Tag: histories

  • KutalaChopeto // Home is not a place anymore – reimagining histories of belonging

    KutalaChopeto // Home is not a place anymore – reimagining histories of belonging

    KutalaChopeto‘s exhibition opened at The Point of Order on World Refugee Day. Teresa Firmino and Esenje Helena Uambembe are an art duo who work collaboratively under the name KutalaChopeto. Their collective practice began in 2016. For this latest project, they focused their research on different communities based predominantly in the North West and Gauteng province – reconsidering stories of seemingly forgotten and disenfranchised communities. KutalaChopto collaborated with curator Maren Mia du Plessis, visual artists Loyiso Mzamane and Setumo-Thebe Mohlomi and Christiano Selmo Uambembe.

    Born from the rupture of the Angolan Civil War and the perceived ‘threat’ of communism, the South African Apartheid government sought to recruit and re-train a select group of FNLA (National Liberation Front of Angola) troops. The secret division were known as the 32 battalion or “the terrible ones”- most South Africans were unaware of its existence until it was disbanded in 1993. Many of these men were already married or from refugee camps. Those who were unmarried were encouraged to wed Angolan womxn in order to produce more soldiers. Teresa described how, “the system itself was violent, so it continued to produce violent bodies.”

    The soldiers were promised land in exchange for fighting alongside the South African government and therefore were relocated between 1988-91 to Pomfret in the North West. The desert town has become increasingly abandoned – utilities have been systematically shut down by the government as a means to vacate the town under the guise of a safety breach from asbestos poisoning.

    KutalaChopeto’s project is centred around the community itself, specifically the womxn whose voices have been historically silenced. The collective was interested in how they ended up in the camp as well as their experiences with living with men who have undergone war and tragedy. The legacy of that trauma appeared to manifest through the normalisation of violence within the larger community. The duo sought to collect histories and translate them visually. Their chosen mode of rewriting or reconstructing history extends beyond documenting the past and interrogates historically held narratives – through a deconstruction and reengagement of fragmented stories previously neglected. KutalaChopeto locate this narrative within an intra-continental perspective between Namibia, Angola and the Border Wars during the height of Apartheid and also examine what remains. “Home is not a place anymore. It becomes the people you are with.”

  • CANINE WISDOM FOR THE BARKING DOG – THE DOG DONE GONE DEAF // Exploring the Sonic Cosmologies of Halim El-Dabh with Artistic Intervention at the Dakar Biennial

    CANINE WISDOM FOR THE BARKING DOG – THE DOG DONE GONE DEAF // Exploring the Sonic Cosmologies of Halim El-Dabh with Artistic Intervention at the Dakar Biennial

    Sonically transformed. Haunting vibrations converging in crescendo. Signifying colourways correlating corresponding frequencies as musical notation. Perforating paper-thin eardrums. Beating through a spectrum of sounds. Tones sculpted, mixed and mastered. The music of modernity finds its tonal traces in histories of the past.

    The recently deceased Halim El-Dabh, was an Egyptian American composer. His six-decade experimental music career positioned him as a pioneer of electronic music. In 2007 he performed his album The Dog Done Gone Deaf  for the Suoni Per Il Popolo Festival in Montreal, Quebec. The musical piece is a fable of the Navajo indigenous American people – the relationship between man and hound. The narrative explores how the dog saves the man’s life, only to be treated with brutality. In response to the violence, the dog covers its ears and goes deaf. However, it eventually forgives the man, in realising that they are both creatures of the earth.

    It was in the middle of the session of The Dog Done Gone Deaf, that El-Dabh invited the audience to close their eyes and breathe together – creating a collective participatory performative moment, one that he hoped would elicit an experience of colour frequencies. A notion that was central to the process and notion of his work.

    CANINE WISDOM FOR THE BARKING DOG/THE DOG DONE GONE DEAF is described as a “spin-off” by the projects curator, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. He goes on to say that it, “seems an appropriate entry point into a venture of reflecting on and paying tribute to one of the greatest composers from the African continent and worldwide, Halim El-Dabh, in the framework of Africa’s most important and most consistent art manifestation, the Dakar biennial.”

    El-Dabh appropriates and invents mythologies in his compositions while disseminating sonic and aural epistemologies. “The exhibition project will also serve as a platform for deliberations on, and experimentations as to what is and where is sound art in contemporary African art, putting a spotlight on transdisciplinary artistic practices between the visual, performative, installative and sonic mediums.”

