Bubblegum Club

Tag: anthropology

  • Eh!woza – youth-driven media meets art, science and anthropology

    Eh!woza – youth-driven media meets art, science and anthropology

    The ongoing project Eh!woza sees collaboration and skill sharing between scientists, artists and learners create awareness through filmmaking. The programme has a positive effect on the learners involved in that they are able to be introduced to the world of creating documentaries, while also being given the chance to tell the stories of their communities through their own eyes. I interviewed Phd student Bianca Masuku (Molecular Mycobacteriology Research Unit, IDM, UCT) who is involved with the programme.

    Where did the idea for Eh!woza come from?

    Eh!woza was never really intended to be an ongoing project. The idea developed after a conversation at a bar between an artist and biomedical scientists. It started with the production of a short documentary after the scientists held a health workshop with learners from IkamvaYouth and the film described young people’s thoughts and attitudes towards TB, while unknowingly establishing the pilot for the project as it developed. The overall idea behind the project as it started to grow was to find creative ways for communities of scientists to use the biomedical knowledge of infectious diseases and to translate their work to communities of people radically affected by, and having relatively limited access to information about the disease. The scientists, who spend most of their time isolated in the lab, get an opportunity to understand the disease outside of their environment and TB affected communities are invited to understand the disease within the lab. And visual media and art mediate this intersection and create a platform to co-produce knowledge. An important part of this is that instead of artists and film-makers making films, the films are produced by learners themselves, meaning that learners decide on what to represent and how it is represented.

    Why do you think that a creative medium, such as filmmaking, will have a larger positive impact with regards to creating awareness and allowing people to share their stories when compared to other channels/mediums?

    The use of filmmaking creates an opportunity to translate and communicate with a broad audience of people about a very complex issue. The visual medium creates new forms of social intervention. It’s a compelling and capturing and familiar medium for larger and more diverse populations and age groups to consume, has an educative and activist power to it, and can function as a tool for awareness.

    The films produced by the learners document the historical development of social perceptions; highlight stigmatizing and prejudicial images; and make a way of influencing and engaging with public perceptions of infectious diseases. Visual media and methods such as filmmaking are platforms that make the struggles and experiences of other people knowable and visible, challenge conceptions and construct perspectives, and became points of engagement, showing the faces and sharing the stories of everyday people that exist within specific communities.

    How did the idea for a collaboration between artists, learners and scientists come about?

    The idea emerged after scientists held a health workshop and two artists produced a pilot film consisting of interviews with young people from the township of Khayelitsha. The young people spoke about how they believed in and wanted to initiate some kind of change within their communities, through the addressing the problem of TB and saying that it is a disease that is taken for granted amongst their peers and amongst adults within their communities. This inspired a collaboration, a coming-together of the tools, skills and knowledge that all members of the collaboration could bring to the table to address a problem/disease that significantly shaped their social or academic lives, through a medium that would be accessible to a very diverse population of people outside of the project.

    Please share more about IkamvaYouth and why you chose to select learners from this NGO?

    The collaboration happened very informally. One of the scientists that was working around TB knew the founder of IkamvaYouth and suggested it would be a good organisation to team up with. Ikamva is an educational NGO that operates in 14 townships in 4 provinces in the country. The NGO works with learners from disadvantaged communities and through their tutoring programme, provides the knowledge, skills, networks, and resources for learners to pursue tertiary education or seek employment and aims to “increase the collective skill level of the population, to grow the national knowledge base, and to replicate success in more communities”.

    Learners that participate in the tutoring program are selected not through academic merit, but through their motivation and determination to improve themselves and their communities through education. It is this motivation to change and improve that Eh!woza also works to develop and encourage. So the aims of Ikamva fit with ours and rather we sort of fell into it, we’ve been really happy to continue working with the organisation. IkamvaYouth therefore offers access to a broader and more diverse population of young people who already have the motivation and determination to create some kind of change in their communities through knowledge.

    https://vimeo.com/259666665

    What are you hoping will be the impact of this collaboration for the learners involved as well as for the people who come across the films?

    The learners who participate in the project always highlight how the most rewarding aspect of the project is the fact that they feel empowered by the knowledge and skills that they gain through participation. The films produced become a reflection of that; a product that shows who they are and what they can do as young people in their communities, and the realities of their social worlds.

    The audience who come across these films are given access to the realities of people most affected by the disease and an opportunity to engage with the social, historical and economic dimensions of infectious disease through these local stories and what they reveal about the disease in a local context. The films are also starting to expose contextual issues such as poverty, sexual violence, violence affecting LGTBQI+ communities.

    The programme also aims to instill a sense of agency in the learners involved. Please unpack the importance of this?

