Author: Ghost Writer

A Womxn’s Dis-ease // reframing ‘disease’ and unpicking the frameworks of cis-heteropatriarchy

Walking into the side entrance of The Point of Order (TPO) I am greeted by varying colours of fabric cutoffs stitched together. Camouflaged between these, are the words ‘DREAMS THAT MY BOdY’ – an impactful introduction to the Masters exhibition by Chloë Hugo-Hamman titled A Womxn’s Dis-ease.

Walking between her works that are installed on either side of the exhibition space, I move excitedly to where she has set up camp on the other end of TPO. Sitting on a beanbag, surrounded by textiles of all colours and textures, Chloë greets me, a small stitching project in hand. “That looks like so much fun,” I comment. “Yes. It’s like a kind of meditation,” she replies. This opening fittingly welcomes my first question about fabric as her medium of choice.

“I am very interested in textile. I love colour and texture,” Chloë explains. Soft, cosy fabrics appeal to Chloë’s eye, with these present throughout all the work that make up the show. Her specific hand stitching technique allows for her to work with the irregularity of the fabric, creating volumes that play on the textures of the reused fabrics. Her stitching, when viewed closely, also resembles veins, making a connection to the importance of depathologising bodies and ways of navigating the world. Letters are cut out of old t-shirts, and these are used to make up the words accompanying the visual pleasure of shades of red, pink, purple, yellow and blue that have been threaded together. This brings to the fore the interrogation of language within this exhibition.

“I made the words first. I was thinking about which words I want[ed] to incorporate into this exhibition.” Once these were created, Chloë was able to decide which words would be placed together, forming juxtapositions and dynamisms, and asking viewers to think about the tension that these groupings of words hold.

‘cHrONic SUPPOrT CaRe’ is once such grouping. This speaks to the lack of support and care in the world for what it means to have a chronic illness, and the need for that care and support structure.

“Chronic means that you will have it all your life, and unless you can afford the care – and even if you can afford it – it’s not really available in the way you need it. What I mean is that even if you have the means to access medical care, that care is prescribed by a largely Western medical framework, which is very much about responding only to the display of specific symptoms. If you don’t display the symptom, you won’t get diagnosed. And then there is the whole thing of language, because if you can’t articulate what your experience is using specific words, then you also can’t get diagnosed. But a Western medical diagnosis is also generally lacking, in that it is very seldom holistic in its approach to understanding the physical and psychic body. Then, as a womxn, it impacts further because of the patriarchal structure of [Western] medicine. A lot of the time you are dealing with doctors who are men, and their experience of the world is different to yours as a womxn. Their experience of violence and pain (and of how these can be projected and/or enacted onto a womxn’s body) is different, and often, as a womxn, you aren’t really heard or taken seriously. Your agency is compromised or negated. I am not implying that men do not experience mental illness or systemic violence, nor am I implying a stable categorisation or binary of gender as man and woman. Rather, I am pointing to the violence and therefore the pain implicit in a womxn’s patriarchal gendering. Which is also why I, like many other feminists, choose the convention of writing womxn with an ‘x’ as a strategy of disentangling ‘woman’ or ‘women’ from the subject-position of ‘man’ or ‘men’, and to consciously destabilise all rigid, violent and exclusionary gender categoristions.”

Following this train of thought is the idea of establishing alternative communities of care or “new forms of sociality”, a point Chloë takes from Ann Cvetkovich (2012), who is a seminal referent in her Masters. This asks the question, how can we create spaces and methods of care that are genuine, and provide a sense of safety, relief and understanding?

Continuing with the interrogation of language and the Western patriarchal biomedical framework for wellness and disease, is the work, ‘Sponsored by’. Taken from old t-shirts produced for corporate funded charitable activities, clusters of the words ‘sponsorship’ and ‘sponsored by’ are stitched together. In our discussion, Chloë comments on how most of these t-shirts were pointing to sponsorship for events related to breast cancer, with pale pink being the colour that is used to visually represent this. She points out the irony of these t-shirts, as the companies that sponsor these events sometimes have products or engage in practices that are carcinogenic. “And that was interesting for me in how it brings together a lot of my interests: big pharma, Western medical-industrial complex, symptom, labels, gender and feminism. Breast cancer is symptomatic for womxn, but it’s also so symptomatic of this capitalist system we live in. And also the fact that these t-shirts just have to be this baby pink! …it’s a kind of pink-washing!”

As briefly mentioned earlier, deconstructing processes of labelling in the way in which language is embedded within patriarchal structures of power presents strongly in the show. In the exhibition’s title the word ‘disease’ is re-framed as ‘dis-ease’. This is an empowering reworking of the English language, and draws attention away from the idea of the individual as the problem. It instead makes a larger commentary on the way in which the world operates. “It is less about ‘I am diseased’, more of ‘I have a dis-ease in the world’. The world that we live in is very fucked up, and you are meant to be or look or act a certain way; and if you aren’t that way you feel a dis-ease.” This ‘dis-ease’ can manifest in various ways, and Chloë’s focus is around mental illness.

A Womxn’s Dis-ease stitches fabric together to unpick neoliberal, white supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-heteropatriarchy.

To keep up with Chloë’s practice follow her on Instagram.

20 July 2018
Maria Metsalu // the power of performance art

Maria Metsalu graduated from the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam in 2016, and takes on the joint roles of artist, performer, choreographer and facilitator. Her practice has evolved from her working as a solo artist, to one in which she works collaboratively, often facilitating other artists in her work. She combines music, collage, voice, and movement in what shares both offline and online.

Metsalu is aware of how the space in which she performs affects the way it is received. Her live performances take place in varying spaces, and Metsalu is conscious of how these spaces influence not only who will attend, but the way in which what she creates will be ingested; how audiences will react and how much time the audience will spend engaging with the work. “In general, I like to be given the possibility to show my work in many contexts and spaces because each different experience will keep informing the work further,” Metsalu explains in an interview with AQNB.

Her work invites a kind of self-reflection for the audience, one in which viewers uncomfortably interrogate the tension between wanting to view, and a shyness about that desire. Therefore, her work engenders an attentiveness from those who view or experience it live that has a presence on its own.

