Tag: knowledge production

  • Thulile Gamedze // a transdisciplinary approach to disrupting the coloniality within educational institutions

    Thulile Gamedze // a transdisciplinary approach to disrupting the coloniality within educational institutions

    Thulile Gamedze is an artist and writer based in Cape Town, working towards a Masters in Philosophy. Her research and creative endeavors look at ways to unpack and disrupt the coloniality embedded within institutionalized pedagogical practices, and develop relevant, experimental and Africa-centred teaching methodologies and content. Hers is a personal, artistic and textual intervention, and a research-based undertaking.

    As part of the all-womxn collective iQhiya, Gamedze’s practice draws on her own investigations and that of her collective. Her work offers strategies of intervention, departure points and moments of reflection entangled with contemplations on South Africa’s tensions and history. As someone who took art as a subject at school, and as a past Fine Arts student, Thulile has recognised gaps in the curricula, and actively attempts to add in and connect dots for a fuller picture of South African art history, and its relationship to other aspects of society.

    Installation view at AVA Gallery Cape Town, 2016

    Thulile is continuously active in animating and stimulating spaces that exist outside of traditional art spaces. Her participation in the two week online residency, Floating Reverie in 2017 is evidence of this. Taking on the visual and discursive markers present in online teaching videos, Thulile asked participants to unpack ideas related to transdisciplinary learning, knowledge production and the dissemination of such knowledge.

    Thulile is interested in the “radical potential of education as a central project of liberation, with her practice borrowing from strategies of collaboration in popular pedagogy, and subaltern African histories.” In this sense, she thinks about decolonisation as an art practice.

    Thulile’s online residency with Floating Reverie, titled WOW_3000ZF
  • Patti Anahory // cross-disciplinary contemplations about urban imaginaries

    Born on a ship on the way to São Tomé and Príncipe, Patti Anahory lived there for 7 years before being raised in Cabo Verde. She ventured off to the US to do her undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture. Throughout her studies Anahory maintained a desire to locate her work and sites of inquiry in and about Africa. This was initially a challenge as her formal architecture education offered little flexibility with regards to the content that could be explored as a student. At the end of her undergraduate education at the Boston Architecture College she won a travelling scholarship that allowed her to spend a month in South Africa. She later went to Princeton University to complete her graduate studies and Anahory began to direct her academic pursuits towards the continent. Her thesis project focused on Dakar, Senegal.

    This required Anahory to present loaded justifications to demonstrate why African cities should be viewed as legitimate sites for research within architectural academic programs. Her persistence continued to motivate her until she was awarded the prestigious Rotch Traveling Scholarship in 2000 through a two-stage architecture design competition. From this she was able to visit cities in East and West Africa. This was a significant moment for her, as she was still on the search for thematics that were able to unpack social, cultural and geo-political understandings of African cities. It also presented her with the opportunity to affirm that African cities are legitimate sites of inquiry. Anahory explains the significance of this by stating that around 2000 there were only a few architects engaging with African cities from this vantage point, or at least few getting recognized for doing so. “So you start to see your work as a political act because it was so out of the mainstream ways of looking into architecture, and modes of knowledge production about architecture,” she explains.

    Reflecting on the attitudes of the scholarship committee for the competition Anahory shares that, “they just could not understand the production of space and architectural critical thinking as a contemporary issue in Africa.” Her choice to explore East and West African countries allowed for a moment of rupture from her formal architectural education which did not place any emphasis on the contemporary conditions of the African city. After over a year of travelling she had to return to New York and worked as a freelance architect. A few years later her home country called her back.

    She was offered the opportunity to help setup a multidisciplinary research centre at Cabo Verde’s first public university. This presented an exciting challenge to setup an agenda for the relevant issues relating to the Cabo Verde built environment. This was a joint effort with her colleague Andreia Moassab at the centre with whom she shared similar interests in postcolonial studies, decolonising knowledge within the field of architecture as well as an exploration of how to think about development strategies and appropriate paradigms.

