in anticipation of Boxing Day sales. But despite up to 50% price cuts across numerous clothing stores across the mall, this was the only store that had garnered a queue. Young South Africans care about sneakers, and about sneaker culture. We, like many others across the world, have been known to camp for hours for limited edition Nikes. But despite the time, resources, and modes of expression that we dedicate to sneaker culture, we have unfortunately not been as invested as we should be in our local takkie scene — and indeed local releases. Recently, local sneaker don Dane Naharaj commented on Instagram: South African “sneakerheads” out here with every Yeezy colourway but won’t show love when a local collab drops. And we’ve seen some outstanding artistics collaborations on our sneaker scene: New Balance and Dr Zulu; Eytys and Ester Mahlangu; Nike and Lazi Greiispaces.

On the 10^th of December, Puma added themselves to the list, dropping a collaboration with Cape Town artist, illustrator and graphic designer, Daniel Ting Chong. Having studied at Vega, he has emerged as one of the country’s most treasured creative talents, working with large brands including Nike, The New York Times and Red Bull.

In his most recent sneaker collaboration, Daniel has re-imagined the Duplex OG and the Duplex Evo through African cosmology. The OG has been inspired by the Zulu Supreme Creator, Unkulunkulu.

“Unkulunkulu sent a chameleon to earth to tell the human race that they will be immortal,” explains Daniel. “But the chameleon became slow and lazy on his journey, so Unkulunkulu sent a lizard to earth to convey the message that there will be death” As Dan explains, The Duplex OG was the first of its kind, launching a sillouette for many more sneakers. It’s an origin story in and of itself. The moral narrative of Unkulunkulu: to live at our highest potential— to clasp the time we have. Sneaker-design has always been driven by an urge to maximize our use of time (speed), space (distance) and expression.

Daniel’s Duplex Evo, with its snake-skin mesh, draws on the story of Mamlambo, the Xhosa Goddess of Rivers. “Mamlambo is well suited to the Duplex Evo because just as Mamlambo alludes to a form that is a synthesis of various species” Daniel says. “So the Duplex Evo is a hybrid created from different materials and technology”.

Both sneakers are emblazoned with a limited edition typographic a logo, different to the generic cat logo we usually associate with Puma.

Literally sneakers of the gods: Daniel Ting Chong’s Pumas are a blend of cutting-edge design and traditional iconography, grounded greens and sky-high imagination.

3 January 2017
Techno in the City: the story of TOYTOY

Run your finger through the history of techno and you will eventually come to the source: Belleville, Detroit in the mid-1980s. It was here where the Belleville Three — Kevin Saunderson, Juan Atkins and Derrick May — first melded Chicago House, Funk, Electro and Electric Jazz to create the blueprint for what we now know as techno music. It was a sonic fusion at the very foundations of today’s club culture. ‘Clubbing’ as a practice is threaded with the histories of warehouse raves, inner-city politics and underground counterculture. And its soundtrack was a blend of techno and acid house: alternative electronic music. Nearly three decades after techno’s inception in Detroit, one of its founding fathers, Kevin Saunderson, would find himself on the decks at a small basement nightclub in Rosebank, at a weekly event called TOYTOY.

I sat down with Fabio — owner, promoter and DJ at And Club — to talk about the history of the TOYTOY phenomenon.

Reflecting back on his initiation into Johannesburg nightlife during the 90s, Fabio recounted stories of a club called Idols. Positioned on End Street, in Doorfontein, it would later become ESP: a landmark in the Johannesburg rave scene. During the mid-90s, inner-city Johannesburg experienced a forceful rave movement and Fabio immersed himself in that scene. This is when he says he first started to draw distinction between the music he was hearing on the radio, and the alternative, electronic dance music that reverberated through city raves. He decided to try out DJ’ing, regularly rummaging for vinyls at House Africa Records, on Louis Botha Avenue. It was here that he first met Graham Hector (G-Force). “He was fundamental in getting the rave scene going”, Fabio told me. “I was star-struck at first”.

In 1997, Fabio moved to London, where he collected music and experienced the night-scene, later also spending some time in the Netherlands. When he returned in 2000, the rave scene had settled. Deep House was starting to take off in a big way, and although he enjoyed the sound, for Fabio this wasn’t party music.

Feeling like Johannesburg club culture was missing an alternative electronic scene, he and Ryan Vermaak (Dogstarr) began throwing parties, having both also been involved in line-ups for festivals like Rustler’s valley. Teaming up with G-force, they formed a DJ collective called Digital Rockit.