Photographs of ‘Mademoiselle x’ by Alan Proosa

Mademoiselle x is one such work that demands this self-reflection. It is based on a semi-fictional character named Mademoiselle x who is convinced that she is a decomposing body. Despite this, she strongly believes that she is immortal. In this work, where the character occupies a kind of in between space, questions around what is possible, what is “too much” and what is the ending or beginning come to the fore.

Metsalu is also the co-founder of Young Boy Dancing Group, an evocative dance collective which explores similar themes to Maria’s own practice, such as voyeurism, interaction, and the power of movement. The group also challenges perceptions of gender and sexuality, and pulls apart the limits of institutionalized spaces.

To check out more of Metsalu’s work visit her website.

Young Boy Dancing Group

11 July 2018
Uncle Partytime converts the dance floor into a space of sonic transcendence

Uncle Partytime is a kid whose dj persona was born out of the scene in Braamfontein, allowing him to be plugged into the sonic shifts that his audience craves. Starting off with gigs at Kitcheners and Great Dane, and the Onyx rage parties, he continues to carry with him an ability to fuel the energy in the crowd and convert the dance floor into a transcendental space guided by the beat.

His sound bounces between hip hop and gqom-wave. Having broadened his gig list to include larger clubs and festivals, he recognizes that his audience is a mix of the old and young. From this recognition he is able to translate the core of this signature sound for both audiences. “It’s always easier with the younger audience because they understand the sound better but it’s always a challenge with the older audience ’cause that’s when I get to teach them about the new wave and still give them what they want to hear,” he explains.

As one of the founding members of Onyx and as a self-taught dj, Uncle Partytime has been active in expanding the parameters of his career. Simple, tactical moves have seen him able to stretch the imaginary of possibility, and his inclusion in the Red Bull Music Festival this year is evidence of this.

When asked about the direction he sees himself moving, Uncle Partytime shared that, “I want to represent myself and local music on global platforms. Just have to work harder, learn more and make sure I’m ready when my time comes.”

13 April 2018
DJ Okapi and Afrosynth Records; Recovering the origins of electronic music in South Africa

DJ Okapi’s Afrosynth Records, possibly the only record store in the country specialising in South African and African music, recently opened up in Jeppestown and is challenging the cultural imperialism and that sets us swaying to American or British trends before acknowledging the innovative vitality of music from the continent. The store, like the Afrosynth blog that it emerged from, is about increasing accessibility to South African songs and albums that were produced during one of the industry’s most prolific times during the 80s and early 90s, but it’s also about sonically subverting some of the divide-and-conquer logic that still emanates from that time by tracing musical connections between electronic sounds here and in other African countries. The store is a veritable treasure-trove for both collectors and explorers, resurrecting hard-to-come-by ‘dead stock’ so that music primarily from South Africa but also from Zambia, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Cameroon, and other African countries, is available in sealed, mint-condition quality.

While electronic genres like Gqom, and artists like Black Coffee are exploding both locally and internationally, other artists who enjoy wide international success, such as Nozinja (pioneer of Shangaan Electro) are hardly even heard of here. DJ Okapi has been researching and archiving South African Bubblegum music for over a decade and understanding some of the appreciations and contestations, visibilities and invisibilities surrounding the genre may shed light, not only on the rich legacy of commercial and electronic music within this country, but also on why and how some of this dissonance was created and perpetuated. While vinyl has, in recent years, exploded as a kind of manufactured aesthetic of cool, Afrosynth taps into it simply for the reason that most Bubblegum music as well as the early Kwaito stuff that evolved from it, is only accessible in this format; the records stacked around the Afrosynth store speak to a passion for the music and artists of the time, which, even after years of conducting research and interviews, DJ Okapi still only feels he is scratching the surface of.

During his early DJ-ing days, Okapi used some of the money he had made to pick up a few South African records from the 80s; including Heatwave by Harari and Touch Somebody by Brenda & The Big Dudes. Like the slipjoint knife of his namesake the music stuck inside him and he started to question why there was such a vacuum of information surrounding it. Bubblegum, a dominant trend in South African pop music and a defining sound of the 80s, succeeded more traditional styles like Isicathamiya, Marabi, Kwela and Mbaqanga, and utilised then new technology like drum machines and synthesisers. Initially heavily influenced by black American Pop music, many of the musicians used English as their language of choice but this was often combined with one or more vernacular languages, and as the style evolved, local influences came increasingly into the mix. The start of Bubblegum is generally linked to the 1983 hit song Weekend Special by Brenda & The Big Dudes and while most of us know these songs, as well as those by Sipho ‘Hotstix’ Mabuse, Sello ‘Chicco’ Twala and Yvonne Chaka Chaka, relatively few of us seem to know that literally tens of thousands of incredible albums and artists were also being produced during the time. This perhaps speaks to the possibility that those who have held the power to archive and disseminate information show a certain disregard for that which they consider to not be ‘South African enough’ and so, despite the sugary label, Bubblegum can actually be said to have muddied such imposed definitions of ‘authenticity’.

While some contest the term Bubblegum (preferring to use labels like Township Pop, Disco or Afro-Pop) as derogatory or as implying a kind of superficiality or disposability, DJ Okapi feels that this doesn’t really do justice to this experimental musical production. There’s a kind of sweet subversion that pulls through the genre and perhaps complicates one-dimensional understandings of what resistance actually looks like; something like the façade of non-political ‘frivolity’ that was sometimes used to disguise serious political strategising at the time. The apartheid regime obsessively imposed definitions and segregations in order to strip the majority of their power and so, viewed within this context, the stylistic and linguistic cross-overs of Bubblegum refused these oppressive methods of the white-supremacist order. Through a multilingual approach, Bubblegum was also able to transcend the SABC’s policy of segregated radio stations for different language groups, thus reaching a much wider audience than previously possible. In many ways, Bubblegum manipulated the system against itself and would often escape the State’s censoring gaze by veiling political messages in seemingly innocuous lyrics. Perhaps it’s these strangely subtle insurgencies that reflect the most political tactics, or perhaps those are to be found in the joyful melodies themselves; claiming the right to moments of happiness and humanity in defiance of apartheid’s massively violent attempts at dehumanisation. Whatever the case may be, Afrosynth refuses to accept the misplaced hierarchical designations that disregard this immensely prolific creative legacy.