    While serving as director at the research centre, Anahory co-founded an art collective called XU:Collective with Andreia, who was  research coordinator, and Salif Diallo Silva, who was responsible for the research group on design and territory. “We decided we want to create a parallel practice that would allow us more freedom and a different language from scientific research and academic institutionalized setting, to speak about things such as environmental and social justice. Things we were addressing at the university but in a different way. In many ways the university and the collective informed each other,” she explains. An artistic language also allowed a different way to engage with society and to reach a larger public.

    When responding to my question about her views on architecture, urban planning and development on the continent, she expressed that rethinking new paradigms on all levels is important. This also involves how we can contribute more to cities and more sustainable development. “We also need to think and speculate about what future we want, and what kind of theoretical basis we want to produce. There are those of us carefully thinking about what kind of practice we want. Architecture is not only about producing buildings and objects, but also about critically thinking about our contemporary moment,” she explains.

    Due to this Anahory, like many others, has to take on multiple roles to tackle the double burden of contributing to an intellectual discourse while presenting a shift in what is seen as knowledge and how it is produced. “You have to be acting in so many realms in order to feel like you are making a change or contributing towards something,” she expresses.

    Working on curating her independent practice, Anahory continues to invest in urban activism and advocacy.  “I can only try to contribute to a more just city. And our cities and our models for development are very much imported from outside an in a neoliberal logic.” This is done through projects with young urban activists, specifically in neighbourhoods that have been neglected in terms of physical and social infrastructure.

    Considering that African Mobilities is a platform that offers multiple avenues for contemplating city-ness and all its associates (identity, culture, physical and social infrastructure, etc.), the inclusion of Anahory in the Praia Exchange made sense considering her experience in having to justify the exploration of contemporary Africa outside of the framework set out by western epistemological agendas.

    From the get go the participants bonded over questioning the terminology of “Lusophone” Africa, (as with “Francophone” and “Anglophone”) and the imaginaries they invoke. Anahory, speaking from an island perspective, and highlighting the ambiguous relationship Cabo Verde has with the rest of the continent, was able to present how our collective imaginaries from these labels craft our identities and place us closer or further apart. Drawing on the parallels between Luanda and Praia, cross-disciplinary investigations and conversations opened up new questions and debates.

    Anahory will be coming to South Africa again this year as a visiting research fellow at University of Johannesburg. Perhaps the Praia Exchange has offered a point of departure for the time she will spend here.

  • Unpacking knowledge production and highlighting alternate worlds

    Jackie Karuti, known for her experimental and conceptual work, uses new media to explore themes related to knowledge, death, sexuality and migration. Her mediums include drawings, installations, video and performance pieces.

    Her drawings are reminiscent of whimsical storybook illustrations, with the backgrounds of her images having an eerie openness, evoking a similar feeling to a nightmare where you find yourself in a strange, yet familiar setting. The ghosts of Yves Tanguy and Joan Miró’s work appear, however Karuti’s work is a portal to a different dimension.

    Karuti also has a fascination with books – the knowledge they contain and their presence as physical objects. She makes her own books, which fold out with intimate content resembling a young girl’s diary entries. Her interest in books comes from her constantly trying to breakdown and reconstruct what is defined as knowledge, and who has access to this knowledge. This unpacking of the value of books and the act of knowledge production presents the possibility for unlearning and reconfiguring. With this foundation, Karuti has put together her own curriculum. “Self-education encourages independent thought and learning as well as critical thinking skills. It eventually becomes a lifelong pursuit of constructive and stimulating thought processes,” Karuti explains in an article for Art Africa. Self-education from Karuti’s point of view offers a pathway to discover alternate universes and to construct one’s future.

    Somewhere Beautiful, 2017

    This fixation with books and their purpose has resulted in a number of projects, including her series of zines titled ‘Exit’. These zines exhibit larger conversations around migration and queerness through the artist’s sketches and scattered, unfiltered thoughts. An earlier work titled ‘Where Books Go To Die’ treats these physical objects and living organisms. A simulated library with a librarian who demands silence, was exhibited as the graveyard for books. Another installation addressed a follow on question; if libraries are where books go to die, where can they be found alive? A table of books fanned so that the pages tremble, flutter and make a noise are the way in which Karuti presents books being alive. The turning of pages brings books to life.