The first TOYTOY was thrown as a once-off event at Carfax, and, in line with the theme, saw the venue draped in inflatable toys. The Carfax venue already had important weight in the city’s rave scene, and in the tradition of global culture was converted from derelict industrial space into a club space. TOYTOY’s aim was to fill a gap in Johannesburg’s club culture, offering the best of alternative electronic dance music, and attracting both international and local talent.

During the noughties, Digital Rockit put on multiple parties, often losing money in each iteration. “We a used to spend ridiculous amounts of money on sound. Double, triple the amount of money that other promoters would spend. Because we believed this was the most important part of the event”. But something felt different about TOYTOY, and the team started playing with the idea of hosting it as a weekly night.

They began in the basement of Capital Music Café in Rosebank. “On the first night we had about 30 people and we had an international DJ. It was horrific. We thought, ‘What have we done?’ But slowly somehow we started connecting with an audience and people started coming”. It was during their time at Capital that the indomitable Kevin Saunderson featured on the lineup. Craig and Grant Van Rensburg (Sound Sensible) also came on as important partners, as did Andi Dill. At this stage TOYTOY drew an older crowd, many of whom were friends of the organisers, but it also started to attract a much younger generation, which Fabio found heartening. “We would hopefully spawn a new generation of DJ’s and producers and people who see potential in this music”.

From very early on, the organisers of TOYTOY started to give pedantic attention to the sound quality, investing in expert sound systems. “People felt the music. Really in their bodies. The base was powerful. Without that, TOYTOY wouldn’t be what it is now.”

When Ryan and Fabio opened the first And Club in the basement of Braamfontein’s Alexandra Theatre, TOYTOY became the Friday night party. Owning venue would help them sustain TOYTOY, for which they had thus far only been claiming door revenue. The duo acquired a ferociously expensive sound system from the UK. The Void Acoustics Air Motion was the first of its kind in South Africa. The event ran there for some time, but ultimately moved to its current Newtown home. The move also entailed a fundamental creative component. “We had to wrestle back creative control. [Unless it’s our own venue] it’s not gonna look the way we want it to look”, Fabio said.

When they moved And Club to Gwi Gwi Mrebi, Fabio and his team were absolutely pedantic” about how they wanted the space laid out. “We’ve situated the bar in the middle. It [the club] is compact. It flows really well. There’s an outside area.” Regulars at TOYTOY speak about the spaciousness of And, the ease of accessing the bar, and the wooden interior. The crowd travel mostly from the Northern Suburbs. Some come from as far as Pretoria and Centurian. “I’m a firm believer in inner-city clubbing” says Fabio. “I just don’t think it should be in the suburbs. At all. From a noise level point of view, to people out on the streets. And just the edginess of what the city brings you.” It makes sense, Fabio went on to say, even within the narrative of electronic music. Jo’burg is a tough, gritty city with many comparisons to be drawn with Detroit.

The predominantly white (but nevertheless mixed) partygoers at TOYTOY are not representative of Johannesburg’s inner-city working class. But they have nevertheless become significant participants in the city’s night culture, where TOYTOY features prominently in the weekly calendar. Today TOYTOY attracts approximately 500 clubbers weekly. The magnet remains the music, attracting international artists from the world’s most renowned clubs, including Berghain (Berlin), Trouw (Amsterdam) and Fabric (London). Over the years, TOYTOY has hosted a sea of local and global acts including Kill The DJ’s, Butane, Dubspeeka and Transmicsoul. Together, the resident DJs probably have close to 80 years of experience behind them.

Uncompromising music curation is at the heart of TOYTOY’s success. “You shouldn’t really ask to play at TOYTOY” Fabio says. “You should be invited. To play there you kind of have to be an established DJ. You have to be doing your thing. You have to be pushing your sound.” Fabio tells me DJ’s will prepare for as long as two weeks before a TOYTOY set.

And because the music and the immersion are primary, TOYTOY does not allow photographs, and cellphones in general are discouraged. “We don’t want you on your phone” says Fabio. “It’s about bringing you into the music. Close your eyes”.

“[TOYTOY is] about what we curate as a music experience”, Fabio explains. “When you start reaching people and they start connecting with you on that level, it’s not copy-able.”

20 December 2016
Turn-up Talk Series Episode 2

The ‘Turn-up Talk Series’ is a collection of discussions in which young Jo’burgers share their nocturnal lives: stories and reflections from the city’s dancefloors. The candid conversations explore nightclubs as stages for young people’s negotiations of identity, belonging and power.

This weeks episode is about how we ‘carve out space in nightclubs’.

Produced by Beth Vale

Background music by Ash_fx (@ashfx)

12 December 2016