Bubblegum Club

Tag: safe spaces

  • 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.”

  • Cherrie Bomb // exhibiting the effects of the male on the female

    Cherrie Bomb // exhibiting the effects of the male on the female

    This is not an attempt to fight the man.

    Nor is it an attempt to latch onto social campaigns like #MenAreTrash and #MeToo.

    Cherrie Bomb is a collection of lived experiences that express what it feels like to be a womxn in a patriarchal society.

    Curated by Nthabiseng Lethoko for Umuzi’s First Thursdays, Cherrie Bomb aims to interrogate and shed light on the norms of patriarchy and toxic masculinity. For a female audience, the exhibition is supposed to be representative and voice the daily subjugation of the female body. For the male audience, the exhibition is meant to be the mirror that prompts self-examination. Ultimately, the exhibition aims to demystify the severe effects that male dominance has over womxn.

    The pieces featured in the exhibition are all by womxn.

    ‘Safe Space’ by Botshelo Mondi & Motshewa Khaiyane

    Botshelo Mondi and Motshew Khaiyane explored the creation of safe spaces. The threat of patriarchy is an accepted norm in every public and private environment and the female body in particular is affected as a result. Essentially, this body of work titled, Safe Space, seeks to express the problems or politics of space as well as the subtlety and pervasive nature of patriarchy. The work comes from visualising patriarchy as a physical mass that occupies and intrudes in a way that marginalises and overlooks its victims.

    In Boitumelo Mazibuko’s Lobola photographs, she captures how this traditional ceremony places value on her, value that she did not consent to, which ultimately makes her a possession. Even though the beauty of the ceremony is acknowledged through its celebration of the women joining her partner’s family, the  treatment of her as an asset can lead to her demise.

    ‘Lobola’ by Boitumelo Mazibuko

    Basetsana Maluleka and Nompumelelo Mdluli interrogate the accountability that womxn are supposed to have for men’s actions and expectations in The Constant.

    Tshepiso Mabula examines how the male gaze has made the female figure subservient and an unimportant item placed on the periphery through her work titled The Gaze. This work aims to shift this portrayal and show women as defiant figures that reject patriarchal standards by defiling the female figure.

    ‘The Gaze’ by Tshepiso Mabula

    Lastly, Thakirah Allie’s Hey Sexy is a multimedia series documenting the everyday phenomena of street harassment and catcalling. Since 2016, the project has developed and infested from sharing the artist’s own experiences of it, to that of other young girls and womxn in and around the public spaces of Cape Town.

    Regardless of gender, we are accustomed to the expectations and consequences of patriarchy. Toxic masculinity, a distressing by-product of the system, has daily repercussions for anything and anyone unlike it. The necessity of this exhibition is undeniable and the conversations it intends to spark will be vital to reimagining our society.

    Cherrie Bomb’s first exhibition took place in Cape Town and will soon be in Johannesburg during another Umuzi’s First Thursdays.

    ‘The Constant’ by Basetsana Maluleka & Nompumelelo Mdluli
  • Artist Sabella D’Souza on the privilege of passing

    Artist Sabella D’Souza on the privilege of passing

    “Indian-Australian? Never felt that, never heard of that, never tasted that, never smelt that.*”

    These are the opening words of Sabella D’Souza’s work titled 22/f/aus. As a performance artists based in Sydney she interweaves notions of cultural hybridity, virtual identity and the transnationality of cyberspace with identity signifiers such as race and gender. A central focus in her work is unpacking the importance of safe spaces on and offline for people of colour and queer people.

    “WikiHow*: to perform whiteness

    The privilege of passing is undeniable”

    22/f/aus plays in the discursive make up of the internet and the kind of interactions and social “passing” that it has engendered. The work is presented in a similar fashion to YouTube makeup tutorial and a wiki-how guide to survive the erasure of racial, and queer identity in virtual communities, specifically for women and non-binary people of colour. By utilizing the conventions of a YouTube or wiki-how tutorial the viewer is initially overcome with a sense of familiarity, having scrolled through a number of these online before. However, the subtitles that display across the bottom of the screen push you into a different frame of reference. The work is powerful in its ability to use the language of the internet video to paint a picture of what it means to occupy a space that is considered “white by default”. With her step-by-step instructions merged together with her own experiences on online interactive platforms, D’Souza exposes casual exoticization and how certain online spaces make one feel as if they need to “pass” as another identity to enjoy a safe online experience.

    Check out the video below.