Bubblegum Club

Tag: live art

  • Infinity Studio at Kampnagel – reflections on privatization, militarization & escapism

    Infinity Studio at Kampnagel – reflections on privatization, militarization & escapism

    Following on from the 5 day residency in Johannesburg at the end of April, Bubblegum Club along with the artists selected to be part of the Infinity Studio programme are in Hamburg for the final stage, their participation in the Live Art Festival #8: SUPERSPACES. Within this frame the work produced will see an expansion on their exploration of privatization, militarism and escapism in Johannesburg – the foundational concepts for the programme.

    Creative Director of Bubblegum Club, Jamal Nxedlana had an interview with Caroline Spellenberg from Kampnagel to chat about our platform, CUSS and the Infinity Studio programme taking place in the space.

    On your website you describe yourself as a “cultural intelligence agency” – what do you mean by that?

    It means that research is at the heart of our practice. Cultural insight or intelligence informs everything we do, from the type of content we publish to our curatorial projects and the visuals we produce.

    Bubblegum Club is commercial image campaigns & promotion, publishing & journalistic writing, artistic and curatorial work. What is the core interest connecting all these practices?

    Although we do connect these practices it was never our main intention. It was more about  creating a space, building a network and developing an operating model for ourselves and other cultural practitioners. And in order to do so we felt that centering our practice around digital publishing made the most sense, especially in Johannesburg where there aren’t many opportunities, particularly for explorative practices.

    You are also almost the same group of people who works under the name CUSS as a curators collective. I saw a programme you did at the KW in Berlin in the frame of the 9th Berlin Biennial. After this we started to talk and we invited you to curate a programme at Kampnagel for the Live Art Festival #8. How did you develop the concept for “Infinity Studio”?

    The idea has developed quite a lot from when we first started speaking. Initially we were interested in creating a space or studio for independent cultural producers. We imagined the space as a time capsule, organised and conceived in a way that would recreate the creative energy or mood that we felt and that was so stimulating for our practice between 2010 & 2012. In that moment we felt a sense of infinite possibilities, and that where the name Infinity Studio comes from.

    Over time we identified a focus for the studio, which was to look at privatisation, militarisation and escapism in Johannesburg’s urban landscape. We organised a residency comprised of a 5 day immersive cultural tour. This allowed us to expose and immerse the invited artists to the spaces that we were looking at as the curatorial team. The programme we will present at Kampnagel in June will be based on the experiences from this residency.

    Coming from the curatorial perspective of a theatre some things strike me about the way you work: For one, you invite a lot of quite different artists to participate with individual contributions, maybe extending the idea of a “group exhibition” into live art? How did you choose the line-up of 13 artists for the “Infinity Studio”?

    Yes, but from group exhibition to group work to live art. We looked for people with particular skill sets. For example, writers, vocalists, music producers, digital artists and fashion designers. People with skills that could be combined to produce components for a one group work. The other thing that was very important to us was the way people practice, for example, are they able to work in a group and practice across their area of interest or discipline?

    Also, what strikes me is that you think a lot about the space, the framing and communication around the project. The ways of presenting the artists – which is part of the work as curators – becomes artistically itself. Can you describe your working methods for this?

    Curation has always been an artistic practice for us and it’s no different with this project. Our role has been to create the platform and quite literally the stage on which the work is set and will play out.

    The title of the Live Art Festival this year is SUPERSPACES and is presenting artistic and curatorial ways of creating specific set ups of space, art experiences and ‘users’. Can you connect the “Infinity Studio” to this?

    I think it connects to this in the way we are approaching the relationship between the audience and the performers, as well as the relationship between the audiences space and the performers space (the stage). We will use curation to reorientate these relationships.

    As content you choose to present insights into the urban cosmos of Johannesburg: your key words for this are “privatization, militarization & escapism”. Can you give us a little background on this?

    It was really when we started thinking about the residency and what our plans were for it. We were thinking about the artists and the aspects of their work that we were interested in and how we could use the residency to focus in on those specific areas of their practices. As we identified spaces and mapped out activities for the residency or cultural tour, we started noticing themes and tropes which we distilled to “privatization, militarization & escapism”.

    Your background is in visual arts and, I think, this is the first time you work in the context of a theatre institution, right? What differences between the two systems do you notice?

    Yes it is. I haven’t noticed too much difference, especially because we are approaching this as we normally would. The only difference is the framework within which we had to work, that being the theater and the theater production. We had to slightly alter our thinking when it came to how we think about audience and how we programme the shows.

    The Infinity Studio performances will be taking place from the 7th – 9th June. Check out the Facebook event for more details.

    INFINITY STUDIO is produced by Kampnagel and Bubblegum Club, with the support of TURN – Fund of the Federal Cultural Foundation of Germany as well as the Goethe Institute.

