Bubblegum Club

Tag: queer bodies

  • Lelo What’s Good blends ballroom and gqom

    Lelo What’s Good blends ballroom and gqom

    Lelo What’s Good is a Johannesburg-based multidisciplinary creative that got into DJing unexpectedly. He met FAKA‘s Desire Marea while living in Durban. Upon returning to Johannesburg to study, he got to know Fela Gucci who invited him to play at Cunty Power.

    “I decided to come through and play. That’s when it started. After that I started getting booked, which was a bit hectic. I didn’t plan for it to be quite honest,” recalls Lelo. The gig led to him being invited by Pussy Party‘s Rosie Parade to attend DJ workshops in order to hone his skills. “I went to her and we just hit it off and she really helped me a lot in starting this new adventure that I was going on. Before I knew it, I was on lineups, people asking me to play places. It’s been interesting.”

    Fascinated by music videos from a young age, Lelo was exposed to artists such as Missy Elliot, Aaliyah, Destiny’s Child, Beyonce, D’Angelo, Lauryn Hill the Fugees as well as local artists such as Lebo M, Zola, Boom Shaka & Brenda Fassie. As a DJ, he likes to push an alternative, grungy sound that draws a lot from ballroom and underground UK warehouse music as well as the raw sounds of Durban’s gqom.

    Thanks in part to his affinity for ballroom music and a desire to create safe spaces for the queer community, Lelo What’s Good founded Vogue Nights. This saw him bringing New York’s ballroom subculture to life in South Africa. “The ballroom scene in New York shifted culture, it uplifted the LGBTQI community into what we know it [to be] today. If you look at it now there’s ballroom all over the world, Berlin, Paris, London, and we don’t really have one here. So I thought since I play ballroom type music and there aren’t a lot of safe spaces for us to actually venture our bodies in, so why not create a space that speaks for us and is by us in the city and also take it around the country. Because we never really had that. So it’s a response to that. An urge to create more safer spaces.” explains Lelo.

    Beyond the parties he throws and the music he plays, Lelo What’s Good aims to be a representative of South African queer culture. “I think I do represent the people in my community to mainstream media. Everything that I’ve written is about queer artists or safe spaces and things like that. I do my best to accurately represent the times that we are in now as queer people, in queer bodies, whether it be as artists or the person down the road and how they might be feeling. I think that’s the type of content I’m trying to create, to write about and speak about. Even the places that I DJ at, they have to be 100% safe for femme bodies and queer people. It’s really important.”

  • FAKA // intersectional body politics and the collapsing of creative boundaries

    FAKA // intersectional body politics and the collapsing of creative boundaries

    FAKA, the duo made up of Desire Marea and Fela Gucci explores a combination of mediums including sound, performance, video and photography. These are the tools they use to unpack themes central to their own experiences, resulting in the construction of a low-fi, eclectic aesthetic that communicates the liberation and reimagination of queer bodies.

    Their collective name FAKA is descriptive of the impact of their work. Their presence is not a faint permeation or seeping into the consciousness of audiences. Instead, it is a direct insertion into ones frame of reference.

    Inviting audiences into their ritualistic, celebratory performances with seductive looks and welcoming hand gestures, their aim is to humanise all faces whose presence signify underrepresented realities. Their work moves beyond that of a performance duo, and shifts into the realm of a cultural movement. Their existence lives beyond gallery spaces and stages, penetrating coded environments with their online presence through sound, video and social media. FAKA have created their own hybridised language to express intersectional body politics. Their work engenders the creation of safe spaces for black, queer, gender non-conforming or trans people to reflect on their own experiences and grow in community.

    As a duo FAKA commemorates and contributes to “third world aesthetics”, making a demand for this to receive large scale validation in local and international creative cultures. European audiences, and more recently Australian audiences, have been drawn to their ancestral gqom sounds as well as the unapologetic lyrical and performative transmission of their own stories and that of Black Queer Culture in South Africa.

    Disrupting cis-heteronormative notions of existence, their work is an amalgamation of music and art, collapsing the idea that artists need to focus on and be recognized within one specific discipline.

    Their collective manifesto can be summarised by words from a Facebook post about their 2016 song ‘Isifundo Sokuqala’ – “Izitabane zaziwe ukuthi zibuya ebukhosini” (Let it be known, that queerness is a thing of the Gods), paired with the statement that the song is an “ode to all the powerful dolls who risk their lives every day by being visible in an unsafe world. This is a celebration of those who have fearlessly embraced themselves. Because when your identity is the cause of your suffering in the world, you begin to fear the very source of your greatness in the world.”

  • Strategies for Survival – An Arts Course Countering Histories of Erasure

    Strategies for Survival – An Arts Course Countering Histories of Erasure

    “Reading silences, rereading denials, deciphering edited out material and actively pouring over existent African Studies scholarship about intimacies, erotics, sexualities, pleasure, desire, and friendships is critical. This would avail the skills, methodologies and theories to unmute, unsee, and unlearn the outright erasure of multiple forms of evidence of queerness.” – Stella Nyazi

    Texts lie scattered across a circular table at the WAM café – the rickety legs supporting pages of politicized queer theory. Light leaks in through the double volume windows of the WAM café. Artist Abri de Swardt sits opposite me, describing Strategies for Survival, a seven-week course that he and art historian Nomvuyo Horwitz facilitated at the Wits School of the Arts, University of the Witwatersrand at the end of 2017.