If you’re interested in discovering more of this rich musical history, head over to the blog where you can check out videos, rare anecdotes of the artists, the album art and fashion, or download mixes and other previously inaccessible, digitised gems. Vinyls can also be purchased on Afrosynth’s Discogs page or you can check out this video, where Afrosynth was the focus for the first ever Boiler Room Collections in South Africa. From this week, DJ Okapi will be spinning these sounds during his UK tour, details of which can be found on his Facebook page. The sonic library of the store will be briefly closed during the UK tour but if you’re in South Africa, pop in again from the 1 December, where you can also scoop the newly released LP Boogie Breakdown: South African Synth-Disco 1980-1984, which DJ Okapi was involved in collaboratively compiling, and where you can perhaps even score some valuable reissues in the future. If that’s not enough, tune into the Soundcloud for some instant gratification. Heita-da!

8 November 2016
Fear of The Youth Ep4 – high school students weigh in on Fees Must Fall

Fear of The Youth is a new web series about the interests and concerns of Johannesburg youth. The series is produced by filmmaking crew, Germ Heals. In episode 4 Germ Heals speak to high school students about the Fees Must Fall movement, their concerns regarding tertiary education and their thoughts on governments interventions in the space.

13 October 2016
The Apocalypse Pantry; a survivor’s guide to happiness in the urban Armageddon

Can we think through the senses? Recognise how systems of control distribute what is sensible, what is knowable, along predetermined trajectories, patterns of thought, or experiences of encounter? It’s in the concrete and the corridors; the ways our bodies are made to move; the doors that open and shut; the dull buzz of boundaries; the tubes of florescent light that dizzy and blind; the beeping of barcodes; the gaping mouths of inaccessible, empty rooms; the partitions… tongues against a dead dry wall. Does it make your stomach ache? Can you think from the gut? Zayaan Khan and Heather Thompson are wading in from the underbelly, dripping in dirt, stepping steady as pulse, reclaiming their breath in order to resuscitate themselves and, in the process, they’re pulling open the nourishing compendium of The Apocalypse Pantry to proliferate all of the knowledge that they’ve dreamt and acquired, caught and released, chewed on and stored. The pantry is a synesthetic experience traversing the gustatory, visual, olfactory, auditory and kinaesthetic. It’s a rich, mycelial network of tactile and intuitive connections, sprouting transformative possibilities for life through the thoroughly collaborative labour it’s grounded in. It’s a healing apothecary nurtured in the visceral learning and ingested explorations of its urban alchemists, unafraid to listen from the barometers of their own bodies. It sweats and it stinks like a microbial mulch against the violent homogenisation and pasteurisation of what it means to exist in the world, rejects the exploitative dispossessions that occur around symbolic and physical distributions of value; hierarchical organisations and segregations of ripe and rotten, clean and unclean, worthy and unworthy. Can we harvest our reflexive responses in order to dismantle that which disregards and disenfranchises, that which enacts a silent apocalypse of now through the multiple deaths of daily experiences?

Photography by Loubie Rusch

The Apocalypse Pantry explodes open the privileged illusions of complacency and immunity, kicks out the artificial support of commodified comfort swung from the shelves, shifts the sedimentation in order to level us all to the earth. It’s about food as an inescapable and thus accessible point from which to approach multiple questions surrounding the most basic sustenance we require in order to survive. What does sovereignty mean when we cannot feed ourselves, when we cannot even recognise the food that surrounds us? Can abundance still cross-pollinate in all of its vital multiplicity? Can supressed knowledges still germinate within the murk of our muddied hearts? Perhaps the things that we were told to leave for dead are just dormant, deciduous, waiting for us to vigorously redefine our relationships and create even small spaces from which to bloom. If the apocalypse is a fire, it’s a regenerative force, a decomposition of depletion, an alert awareness that reminds us to bend to the faint, grubby scent that leaks from a crack in the pavement, to notice the succulent shoot that’s somehow sustained itself during its difficult movements through the hard and hostile surface. The pantry offers a refreshing recollection of our ability to embody similar forms of resilient resistance against the suffocating clutch of capitalistic control. It refuses the disempowering conditioning we’re encultured into and emerges from underneath the heavy, burdensome fog of our subtle and insipid incorporation into the imperialist, white-supremacist, neoliberal, patriarchal order. What kills us often calls itself life but if we calm down, if we’re conscious, we are able to utilise our resources and transform our blood into an anti-venom against the vacuous and virulent. The Apocalypse Pantry is a purgative to disfigure and disorder our conceptual and corporeal limitations. It summons our creative capabilities by observing our instinctual coping mechanisms and sows seeds towards the cultivation of our fruitful potential, even within dense, vampiric atmospheres. The apocalypse is about the generative possibilities of our vulnerability, the disorientation of self-centered claims towards mastery and domination. It’s about acknowledging the mystical reality of our interconnections with the universe, noticing our permeability through the composition of our bodies from the same stuff as stars, or the ways that microbiomes are stirred and folded into our genomes… even our own forms are inhabited by more than ourselves. Perhaps there are strategies for our survival that will one day return us to a vision of bodies committed to the cycles of the soil, not because they are eviscerated by bullets or bombs, but because they are old and worn and loved. The Apocalypse Pantry is rooted in hopeful reimaginings, quiet mutations towards where we can flourish. Take a deep breath and get cooking…

5 October 2016
Umuzi- redefining creative economies through education that is accessible and free!

South Africa is currently in a critical place of rising consciousness, with far-reaching and irrevocable implications for the dismantling of ongoing oppressions, systemically enforced, both subtly and overtly, in our so-called ‘post-apartheid’ state. Through the explosion of movements such as #FeesMustFall, we have been able to bear witness to the beginning of a new, self-determined redefinition of this country. Umuzi directly speaks to these politics as a radical example of an alternative system of education that is accessible and free, and so I have decided, somewhat unconventionally, to reproduce the majority of our discussion below (there are some minor copy edits, collaboratively approved, pre-publication). Umuzi is about creating the next generation of creative professionals in order to challenge the South African narrative and their work is a tangible, practical manifestation of non-oppressive alternatives. As such, the conversation below can perhaps provide some insight into emancipatory operational structures for institutions in the future South Africa, currently in the process of being created. The conversation is also reproduced here in this format, as self-authorship is essential to the way that Umuzi functions. I caught up with Creative Director, Nthabiseng ‘Thubz’ Lethoko (referred to below as Thubz); Cohort 4 Recruit, Dimpho Saal (referred to below as Dimpho); and previous Cohort or alumni, Kgomotso ‘Neto’ Tleane (referred to below as Kgomotso).