  • Ilze Wolff on a transdisciplinary architectural practice

    Ilze Wolff on a transdisciplinary architectural practice

    Ilze Wolff is the co-founder of Wolff Architects, a practice she started with her partner Heinrich Wolff. They have a space in the Bo-Kaap where they produce designs for buildings and public spaces. Their space has a gallery that looks on to the street, which they use for hosting programs, discussions and exhibitions related to architecture, space and the city. Over the years their practice has placed increasing emphasis on ways to get the broader public to engage more directly with urgent questions relating to architecture.

    “Architecture is about the embodied experience of situations and of space linked to an imagination.” This statement is from an interview Ilze did with Design Indaba for an article mentioning her nomination for the Moira Gemmill Prize for Emerging Architecture. When I asked Ilze to unpack this statement, she humourously pointed out that it was one of the many things she says that she does not always have a clear answer for. However, her explanation reveals her dedication to a nuanced understanding of the interaction between people and space, and the role of architecture in paying homage to this interaction. “I think that I was trying to say is that we all experience space in particular ways and the production of architecture is linked to your experience of a space and the articulation of crafting a new space from your own imagination. It is about the interplay between subjectivity and imagination. Architecture is thus one of those sublime contradictions in that, yes, we design for a public collective experience, yet all our speculations and experiments are seated in a very individualistic and intimate space: the imagination.”

    The intersection between architecture, art and public culture is where Wolff Architects finds the most joy, as well as intellectual and creative stimulation. Taking on the point of view that the boundaries between these three disciplines are “inherently artificial”, Ilze expressed that imagining their work and creative production as transcending these borders has been productive. “Our training as architects brings specific readings and sensibilities to a project, which we cannot take for granted but research and engagement into art practices, socio-cultural debates and popular culture layers our approach beyond the technocratic responses that is the norm in our industry.”

    Documentation and advocacy also plays an important part in how Wolff Architects injects new life and critical questions into the field of architecture. Conscious of the way space, architecture, infrastructure and landscape has been used for separation in South Africa, “We feel it is our obligation to use our discipline (architecture) against itself and produce work that advocates for social cohesion,” Ilze explains, “We document our situation and built environment in order to develop wisdoms on how to intervene sensitively and with new readings. Research and asking difficult and critical questions is important for us to establish a project’s ethical framework. Ethics also in terms of aesthetics and imagination.”

    Ilze is also the co-founder of Open House Architecture, a research platform that embraces transdisciplinary knowledge production. Started in 2006, it began as a way to have thorough overviews of local architects’ portfolios through architectural tours, documentaries and monographs, some of which presented to the public for the first time. After a number of successful events, they realized that their audience was almost exclusively architects and other built environment professionals. With a desire to attract people outside of these spaces, Open House Architecture ventured into live art and public interventions, and in 2016 started a publication and interventionist platform called ‘pumflet: architecture and stuff‘, with artist Kemang Wa Lehulere. “With Wa Lehulere, we have co-produced two editions: Alabama and Gladiolus, both of which attempts to reinsert the destruction of Cape Town’s cinemas and black neighbourhoods, and their contemporary meanings back into the public imagination. We feel that it is important to research marginal architectural histories but it is even more important to cultivate a diverse audience and public culture around lost spaces, art and modern architecture.”

    Wolff Architects’ most recent poroject, under the direction of Ilze, was working in the design for the African Mobilities exhibition titled ‘This is Not a Refugee Camp Exhibition’ taking place at Architekturmuseum TU Munchen in Munich until 18 August. The exhibition engages with migration, mobility and space in Africa. Reflecting on the design process for the show, Ilze expresses that, “We allowed ourselves to engage with serious play where we purposefully tried to distort the very rational German gallery by introducing slight distortions on familiar pure geometries. We included a range of environments for speculation and engagement: in the first room we echoed the artist’s in that room’s notion of mixing up digital futures/histories by including a VR room that is both futuristic and nostalgic in its design; in the second room the library offers a public space for viewers to relax and look out onto a garden and in the last room we created a sound carriage where you could experience the sonic landscape of rail travel offered by the artists on display.”

    Another exciting addition to the notches in Ilze’s belt is the publishing of her book ‘Unstitching Rex Trueform: the story of an African factory‘. The book is about a factory that has haunted Ilze ever since she became aware of the connection between architecture and the politics of space. “I write about the way modern architecture in Cape Town is representative of the ways in which labour, capital and the city worked together to construct race, genders and identities in the mid 1930s and 40s.” Ilze mentioned that at she is currently working on an experimental theatre piece based on the research for the book, which will be presented at The Centre for the Less Good Idea later this year.