    Bonaventure highlights the importance of narrating and actively claiming one’s own histories within a framework of Pan-Africanist ideology. “Our intention is also to re-establish a genealogy of modern arts and sound arts in Africa and beyond, and contemporary sound artists, painters, video and installation artists are hereby invited to relate, extrapolate from, get inspired by El-Dabh’s practice – his compositions, installations, theories and research.”

    Younes Baba Ali, Leo Asemota, Satch Hoyt, Tegene Kunbi, Memory Biwa and Robert Machiri, Ibrahim Mahama, Nyakallo Maleke, Elsa M’bala, Yara Mekawei, Emeka Ogboh, Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom & Ima-Abasi Okon, Lorenzo Sandoval and Sunette Viljoen are artists who span the continent. CANINE WISDOM FOR THE BARKING DOG/THE DOG DONE GONE DEAF invited them to engage with El-Dabh’s seminal text, using it as a point of departure to explore sonic modalities and create an artistic response of their own.

    “For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.”

    • Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, 1977.
  • ‘Embroidery For A Long Song’ // merging the traditional and the modern in a neon-inspired meditation on female energy

    ‘Embroidery For A Long Song’ // merging the traditional and the modern in a neon-inspired meditation on female energy

    ‘I rise, I run. I even try dancing’ – these are the first words one hears after being greeted by the music from ‘Khaleeji’ (the ten piece band of folk singers) in the opening scene of ‘Embroidery For A Long Song‘. This short film is a neon-inspired meditation on female energy, and it creates a bridge between the modern and traditional by examining the histories of the Gulf region through music, fashion and poetry.

    Filmmaker Amirah Tajdin  has always been fascinated by the connection between fashion and film. With designer Faissal El-Malak‘s concept for ‘Embroidery For A Long Song’ she was finally able to explore this. A few months before Faissal asked Amirah to get on board with the film, she had created a fashion film for his Spring/Summer 18 collection. They had been friends for a while, but while working on the fashion film they discovered a new kind of creative synergy. When Faissal was approached by the W Hotels and Mixcloud team a few months later to curate the Dubai edition of their Future Rising event he automatically thought of making a second film with Amirah.

    Faissal was given the broad brief to combine music with ideas about the future and a wonderland. These elements came together in his mind through nostalgic memories of the traditional music shows and concerts he used to watch on tv while growing up in the Gulf. “The sets of these shows were oddly futuristic; they created something very interesting visually where the tradition was respected and preserved within an ultra-modern context. It was sort of a wonderland where technology and an abundance of LED lights created a space to express one’s self fully. This was not a foreign concept to the way we live our daily life in a region that has seen exponential growth and has embraced very quickly modern and futuristic architecture as a norm, but that still hangs on very strongly to tradition, most notably in the way most people still wear traditional garments on a daily basis.”

    With these memories and his desire to further his knowledge about women who play traditional music, Faissal began to ask around about this practice. He was also influenced by the words and pseudonyms used by millennials who revived the tradition of spoken word poetry through platforms such as Flickr and MySpace. These pseudonyms – ‘Eye of the Gazelle’, ‘Daughter of the falcon’ and ‘The one with the khol lined eyes’ – are interpreted visually through the animated illustrations that appear at particular moments in the film. “The expression of traditional music is in itself a collaboration between sung poems, the traditional garments, beats and dances coming together to create a feast for the senses,” Faissal explained. The connection between poetry, fashion and music is intimately displayed in how the film unfolds.

    At the core of Faissal’s approach to fashion is his appreciation and celebration of Middle Eastern textiles and motifs, designing women’s ready-to-wear garments that offer combine the traditional and the modern. There is a parallel display of this in the film. A string of symbolic gestures echo this, such as the ironing and incensing of the main character’s hair and her dancing in the hall on her own. These traditional references are juxtaposed against the futuristic elements of the W Hotel hallways and neon lights. Trippy, distorted sonic encounters are merged with the instruments and chanting by Khaleeji. A poem is used as a device to narrate the film, inviting viewers into the mind of the main character.

    This film is a loud celebration and a quiet reflection all at once. It offers itself as a compilation of memories presented in a way that excites sight and sound.

    View the full film below.