Before we jump into the conversation, you should know that Umuzi are currently recruiting the next Cohort of Umuzi Recruits, set to take flight in mid-October. If you want to be part of this movement and you believe that you have what it takes, show them what you’ve got by applying at www.umuzi.org or hit them up on their Facebook page.

GW: So Umuzi started in 2009 with single-use film cameras and was directed at high-school students, how have you evolved from the Umuzi Photo Club of the past into the Umuzi of today?

Thubz: I’m glad that you started at the very beginning, because it touches on why we exist in the first place. Umuzi started through the realisation that there is a massive problem in terms of the black creative community; access is restricted and kids can’t actually get to this thing, because there is just too much money in between. We exist to bridge this gap, where access to privatised institutions is limited. The main reason that we do what we do, is because there is no transformation happening within the privatised sectors of the creative community or within creative schools… there is very little that is feeding the industry in terms of black creative talent and that causes an even bigger problem because the people who are going into the institutions do not understand the stories that they are trying to communicate to the mass market; they don’t live or understand those stories, which creates a very warped perception and outcome. That is the situation we are trying to change; we are trying to infiltrate that so that it becomes real and relatable or understandable.

Dimpho: I want to add to what Thubz is saying; money is a big problem but that also connects to other factors. As high school students you are fed certain information, or you receive certain perspectives from your parents; pressures to follow a mainstream career path, even if that isn’t necessarily linked to what you want to do. Because money is such an important aspect, you aren’t provided with the options that private institutions offer- say to actually become a visual artist- so then you are forced into doing other things. Umuzi really addresses some of these complications.

GW: A lot of this really speaks to the reality of a non-reformed education sector… even in terms of art classes often being exclusively provided within privatised schools; in public schools it’s sometimes not even an option.

All: Yes!

GW: This actually leads into the next question which is directly about the politics of education in this country- so we have already been speaking about bridging critical gaps but I guess there are also many other aspects; for example, in terms of creating non-hostile learning environments. Obviously we’ve recently had the #SansSouci protests. Is there anything else that you would like to elaborate on in terms of how Umuzi engages these politics?

Thubz: The way that we educate and upskill our Recruits works off of 3 Pillars: Education, Community and Content. With regards to the Education Pillar, our aim is to provide skills in order for our Recruits to secure employment. They get a certificate at the end of the process, but we are really focussed, at the end of the day, on ensuring our Recruits are employable. In this way we are quite different from traditional education systems. This is supported by all of our Managers; we all come from the creative industry where we’ve had to learn to clearly understand those environments. It’s not like we’re coming from text books; we’re coming from real life and that’s what the job experience angle means. The work that is created here, or the challenges that we give, are based on realities and we expect real results. Our Recruits learn things that they would actually be expected to do when entering the creative economy- so they enter being ready. The second Pillar is Community. The first aspect of that is the community of Umuzi itself; we are constantly communicating with our students in one way or another, from our very first Cohorts until now. We provide an ongoing system of support for our students and they can always come back… Kgomotso, maybe you want to talk about that?

Kgomotso: Just to pick up on what we were saying with regards to the traditional way of learning; when I first came here it was very different to how it is now. Back then, you would come in and you would study and write tests. Now, you accumulate briefs and then engage in real life experiences, often working around your own community. As Thubz was saying, if you want to move into the industry, you enter with a lot of real experience. But not everyone wants to work in predefined structures or positions, so Umuzi also engages community in the sense of providing a space for you to do your own thing. Even after you have graduated, you can still come in and work from here and build your own thing. It’s also a great space for collaboration because there are so many creatives here; you can literally turn around and find a great writer or a graphic designer and involve them in your project. The energy here is amazing because you are surrounded by people who are continuously producing and that gives you the drive to create new content.

Thubz: That actually made me think about our bigger hope and dream. Right now we are Umuzi and we are producing these awesome, young, creative people and it seems like we have the social capital because we are the hook up between them and the industry. But if you think about it like an infinite hourglass, the sand comes from the top and goes to the bottom, but over time, the sand starts to accumulate from the bottom and rise to the top. That’s kind of the situation with Kgomotso; he’s graduated but he’s coming back here and using the people within our space for his own projects. So our hope it that when the first or second Cohorts are the group heads, or senior art directors, or executive creative directors, or managing directors… once they have the social capital, the whole thing will flip.

GW: That’s quite unique; I don’t really know other institutions that do that… it’s like they take your money and kick you out the door.

Thubz: Ya… so I also feel like we maybe shouldn’t be put on too much of a pedestal right now, because it’s not actually about us, it’s about that moment when everything flips over.

Kgomotso: The community part of it is crazy because if you go to a creative event, it’s hard not to spot Umuzi people, from all of the groups. In the next two or three years, it’s going to be massive… it’s going to be something else!

Thubz: We’re hoping for that change to happen really soon.

Dimpho: A few months ago we attended the One Club Creative Bootcamp. When I got there, I had conversations with students from other institutions and many were saying that they only do practical work in their fourth year, which is really weird! We do that every single week and we present every Friday, so our skills really are practically harnessed. We don’t have set textbooks, so that’s not the way that we learn; our learning material is, for example, often visual or our Managers compile what they think we need at that point in time and that’s really special. Through these non-alienating, practical processes, we are equipped with what we need- at the end of the day, people want to see content.