    What we hope is through participating in the project, a sense of urgency and the ability to affect change will be developed and nurtured. We hope that learners finish the project with a feeling of being able to change things in whatever way seems needed and suitable. To want to make a difference about issues that they care about in ways that they want. We hope that the learners gain technical skills and knowledge around film production as well as biomedical research, but also softer skills and self-assurance.

    Who is the intended audience for these films?

    It’s a question we often get asked to be honest I guess the answer is everyone. The films are meant to create an active awareness for the learners’ peers on the impact of TB in their communities, educate, demystify, and destigmatize the disease for adult members of the communities from the perspectives of the learners, so really the learners and their peers and adult connections. But they are also there to reflect the realities of TB and TB affected communities to the greater population locally. Eh!woza also has a fairly active social media presence which attempts to reach a wider audience in other provinces and we are in the process of developing a schools program within the Cape Town area, and expand from there.

    Please unpack the importance of interdisciplinary learning and collaboration, as evident in this work? How can this assist with awareness and understanding for issues such as HIV, TB, violence against LGBTQI+ people, sexual violence, poverty, etc?

    The different skill sets and training that the team members – art, science, anthropology – bring different perspectives to these issues. There’s often a tension in the different ways that these disciplines think and I think it’s in grappling with that tension and finding ways to bring them together, that new and different ideas come to the fore. The importance of the collaborative nature of the project also really bears fruit in providing a space for the learners involved in the project to investigate and understand, and then create awareness around these issues in ways which learners want, rather in than prescribing issues and specific tools or ways in which to investigate them. The learners have very quickly caught on to the fluidity of the project and ideas and understand that disease is a starting point from where to interrogate associated issues surround disease and have the freedom therefore to explore any associated difficulties affecting communities, and not just a primary focus on the disease itself.

    What were the responses to the films?

    The films have received extremely positive feedback from communities of learners that view each year’s outcomes at screenings that continuously inspire on-going recruitment from Ikamva. People outside of this learner population are often amazed at the level of work that the learners are able to produce, the content that they create, the inspiring stories that they share, and the artistry throughout the work. Some learners recently presented their films at a symposium at Wits and the audience was really wowed by the films and content, but also a bit stunned at the level of engagement of the films and presentations the high school learners.

    How has the programme evolved since its inception?

    It started off really small and was meant to be a once off documentary about TB. It has grown a bit into something that runs every year and throughout the year, and while still very focused on TB and health, social concerns like violence and poverty are starting to show up more in the films produced. The learners lead the project and constantly shift it in many different directions through the stories that they have revealed through participation and different aspects of their social worlds. This has inspired opportunities for further collaboration with other organizations and communities of people that were initially outside the scope of the project. One group of learners documented the struggles of ex-mine workers, while two other groups created a film that addressed the experiences and challenges of young teenage lesbians within their neighborhood, and another the realities of sexual abuse through the story of a neighbour. We also have a collaboration with MSF (Doctors Without Borders) and local musicians in Khayelitsha. This is just starting up.

    And as for me personally, I am an anthropology PhD student studying the intersection of science, art, media, and youth education within the Eh!woza project and how knowledge (about an infectious disease) is configured and produced within it. This also adds a significant social science dimension to the Eh!woza’s work and is creating academic outputs for the project. In a country where the majority of TB sufferers are black, poor, and vulnerable to ill-health and those wearing lab coats are white, well-off and healthy, a project such as Eh!woza makes it clear that illness is not merely accidental – social context, environment and circumstances shape the bodies we have; and the bodies we have shape our experiences of and in the world.

  • The White Gaze and its Presence in a “post” apartheid culture

    The White Gaze and its Presence in a “post” apartheid culture

    “I want my voice to be harsh, I don’t want it to be beautiful, I don’t want it to be pure.” – Frantz Fanon

    *  The foundation for this writing was gathered from the writings of George Yancy in his book Black Bodies, White Gazes – The continuing significance of race published in 2008

    So what am I, a white womxn, doing writing an article on the white gaze when I am not victim to being viewed by the gaze? The answer to this is because it is my attempt to emphasize the importance of this topic to not just people of colour but to white people; to all people. We need to be aware of what it means to be white, what makes a white person “whitely”. (Yancy, 2008: unknown page) and why the white gaze is still prevalent in an apparently liberated society. A person, a body’s sense of identity, imagined community and emphatic identifications is realigned by anti-black racism, according to Linda Martin Alcoff. This article then is a hope towards a more inclusive society, a more woke society even in a “post-apartheid” culture.

    In order to unpack the white gaze in a South African context I will look at the photographic work of Alice Mann, Kyle Weeks and Alexia Webster. I am by no means stating that the white gaze is something that is exclusionary to the photographer’s discussed here, they merely serve as examples to aid in a difficult conversation.