    Karuti’s exhibition ‘There Are Worlds Out There They Never Told You About’ was held at the Goethe Institut in Nairobi. Through the use of various media, she interrogated the current conversations and violent reactions to migration around the world. Included in this is negotiations related to establishing a sense of belonging which is evident in Brexit and the African Union’s consideration of a universal visa for Africa. The exhibition brought together a variety of media to address migration and alternate worlds. These alternate worlds often make reference to the ocean. The potency of this reference comes to light when thinking about how black people were taken across the ocean in slaves ships, and were thrown or jumped overboard, and  how the ocean is a carrier of migrants. In defining alternate Karuti expressed that, “Alternatives mean you can choose different options regarding life, death and general existence. I’m most keen on the possibility of alternate worlds, which defy normalcy, dogma and conventional living.”

    The Violent Suppression of Otherness, 2016. Concertina fold book and book casing
    The Violent Suppression of Otherness, 2016. Concertina fold book and book casing
    The Violent Suppression of Otherness, 2016. Concertina fold book and book casing
  • WOW_3000ZF: taking non-institutionalized transdisciplinary learning seriously

    As part of her two week residency with Floating Reverie, artist and writer Thulile Gamedze put together an interactive online “course” to think through South African education and art history. We had a conversation about why she considers herself an “education nerd” and the aims she had for the course.

    Reflecting on her undergraduate years at Michaelis School of Fine Art, Thulile expresses her gratitude at being able to study Fine Art as well as the guidance it offered in being able to read visuals. However, she also reflected on the discomfort she felt within the education space, particularly after she graduated and became part of the Rhodes Must Fall movement. With her interest in writing coinciding with her being part of student activism, Thulile was able to pin point the root of this discomfort within university spaces. She also realized that this can be translated to the art world as “all these institutions operate with similar power dynamics”. Mimicking the course codes used at UCT, the course WOW_3000ZF aims to think about the fact that many parts of our society that were once very political have now become de-politicized and commercialized.

    Thulile has a desire to invest in ways to produce knowledge that fall outside of traditional learning spaces, and the potential that these non-institutionalized spaces have for being able to learn about the real world. The second day of her course ties in with this desire, as she introduces followers to the definition of transdisciplinary learning. This was important for her to include because it articulates the way she enjoys learning and she feels that “when [learn about how] all these things overlap that is when we really understand the world that were are living in.”. Removing the idea that we should live and learn in silos is married with how she plays with internet education aesthetics. In the videos she has uploaded Thulile uses a computer voice to deliver the information she wishes to share and questions she asks. This fits in with her exploring different ways of producing knowledge, as well as plays with relationships of authority regarding who communicates information and the channels used for this communication.

    WOW_3000ZF also taps into the history of art centres that Black people setup during Apartheid. Remembering how she was taught about the evolution and destruction of these spaces, Thulile focuses on their radical nature and how they were used to disseminate information hidden from the public, while situating them within the broader context of South Africa’s history. “These spaces were so central and so active,” Thulile explained, “We have come to a space now where we are kind of realizing that there are a lot of things that haven’t changed but we don’t have these super politically charged art education centres anymore. And there is this missing part of art. It feels like institutionalized fine art [has] the dominant art voice.”. By bringing in curriculum content in this way, Thulile is able to point out the ways that we are not using art.

    This content is presented in humorous and nonsensical ways. At the same time every piece of information or artwork uploaded can be viewed as an intervention in the way it has been presented and the way she teases out the information she shares. “Sometimes I try and give information, like the day when I attached the interview with Wally Serote to talk about the Apartheid government  murdering Thami Mnyele and the Medu Ensemble vs [the day when I shared] a GIF with First Thursdays which is an oversimplification of what has happened. But it is a personal itch that I have and I feel that it is just as relevant to weaving together a history as is historical events or facts about things that happened. I am trying to challenge the way we can tell stories and allowing all of those ways to be valid at the same time.”.

    The course will end with a fun exam that Thulile has planned. To check out the course and more of Thulile’s work visit her website.