GW: It’s pretty political; this idea of organic knowledge rather than that being this stale construct based on restricted access and locked away in the cabinets of ivory towers.

Thubz: I love what Dimpho was saying because that speaks to the third Pillar, which is Content. That basically means that when you leave, are you able to work? Do you understand what is happening and are you employable in that moment? The way that we measure ourselves is from industry feedback; ‘your people are awesome, I want to work with them, how can we employ them?’ So we measure ourselves from that perspective, rather than from self-created hype or hollow self-promotion.

GW: I was reading a few of the available articles about your work and they mentioned how it started through photography and that something important about that was how it transcended language barriers. Maybe it’s a bit of an off-centre question but because we’ve been speaking in the ways that we are, I want to ask about the politics of language within the space?

Kgomotso: I think from my experience, the language of Umuzi… I can’t say it’s like this specific language or that specific language, it’s like Kasi slang or like how I would speak to some of my friends. If I had to say that Umuzi was a person, I would say that it was someone who grew up in Joburg, in the hood… but in the 90s though
[All laugh]
Dimpho: While we may learn in English, we are often aiming to get into the industry in order to amend certain problems. So Umuzi is not just developing creatives; it’s developing professional creatives. For now, we need to get into that space and be able to professionally communicate with everyone, while still bringing in that real person that Kgomotso just mentioned. In this way, we can start the work of telling our own original and authentic stories.

Thubz: I mean the language question is also a part of that flip we were talking about. When you get into a professional environment, you need to be professional enough to translate what you want to say in a way that they can understand, but you also need to be able to use vernac confidently; because you know, that they know what you are talking about.

Dimpho: I remember we were, at some stage, watching an ad it was trying to speak to the black community but everything just felt totally wrong and that happens so often! That is why we need to be the change.

Recruit Name: Lesego Maphutha – Graphic Designer/Art Director

Artwork: Black Label – Celebrating woman of power throughout the year ( Poster Campaign )

GW: That leads to the next question I want to ask, because a lot of the articles I have read are like; ‘Umuzi’s cool because it’s about disadvantaged youth.’ They actually use and repeat this reductive terminology as the primary description of the people engaged in this space… So I want to try to address that by explicitly asking about the diversity of the Umuzi Recruits?

Thubz: There is so much! We range from a 19 year old, right through to a 29 year old- that’s a difference of 10 years! But what is important is that those people still feed off of each other and create together; there are no barriers or hierarchies where it’s like ‘oh, I’m older than you’ or whatever.

Kgomotso: We are all so different! For example, you get people from rural KZN who come to learn here, you get people from Soweto, you get people who grew up in the burbs, and so the cultures and backgrounds are really varied. I think that’s one of the reasons why we end up having such a diversity of content; because we all have different ways that we see the world and our surroundings.

Thubz: That’s actually really important because often, the assumption in the industry or in the media, is that a township is a township and that everyone goes through the same stuff. So if you come from a township, the attitude is like, ‘oh, you went through that thing or you know what we’re talking about.’ But something I’ve really experienced through Umuzi, is that every single township is so different; they all have their own cultures and unique lingos, which are so rich and beautiful!

GW: Obviously Umuzi is very youth-focussed and relatively early on there was the shift from the high school students to the tertiary level. Is there more you want to say about the youth aspect of the work or why the youth are so important within creative industries?

Dimpho: The youth are a huge demographic in this country and it’s really important that we are spoken to in a way that we understand. Because we are from that place, we know how to speak from it in a real way. Also important is the fact that we have witnessed the recent shift or explosion in youth consciousness within this country. We have been right in the middle of a transition, and so we have witnessed both perspectives in terms of the youth of the past and the youth of today… we carry a bit of both.

Kgomotso: I think we are living in a very crucial time; there are so many things that are happening and changing and it is mostly because of us. We have seen so many injustices happening for such a long time and now we are directly addressing these things; often through creativity. It’s up to us to communicate the things that are happening and we are finding that we are able to do this even with people who maybe don’t understand or properly see what’s going on. So it’s massively important as the youth of now, that we create content that is able to communicate these things.

Thubz: I think the youth of today is like a juxtaposition between now and the youth of ‘76. It’s been a really long time since they’ve had a voice, and I’m not exactly sure what the reasons for that are, but they’re speaking and it’s important to listen to that now! That’s something we feel quite strongly about at Umuzi.

GW: There’s maybe something interesting here that connects the economy to the politics. I think contemporary youth sometimes get quite frustrated when older people look at them like, ‘oh, they’re pretty useless because they’re not employed by this age, or they don’t have this by that age, or they’re not married by that age’ or whatever… without necessarily realising how much things have changed; it’s a totally different operating system. But the point is that that attitude kind of implies the lament of ‘where are the youth’ or ‘where are the great youth leaders of today?’ But now it’s like ‘whoa, they’re here!’ And not only are they here in conscious ways that don’t buy into empty rhetoric, but they’re also totally remaking things in really interesting ways… they’re creating their own economies.

Thubz: We’re touching on something really important which we haven’t spoken about; because there hasn’t been a huge culture of young creative professionals within our communities, there are almost no role models. Getting your family to understand- before you even talk about the money- that you want to, for example, be a designer or an art director; they often don’t understand what that means. So you are already challenged, within your home to try to explain yourself. You don’t have a successful next-door neighbour you can point to, or you don’t have an uncle who knows somebody, who knows somebody, who will hook you up, so that your mom will feel comfortable or secure enough to let you go into that industry. So the great leaders have always been here… they just haven’t had the opportunities… especially from a creative perspective.

Kgomotso: Being in this time and looking at the media landscape, I think that one of the ways in which the youth have been able to claim their power is through social media. Today there are so many ways to put your voice out there, so in that way, there is also an important direct link between the youth’s consciousness and the format of media itself. There’s this ability to have a direct voice…

Dimpho: …You don’t have to wait for specific events anymore. You can raise your voice and speak about a topic at any time and it’s always amazing how many people actually want to speak back.

