The annual month-long Fak’ugesi residency which continues into the festival aims to support young, African digital makers. This year Dananayi Muwanigwa and Kombo Chapfika from Zimbabwe team up with Julia Hango from Namibia.
Dananayi shares that in Zimbabwe there used to be an elite recognized few who were spearheading digital arts in Zimbabwe, mostly in Harare and Bulawayo. In the last few years has been a growing community of young aspiring digital artists. With the Global Citizen Internet boom, more and more aspiring artists have access to the information via the internet, particularly through browsing on their mobile devices. “The Zimbabwean Millennial is more open minded to new ideas and different digital art disciplines. Although the community is still marginal compared to conventional mediums of expression, it is definitely a growing one,” Dananayi explains. “The digital art scene in Zim is still in its infancy, with it mostly being photography and graphic design, some film & animation. Most often people produce digital art as an accompaniment to other art forms, especially fashion,” Kombo adds. Julia paints a similar scene when asked about the digital art in Namibia. She explains that there are a handful of artists, graphic designers and photographers who are involved in contemporary artistic expressions.
Identifying as a nudist and a feminist, Julia who works under the name JuliART, uses a variety of art forms and works with the naked human body to break barriers and binaries in society. “I believe the body is a very powerful tool for social change, especially when in its raw and most authentic state,” she explains. Dananayi also works with the human figure, specifically the black body to think about its connection to divinity, beauty and its relationship to power as well as themes around alienation. Kombo describes his work as “Retro-Futuristic-Afro-Kitsch”. Explaining that Afro-Kitsch is everywhere, he expands on how he conceptualizes this in his work: “It’s all the recognizable tropes of African artwork: market scenes, sculptures, masks, etc. It can be reductive and reduce aesthetic objects or ideas into easily marketable forms usually for a foreign gaze and then Africans internalize it…I enjoy distorting it, satirizing it, subverting it. It allows me to simultaneously pay homage to it and take the piss out of it.”
Continuing with this, Kombo explains that he enjoys subversive messaging and coded images which can be interpreted in multiple ways, especially when debunking expectations of what African art should be. This sentiment continues with Julia’s desire to break down barriers and Dananayi’s emphasis on blackness, power and the divine.
Having officially met at the airport as they arrived in Johannesburg, the artists immediately started sharing ideas about what they could put together for the Fak’ugesi Digital Africa Exhibition that they are working towards. Pointing out overlapping concepts and interests in each other’s practices, having a collaborative aspect to what they produce is an important factor that they all agree on. Not wanting to reveal too much during this early stage, Dananayi mentioned that he is thinking about exploring the idea of ‘’the divine afrofuturist black human form’’ in an alien world. Kombo is hoping to create work with visual energy that leverages both older African symbolism and contemporary urban iconography. Julia was a little more secretive and left me with the words, “All I can say is that there will be some #Bravetech art to feast your eyes on. Come with an open mind.”