    ‘Domestic Bliss’ (2014) by Alice Mann

    Objectifying Black bodies brings to light issues of Black invisibility and hypervisibility as methods of the erasure of the integrity of Black bodies. “The black body is deemed the quintessential object of the ethnographic gaze, the ‘strange’ exotic, and fascinating object of anthropology.” With anthropology, a comradeship was formed with the photographer – anthropologist and photographer worked in unison to document the “strange exotic”.

    The apparent social and political emancipation of people of colour that came about through the end of apartheid is bursting at the seams with the narratives of people of colour still frequently lensed by whites that perform their whiteliness through acting out the white gaze.

    Employing moral distancing, many white people attain moral superiority over “white racists”. They obscure their own racism by refuting only a specific form of racism thereby creating cavernous self-deception. Hereby is meant that many white people are not self-reflexive enough and only see extremist white supremacy as racist acts while racism gapes far wider than this selected group.

    “The white gaze, given the power of the ocular metaphor in Western culture, is an important site of power and control, a site that is structured by white epistemic orders and that perpetuates such orders in turn.” (Yancy, 2008: unknown page) Here is where my argument lies, not in the ocular as a metaphor, but as a definitive object that objectifies in the hands and with the eyes of many a white photographer – something that has been happening since the invention of the camera and still endures.

    ‘Domestic Bliss’ (2014) by Alice Mann

    White people inherited the privilege of being “lookers”, gazers and the power that comes with this state of being. White people assumed the right to appoint Black bodies as they pleased. White hubris then arrogantly takes it upon itself to define the “reality” of people of colour in categorical terms, conditions, stipulations and appellations that are based on white privilege and power.

    Veiling their own whiteness, hiding behind their cameras, commodifying from one-dimensional views of Blackness, many white photographers have assisted in creating and maintaining distorted conceptions of Blackness.

    This can be seen in series’ such as Alice Mann’s Domestic Bliss (2014) which was met with public onslaught. The series depicted domestic workers dressed in uniform in the wealthy homes of their employers, not performing their daily tasks working for those homes, but instead in reclining poses on sofas and neatly made beds. They look uncomfortable, most of the time, sometimes even confrontational in their gaze. By creating a juxtaposed scene, that of the helpers in their uniforms on the one hand, and the luxury that surrounds them in their working situations on the other, the idea of an apparent “post” apartheid society is easily questionable. Against abundance and wealth, these women stand out as “other”.

    The white gaze continues into her photo essay Drum majorettes of Cape Town that focused on young primary school girls. They are seemingly unaware of how she is firstly, invasive, turning her lens on their family homes, their intimate spaces and changing their lives into a curiosity cabinet, a spectacle for people from all over the world to visually explore. And by extension, she makes their real-life experiences a commodity.

    ‘Drum majorettes of Cape Town’ by Alice Mann

    It might not be as visible in the Drum majorettes photo essay, but in Domestic Bliss it is almost all that stands out. The reason why I say this is because there cannot be anything more problematic than a white employer photographing her and her friends’ domestic workers to start off with. What’s more is that even though the helpers have consented to have these portraits taken of them, one can question how much choice they really had to reject this request.

    These bodies of work speak of her subjectivity that she attempts to paint as ambiguity more than anything else. The mystery in Mann’s work lies in what they are suggesting about how her consensual models felt after she had photographed them (Sontag 1977: pg. 28). How did the woman and girls feel after they saw the portrayal of themselves in Mann’s eyes? Did they see themselves that way?

    The white gaze is not something that can be spoken about impartially if only one white person’s work is being taken into account for such a discourse. Therefore, I next look at the work of Kyle Weeks. Weeks, born in Namibia, is known for his work that strikes the balance between portraiture and documentary depictions.

    The problematic nature of his work lies in the “Asymmetrical power relations between whites and Blacks and the historical expansionist tendencies on the part of whites, and how they make themselves at home even when uninvited.” (Yancy, 2008: unknown page) This is again something that can be drawn to all three of the white photographers discussed in this piece. I am by no means stating that the white gaze is something that is exclusionary to the photographer’s discussed here, they merely serve as examples to aid in a difficult conversation.

    ‘Palm Wine Collectors’ by Kyle Weeks

    Weeks’ series, Palm Wine Collectors, visually explores the working lives and dynamics of the Makalani palm harvesters of northern Namibia in the Kunene Region. According to Week’s biography, this series offers, “a subversive alternative to voyeuristic documentary stylings.” Another body of work that can be put in the same category as the first is his portrait series, Ovahimba Youth Self-Portraits – a body of work that acts as a visual commentary on the longstanding colonial photographic methods used to depict Africans.”