GW: I guess that’s another kind of flip or feedback mechanism, because Umuzi is engaging with a changing media landscape, where you learn that your own voice is a powerful thing.

Kgomotso: Exactly. As much as social media is a virtual thing, it’s also the real word and about real things that are happening. We can recognise those connections and carry that perspective into the work that we do.

Recruit Name: Kgodisho “Zito” Mowa – Graphic Designer/Art Director

Artwork: The Mzansian ( Social Media Campaign )

GW: I want to ask a bit more about the operational specifics- I know that you have had various recruitment campaigns; how does this aspect function?

Thubz: We have a recruitment drives every couple of months- I think right now it’s every 4 to 6 months. With every drive we have a campaign. Because we are so fluid and learn and evolve so much within the periods between recruitments, we try to take what we have learnt from previous Cohorts or from new people who have come in, and we let that influence us in developing the next campaign. We refer to the people who come in on specific recruitment drives as Cohorts and we are now on Cohort 5. The Cohorts aren’t annually structured; it’s more organic than that.

GW: That’s quite important, because for people who may have been restricted from entering other institutions, it’s often like, well, what are you supposed to do after that? Through Umuzi’s intake process opportunities are opened up, rather than shut down.

Thubz: People also drop out of school at different times and for different reasons. People find themselves in many different situations. With us, you don’t have to then sit and wait it out for the rest of the year, while not pursuing your goals.

Kgomotso: And this structure is also something that has evolved over time. In the beginning it was more of a traditional, annual thing. So it’s an example of the ways that Umuzi adapts in relation to the realities of this country.

Thubz: Umuzi is a working example of free education. There is also a small stipend provided for transportation; so access is a critical consideration throughout our entire operation.

GW: Next I want to ask; do you perhaps want to mention any successful or notable alumni?
[All laugh and make comments about ‘pretty much everyone’]

Recruit Name: Kgomotso “Neto” Tleane – Alumni Photographer

Image Description: Image taken at “Fees must fall” used for the “Take your power to the polls” campaign

Thubz: It’s a difficult to say ‘these are the people’, because there are those who are successful and are under the spotlight, and then there are those who are successful and aren’t under the spotlight. I guess I could say, once again, how we measure ourselves is through the industry response or through actual employment. Throughout 2015, we had an 80% employment rate which is pretty phenomenal if you think about it!

GW: I want to ask a bit about what the days look like or how things are actually structured. I know you have also had some really great Master Classes; I saw on the blog that you’ve had sessions with Lebogang Rasethaba, Zwelethu Radebe and Dr Peter Magubane. Maybe you can tell me a bit more about the way things function and also about the mentorship aspect?

Thubz: We are constantly evolving; so the way that we did things with Cohort 1 is very different to the way that we did things with Cohort 4. For the first 3 months of the year, you go through what we call a crash-course. In those months you go from department to department- there are 6 (photography, graphic design, digital marketing, traffic, videography, and copywriting) and you spend 2 weeks in each… everyone moves around and gets a taste of everything. After that, you move on to specialisation, where for 6 months you intensively focus on the department you came here for. If you change your mind about what you want to do during the crash-course, you are able to make that change.

GW: Taking into account some of the gaps we have spoken about, that exposure and option to shift is kind of amazing; there seems to be a reflexivity to the fact that many incoming creatives may not have actually had exposure to the variety of career paths that exist?

Thubz: Exactly. Then in the last few months of the programme, the Cohort is sent for work experience, where they really get to test out everything they’ve learnt during the process.

GW: Do you want to say anything about the Master Classes?

Kgomotso: What’s interesting for me is that we get exposed to a lot of black professionals, so that’s really inspiring and a lot of the things that they say are relatable to us. So, in ways, that fills the role model gap we were speaking about earlier.

Recruit Name: Tshepiso Mabula – Cohort 4 Photographer Recuit

Image Name: Tshepiso Church – Part of a series

GW: I’m going through the nitty-gritty here, but how do the exhibitions work?

Thubz: The exhibitions used to be about the old annual structure, so they would look at the whole year of work and celebrate that. What we do now, is we have something called #COM or Creative of the Month. People get to submit their work online and there’s a panel that then selects an overall winner. The plan- we’ve only done one so far- is that we will print all of the work that comes in and this is going to form future exhibitions. So anyone, from any Cohort, past or present, is able to submit, again returning to the Community Pillar.

GW: I want to then quickly ask about some of the individual projects I’ve picked up on; like The Bicycle Stokvel project and the Backroom Space project. From what I can tell, it seems like there’s a willingness to highlight the work that Umuzi students do; their own initiatives that occur even beyond the institution?

Kgomotso: There is a supportive attitude towards individual projects and that’s important because often, like in those examples, these projects are about taking art out of inaccessible spaces and making it available to the communities and to the general public. So these are ways that the Recruits are applying and putting their knowledge into practice.

GW: We’ve had a really generative discussion and I think we’ve picked up on some important dynamics in terms of how Umuzi operates, so I think let’s close it up by just asking if each of you perhaps want to share some final words?

Kgomotso: For me, Umuzi changes the way that you see things. Even if you already come from an alternative perspective, it helps you to structure your work and hones your ability to articulate that. Through Umuzi I feel like I’ve been enabled to create real work with strong purpose.

Dimpho: I’d like to pick up again on the point of creating visibility around the creative sector as something able to provide viable careers. Through Umuzi’s work, people within our communities are exposed to that, so all of these processes are generating real change.

Thubz: I want to touch on what Kgomotso said in relation to the projects, which really relates to our role and our vision. I really connect with the work that Umuzi Recruits are creating because that really is challenging the South African narrative in one way or another. They are breaking down walls, which is awesome and makes me really excited… because art and creativity don’t belong inside the walls of specific, predefined spaces.