    Samuel Fosso, Self-portrait (1976)

    The course was used as an opportunity to reevaluate and identify failings within the curriculum – locating relevance to the city and the institution in the wake of the Fallist Movement. This was drawn in part from, and in response to, Abri’s engagement with the same body of students during the practice-based Staging Mediums course the previous year. The programme was positioned within the broader framework of Reading the Contemporary. In this instance, reading, was approached from the context of Drag culture, where ‘read’ has come to mean, “to wittily and incisively expose a person’s flaws, often exaggerating or elaborating on them”. Imbedded within this approach is a sense of criticality towards that which ‘the contemporary’ as temporal category delineates, and the blind spots within this designation.

    Lorraine O’Grady, Art Is…. (Woman with Man and Cop Watching) (1983), Performance view, African-American Day Parade, Harlem

    A seminal text in framing Strategies for Survival is Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (2009) “Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life. Instead, ‘there is a life that will never have been lived,’ sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost. The apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life. Grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being as living, exposed to non-life from the start.”

    The notion of “grievability” is positioned as a signifier of value and persistence in relation to the social hierarchies of class, race, gender, sexuality and ability, inducing which bodies, beliefs and populations matter, and on a differentiated scale, those which are systematically erased. Butler’s text also describes the intersection between precariousness and precarity with regards to human life – positioning the concept of ‘flourishing’ as central to the distinction between living and merely existing. This takes on a more direct level in necropolitics and accountability for lives lost, which locally can be foregrounded in the Marikana Massacre and the recent Life Esidimeni arbitration.

    Akram Zaatari, Anonymous, Studio Shehrazade, Saida, Lebanon, early 1970s. Hashem el Madani

    Strategies for Survival examines various subject positions and modes of socialization disidentifying with the invisibility of normativity and its associated subjectivities of heterosexuality, whiteness and ablebodiedness. José Esteban Muñoz writes in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999) that,“disidentifications is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.”This theoretical framework investigates the confluences of queer bodies, black bodies, impaired bodies, trans bodies, intersex bodies, female bodies, cyborg bodies and non-human bodies as well as the moments of affinity and strategic collectivity between them, while simultaneously being aware of subjective experience and the nuanced levels of systemic violence enacted on and within those subject positions.

    Contemporary art practices are considered through the lens of queer theory, but also from radical black writing, trans–, and disabilities activism, eco-feminist text and indigenous rights texts, and affective modes such as joy, love and rage. Strategies for Survival is framed within post-colonial discourse and explores modes of ‘Africanizing’ the curriculum through the writing of Stella Nyazi, Zethu Matebeni and Nkunzi Nkabinde among others, while interrogating capitalist constructions of time and production – extending into the ‘non’-neutrality of digital space. The vast subject matter and theoretical framing illustrate the importance of approaching pedagogical practice with considered modes of criticality – while promoting platforms for mobilization, resistance and visibility within and beyond the institution.

    “Silence Equals Death” – ACT UP

    * Images from course slide show

    Rafa Esparza, STILL (2012)

     

    Gran Fury, Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do (1989)

     

    Igshaan Adams, Bismilah (2014)

     

    Claude Cahun, Hands (1929)

     

    Alvin Baltrop, The Piers (wreckage) (1976 – 86)

     

    R.I.S.E, #NOCOLONIZERS (2017)

  • TELFAR x FAKA – exploring gender fluidity through fashion and performance

    The exploration of gender fluidity or genderless garments has come to the fore over the last few years in fashion. Launched in 2005 by designer Telfar Clemens, TELFAR has positioned itself as a foundational brand for black, avant-garde design with gender fluidity as its backbone.

    During  Milan’s Men’s Fashion Week in January, Kaleidoscope presented TELFAR’s project, Nude – a live installation of TELFAR’s work in collaboration with other artists. This project stretched fashion linguistics by sharing with audiences a fashion presentation without any garments.

    Photography by Donald Gjoka

    The exhibition centres around a large nude image of designer Telfar Clemens by Rob Kulisek. Surrounding this were nude mannequins with gender signifiers removed. These were an updated version of the mannequins TELFAR presented at the 2016 Berlin Biennale, that were designed by American artist Frank Benso and manufactured by German mannequin factory Penther Formes. In addition to this, there was a film about Telfar’s apartment building in Queens, NY made by filmmaker Finn MacTaggart accompanied by musical composition by Aaron David Ross.

    FAKA were invited by Telfar to bring a performative element to the show. Having been TELFAR fans for a number of years, they were pleasantly surprised to find out that Telfar has been keeping an eye on them too. After a few email exchanges, the collaboration was solidified. “We performed both our EP’s ‘Bottoms Revenge‘ and ‘Amaqhawe‘. Our performance tied into Nude through our known exploration of gender fluidity which Telfar’s work generally explores,” Desire explained. Their performance also gave audiences a sneak peek of TELFAR’s new looks. Working together made complete sense considering FAKA’s interrogation of gender identity, and their aim to celebrate, reimagine and liberate queer bodies. FAKA continue to push their positive agenda across the globe with collaborations such as this.

    Photography by Pietro Savorelli