    My critique is the gaze of course but more than this the way in which these series’ are described by the visual auteur, and as Yancy states, the non-existent invitation that white people give themselves to lens the narratives of people of colour. To infiltrate their spaces without hesitation and to write narratives for people of colour however they deem fit.

    Firstly, Weeks presents his Palm Wine Collectors series as a body of work that is progressive, as an alternative to voyeuristic documentary depictions. In my opinion, this body of work does not reflect objectivities and instead tells us more about Weeks as was the case with Mann. Both of Weeks’ bodies of work discussed here speak of subjectivities.

    Ovahimba Youth Self-Portraits is aimed at subverting colonial photographic methods used to depict African people, and again by definition fails in this attempt and always will when lensed by a white individual who cannot acknowledge the effect of their whiteness. Weeks’ whiteness goes unnamed in his work.

    ‘Ovahimba Youth Self-Portraits’ by Kyle Weeks

    The voices of racists declare themselves to be raceless; hidden behind the veneer of white “progressive liberalism”. By many white people, racism is understood in terms of white supremacy and white extremism and they fail to see their own acts of micro racism as they believe that their liberalism lends them as raceless and blameless. The privileged status of normative “absence” is given to the white body.

    Alexia Webster’s work cannot be seen apart from the scope of the performers of the white gaze. It can be seen in bodies of work such as The Spread of the South African Supermarket – Portraits of Zambian Shoppers. The photo essay tells the story of the rise of the South African supermarkets in Zambia by photographing shoppers of colour in the act of shopping in a Shoprite chain store. Given, this was an assignment by the Financial Times Weekend magazine I still believe that objectivity is not prevalent and that this is a subjective body of work.

    As with Mann’s photographic work, this body of work feels extremely invasive. Webster photographs people in the relatively private act of shopping; shopping is private for me at least and I would not enjoy being lensed while buying my supply of fresh food and other necessities. It is the white person’s assumed right to insert themselves into narratives they don’t understand and then even more than that; to convey the narrative, however, they see fit.

    “The production of the Black body is an effect of the discursive and epistemic structuring of white gazing and other white modes of anti-Black performance. And while these performances are not always enacted consciously but the result of years of white racism calcified and habituated within the bodily repertoire of whites, whites are not exempt from taking responsibility for the historical continuation of white racism.” (Yancy, 2008: unknown page)

    The Spread of the South African Supermarket – Portraits of Zambian Shoppers by Alexia Webster

    White solipsism arranges the world as a white space where “whiteness” is seen as a normal and universal condition. All three of the photographers discussed above fail to employ self-reflexivity with regard to how they positioned themselves as white photographers or how the ideology of whiteness positions them as “race-free”. Their apparent documentary work is simply an act of performing whiteness. What reinforces the status of whiteness is to allow it the power to go unnamed and to accept its status as a natural site of the human condition, thereby stripping people of colour of their humanity. Racialized meaning is re-established through silence.

    “Becoming white” is different from being “phenotypically white” (Yancy, 2008: unknown page. Becoming white” then, is an additional layer or classification and refers to more than phenotypic markers. As Marilyn Frye states, being “whitely” is a deeply embedded way of being in the world (Frye, as sited in Yancy, 2008). Whiteness is performing both the phenotypic as well as a subjectivity that is structured by particular white epistemic orientations. Whiteness relates to one’s position in a white racist social structure that grants privilege.

    In no way do the above statements negate that white people have different investments in whiteness, nor that there are white people who participate in antiracist forms of praxis. Despite this, however, white people continue to benefit from being phenotypically white irrespective of good intentions. White South Africans reap benefits from a previous hegemonic structure of hate built on white supremacy. I do not deny that white people have privilege by racism while are targets of classism, sexism, homophobia or ageism. I also do not deny that white people are beneficiaries of whiteness in different ways.

    “In the process of naming their whiteness, whites must understand their role in a normalizing whiteness and also understand how whiteness is a site that is dutifully maintained.” (Yancy, 2008: unknown page) In the examples of the photographers mentioned leaving their whiteness unnamed and unidentified, has the effect of interposing Blackness as marked and the “real” object of their gaze. Whiteness, however, maintained its unmarked status and provided them with the latitude to create distance between themselves and white racists.

    It is important for all people to understand the white gaze. To identify it, to confront it. White people need to be more self-reflexive of the way they are in the world and realize that racism isn’t something that is singular to white extremists but that small acts can as easily be a performance of the white gaze. White people need to stop inserting themselves into narratives that they do not belong in and make way for people of colour to tell their own stories. True objectivity is unattainable, especially with a camera.

    “Critical reflections on whiteness should not begin and end with critical reflections on white supremacy. What is important is that the critical project of making seen the unseen of white privilege in mundane contexts is a significant endeavour that transcends unambiguous cases of white supremacy.” (Yancy, 2008: unknown page)