Recruit Name: Kgomotso “Neto” Tleane – Alumni Photographer

Image Name: 0.01 and x2 vote- The Honey (Ongoing online Campaign)

14 September 2016
Anthony Smith- Waar brand dit?

Anthony Smith, founder of South Africa’s most befokte clothing label, 2Bop, has always lived by his own rules and he’s proving that you don’t need to buy into the lily-white-old-boys-club-hierarchy of the traditional Cape Town creative industries in order to level-up. As a kid he’d be skating and shooting hoops and skieting games from the rough Northern areas to the idyllic Summerstrand and Kings Beach while his ‘art’ teacher plotted new drawing formulas for the class to conform to. Even back then he was too organic for graph paper, could dallah pump fakes against the systems of constraint. Smith tells me about growing up in a coloured community in PE and at 15, being a bit insecure moving from a ‘ghetto school’ to a ‘fancy private school’ where “all the kids knew Shakespeare and shit” but how he soon realised that kids were just kids, the only difference was access. So he’d make his own spaces, skating across racial divisions and jamming the arcade games which flourished in the blind spot of apartheid’s gaze.

There’s a richness to childhood experiences which we never really realise at the time; how can you properly articulate the victory of discovering Double Dragon 2 in your grandparent’s street when you’d started to expect all the good games to be in the white areas? Or the excitement for other kids being good at the games because it meant seeing all the levels and characters and bosses without spending your own 20 cent pieces? It’s not about some kind of misplaced nostalgia, it’s about formative experiences that remain relevant to 2Bop today. Smith’s brand has never bought into the legacy of inferiority that still remains ‘post-apartheid’, it’s always taken pride in local culture, manufacturing locally and channelling Afrikaaps or coloured club culture through remixed Strictly Rhythm Records aesthetics. But all of this diverse texture is exploded open, utilised in a way that opens up appeal rather than shuts down access, drawing on the value of the lo-fi as a platform for the imagination. You can play just about any game today on an emulator and that’s cool, it doesn’t hack the power of the OGs who know the Juicy lyrics when they see them. Smith’s already two-steps ahead, establishing his own company called Premium MFG and Co., producing for like-minded clients and upcoming brands. He also his eye on eventually going full circle to actually producing video games and is already bringing arcade style home by creating a new game controller prototype.

For all of his success, Smith’s incredibly humble and expresses immense gratitude for his team and the counter-culture checkpoint at Corner Store in Cape Town. He’s cracked the code and is subverting the structure through the communal and collaborative, bringing on interns, hiring young designers, and creating work with all different kinds; from well-established artists to a 6 year-old kid named Kayden. Smith’s pioneering a new business culture; while you were rushing to take notes, he was utilising the resources to make full colour print-outs for logos of the future. While you were networking with corporates, Smith was realising the value of friends who could hustle with heart and who held skills that didn’t fit into lame-ladder job descriptions. There are other ways that you can do things, power in articulations that don’t conform to narrow definitions of language and 2Bop’s the turnaround jump shot. What company do you keep?

You can follow 2Bop on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram and get gedruip through purchases here and here

Editorial: Anthony is in pieces by 2bop, i & i & Patta

25 August 2016
Dismantling imaginative monopolies; Sheetal Magan and the radical new generation of South African filmmakers

Sheetal Magan is part of a new generation of South African filmmakers, immersed in a young context that is already reinventing itself through its own complex honesty and the rejection of a stoic condescension towards emerging voices. These pioneers of the industry are subverting hierarchical and patriarchal monopolies on the imagination, as well as one-dimensional cultural confessionals, seizing their own permission to be genuinely aspirational in terms of thinking outside the limitations and refusing to let those lines-of-sight settle. As an up-and-coming filmmaker, Magan’s repertoire already speaks to an immense and unhindered curiosity, willing to boldly submerse itself in the subconscious grit of multifarious worlds, in refracted layers of consciousness and evocative atmospheres moving well-beyond the zones of complacent satisfaction.

In God Dank vir Klank (2011), Magan was already experimenting with genre through documentary-fiction, interrogating conversational currents around Zef culture and issues of appropriation, and incorporating visible failure as a strategy towards demystification. Magan is emerging as a tenacious risk-taker, immediately destabilising stereotypical confines through her lack of fear for navigating foreign landscapes. Despite a low-budget, in City of Ashes (2014), Magan took-on dystopian speculative-fiction, channelling current South African anxieties through the vision of ground-zero Johannesburg in the year 2024, disordering secular structure and invoking the phantasmagoric layers of history and experience that resonate within the city. The Fall of Ganesh (2015), which premiered at the Durban International Film Festival (DIFF), coalesced from a palpable personal encounter, that for Magan, really exploded illusions of ‘social-cohesion’ in South Africa and stuck in her body as an involuntary shake, well-after a mob riled against her family during a particular Diwali celebration. Can a sense of disorienting displacement seep through the grounding of rituals? Who defines our rites of passage and what relationships are we allowed to articulate?

The Fall of Ganesh is a tactile reflection of Magan’s ability to subtly weave together multiple threads that resonate with the intricacies of non-linear emotion and the mysteries of human experience. Her work is beginning to reflect a powerful, untold undercurrent and it’s being recognised through her inclusion in prestigious platforms such as DIFF’s Talents Durban Doc Station, Urucu Media’s Realness South African screenwriters’ residency, and the Cannes South African Film Factory, through which the short film Paraya (2016) was created. Paraya premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and is also set to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival and the upcoming Jozi Film Festival. Magan’s first feature film, The Day and Night of Brahma is currently in development and she is also currently working on an eight part mini- series entitled the Acts of Man.

When I spoke to Magan about her navigations within Indian culture, I couldn’t help but think of Marji in Persepolis donning her ‘punk is not ded’ jacket and it made me incredibly excited for the potential of South African cinema- I imagined, through the perspectives that Magan related, a South African Asghar Farhadi and Hindu metaphysical intuition bleeding through the aesthetic of Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color. Could there be a kind of South African Tarkovskian texture, infused with honey and ghee, merging with contemporary, digitally-diasporic dispersions? Magan is throwing punches at being boxed-in and the strength of her unique visual language, before even releasing her first feature film, stretches the imagination towards the realisation of such radically new possibilities.

19 August 2016
Tune-in to Kwelagobe ‘Kwela’ Sekele’s powerful new frequency; Yeoville Radio

Vocalist, song writer and producer Kwelagobe ‘Kwela’ Sekele has been shaking up the South African music scene for over a decade. As visionary and vocalist for the Kwani Experience, which took off in the early to mid-2000s, he helped to lay the foundations for an explosive new-generation of Johannesburg bands that built on the legacies of groups like Harari, Stimela, and Sankomota, and gave rise to the likes of the BLK JKS, Tumi and the Volume, 340ml, Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness (BCUC), and The Brother Moves On. Sekele’s personal journey within the industry speaks to an unwavering passion and dedication – while performing and discovering the power of his own sound, he has also worked with the record label Motif, contributed to the realisation of Melt2000’s ‘Music with No Name’ series, acted as tour management for greats like Zaki Ibrahim, and currently works as Music Supervisor for Rhythm City. Sekele is man unafraid of pushing boundaries in search of excellence and originality, and his sonic explorations have seen him morph through multiple incarnations (you can watch the scorching music video for ‘Moni’ by the Po Box Project here), and embrace a wide variety of collaborations; such as those with DJ Oil (former Troublemakers), Top Shayela, MXO, Boyza, DJ Lemonka, Prof Trance, Spacemunna, Bhubesi and even the rockabilly band, Black Pimp’n Jesus.

If any of this makes your mouth water, you’ll want to tune-in to Kwela’s latest solo-project, fusing multiple musical influences, including Afro-beats, indigenous sounds, early SA pop hits, praise poetry, hip-hop, synth and electronica; Yeoville Radio. Named after the elusive Johannesburg suburb, Yeoville Radio reflects on the vibrant and frenetic experiences of the pan-African economic migrants that occupy the community. Songs in the project are laced with polyphonic grooves, trans-lingual vocals, South African colloquialisms and street flair, with Kwela vocalising the contemporary African experience from the perspective of living and walking the streets of Johannesburg. The Project’s first single, Pfukani (‘wake up’) was recently launched at the Soweto Art and Craft Fair, through the support of Concerts SA’s 2016 Mobility Fund, as well as Jozi Unsigned, with this being the first in a series of regional shows set to take place in the SADC region over the next few months. The line-up reunited Kwela with former Kwani Experience members Gontse Makhene and Mahlatse Riba, included the indomitable great, Sello Montwedi on drums, and brought Leanaphuthi Moloi and Senzo Nxumalo into the mix on keys and bass respectively. The lyrics of Pfukani are hard-hitting and pay tribute to South Africa’s workforce, incessantly grinding against ongoing disparity, with all of this wrapped-up in an innovative sound that ignites, inspires, and sets the soul to dancing; offering love and respect in a transcendent moment of freedom. Yeoville Radio is the powerful culmination of Kwelagobe Sekele’s years of experience and experimentation and is blazing a new trail that you’ll definitely want to follow…

1 Kwanele Sosibo, ‘The evolution of the black band, a decade on’ in the Mail & Guardian, 07 Nov 2014, Available: http://mg.co.za/article/2014-11-06-ten-years-on-the-black-band-is-not-dead

11 August 2016
The unfiltered confessional and emotive resistance of Banele Khoza’s Temporary Feelings

Banele Khoza is undoubtedly an emerging South African artist to watch; before he had even left university, the Tate panel in Africa had begun to acquire his work and at the age of 22 he holds multiple accolades, including being selected for Lizamore & Associates’ Johannes Stegmann Mentorship Programme, where he is currently under the guidance of Colbert Mashile. Khoza has just completed exhibiting work at the Turbine Art Fair and recently opened up his first solo-exhibition titled Temporary Feelings.

Temporary Feelings is a personal confessional, a diary left open to the audience, containing unfiltered observations of all the messy, confused, and distracted surges of desire and fear that humans emit between themselves. This exhibition pries open all the awkward dissonance of a hyper media-ted existence through a brazenly disproportioned and unedited amalgamation of digital-traditional techniques, refracting multiple ‘inappropriate’ colour associations and lines that cannot contain. We all get lonely but we’re not supposed to talk about it… this work offers up a body you can touch and lovingly unhinges these taboos of emotion and of vulnerable masculinity, in order to open a door that the complexity of a person could actually appear through. Unspectacular isolation is rendered remarkable through a subversion of superficial, representational humanity- with the collected articulations blushing in the gap between the immensity of what people feel and the constraints of what they’re ‘supposed to’ exhibit.

What happens to all the ambivalent, contradictory or non-cathartic emotions that accumulate and reverberate inside of someone intuitive? Temporary Feelings seems to scrawl a suggestion through all of the smudged and spectral recollections of subtle interactions, played-out through multiple gazes, simultaneously harbouring and rejecting clichés like ‘love at first sight’. Desire, as it relates to the lost or the unobtainable, seems to haunt Khoza’s work but this also seems to manifest in a palpable tenderness towards the carefully-unspoken longing of strangers. The audience is intimately submersed in the narrative as another removed observer, bustling between all the isolated darlings, and this radically dizzies the possibilities for clean perspectives, throws into question all the politics of inclusion and exclusion, of looking and being looked at; can it cut like a knife… can it burn… can you recognise?

If human interactions are replete with complex tensions, so is this exhibition; the empowering affirmation of fleeting emotions pulls against the way the work permanently archives and against the skeleton that remains long after it was meant to be buried… even ‘naïve cuteness’ stares out a question of what that regard could reveal in terms of interactive power dynamics. This terrain is an honest and emotive resistance to regulative impositions and it unembarrassedly logs-in a thousand times, in order to channel multiple influences through an entirely idiosyncratic aesthetic. Even if you’ve got your brave-face on, you’ll want to develop a relationship with this work.

You can stalk Banele Khoza on Instagram, Tumblr or Facebook. Temporary Feelings runs until 4 September at the Pretoria Art Museum.

2 August 2016
Fear of The Youth Episode 3 – Vuyiswa Ntombela’s Charitable Cause

Fear of The Youth is a new web series about the interests and concerns of Johannesburg youth. The series is produced by filmmaking crew, Germ Heals. In episode 3 Germ Heals catch up with Vuyiswa Ntombela, a young person inspiring other young people and bringing about change in her community through charity work.

1 August 2016