Bubblegum Club

Tag: writer

  • Visual artist and storyteller Saaiqa unpacks the mind as a theatre in her series ‘The Fourth Wall’

    Visual artist and storyteller Saaiqa unpacks the mind as a theatre in her series ‘The Fourth Wall’

    “The day of birth for every human being is the start of a lifelong battle to adapt himself to an ever-changing environment. He is usually victorious and adjusts himself without pain. However, in one case out of 20 he does not adjust himself. In U.S. hospitals, behind walls like [those] shown here, are currently 500 000 men, women and children whose minds have broken in the conflict of life.”

    (Excerpt from LIFE Magazine’s 1939 article and photo essay, “Strangers to Reason: LIFE Inside a Psychiatric Hospital. The beginning of Saaiqa’s artist statement)

     

    Saaiqa is a Durban-based visual artist, writer and storyteller expressing herself through film, photography, installation and mixed media works. Plunged into the world of artistic evocation from childhood, her creativity was fuelled by a desire to understand, learn and observe from the world.

    From a young age, Saaiqa was involved in theatre and the dramatic arts which she took part in until the end of her high school career.

    “It’s interesting in retrospect, acting and learning how to inhabit another character from such a young age; I think you start to get a handle on how human psychology, experience and conditioning is translated and manifested in how we as individuals exist in the world.”

    Saaiqa’s fascination with the mind stems from a deep-seated interest in mental health. “I believe we all suffer from some form of neurosis; it’s just an inevitability. Even if you are not mentally ill we all have been marked by life in some way.”

    She continues to open up by saying that members of her immediate family are afflicted by mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Her first-hand experience with this has shown her how difficult it is not only for the person afflicted by the illness but for the person’s loved ones to navigate the world living with this illness. She expresses that it is difficult to help someone in this position within a system that is broken and not very forgiving or understanding when it comes to mental health issues.

    ‘Neurosis’ – Rorschach

    In unpacking her series Saaiqa explains that The Fourth Wall acts as a study of the psychological arena of the modern day human being. Through observation she has concluded that we are cognizant beings continuously attuning ourselves to an environment that is characterized by rapid change, causing both feelings of joy and of pain. Her aim with this body of work is to investigate this negation with life. This is achieved by witnessing the human condition as well as states of existentialism.

    “I was motivated to explore a project like this because there is still a great amount of stigma, discrimination and a lack of education and discussion regarding mental illness and health in society. This often prevents people from seeking help and, particularly in under-resourced communities, this often leads to unfair criminal incarceration, homelessness, substance abuse and even suicide.”

    Saaiqa continues to express that she feels that people have become more aware and are speaking about self-care but that she isn’t sure of the seriousness of people’s convictions. “I mean it can’t be this surface level thing; this romanticised tumblr type shit is not going to help people.”

    ‘The Tear’

    She explains the link that she made between the theatre and the mind by stating that to her it feels like the perfect metaphor. She sees the mind as a space where performances manifest. “It’s this place where we literally stage our fantasies, suppress trauma, where we interpret reality, create and destroy identity – it is a performance in constant flux. The theatre of the mind is where one continually finds and loses oneself over and over again, through the course of life.”

    To create this body of work Saaiqa’s process was research heavy. She emphasises the importance of research to her practice regardless of how a project conceptually or visually manifests. She had come to the decision that to approach this subject matter she would use alternative visual approaches that include a variety of mediums such as scans, photomontages, Rorschach prints and an installation work.

    “I observed space a lot; I also look at objects and still lives. I think that spaces and objects hold such power within narratives and can often be the centre of the most compelling images. It can also be important to consider, especially when certain ethical decisions need to be made when tackling complex visual stories.”

    ‘The Mad Scene’

    While creating this body of work Saaiqa was volunteering at a psychiatric hospital working in art therapy within the hospital. She regards volunteering as something that was very important for her to do. Although her series does not reflect issues surrounding mental health in a literal way, her experience in volunteering helped her gain a deeper understanding of different people who exist within alternative states.

    “And because this also hits so close to home it was both an opportunity for experiential learning and a way for me to give back/ improve the lives (even if in some small way) of these people who are all too often forgotten by society.  I worked in quite an intense unit, where a lot of patients had severe cases. It was definitely an eye-opening experience, even for me. The combination of poverty, economic strife, social stigma, lack of education, the exacerbation of some situations created by religion and culture –   all form an immense barrier and lead to disastrous outcomes for most individuals. I learnt a great deal about mental health and the state of healthcare in South Africa. I also learnt a lot about myself during this time as well as the lives of women, which was interesting. In that environment, you realise how fragile we all are and how we all undermine our own and each other’s mental health.”

    ‘Suffer Well’
    ‘Restless Chafing’
    ‘Penance I’ & ‘Penance II’

  • 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
  • Writer and activist Achal Prabhala on expanding the parameters for what is considered knowledge

    Writer and activist Achal Prabhala on expanding the parameters for what is considered knowledge

    “When books are scarce, people are knowledge”

    This is a quote from an email interview I had with Bangalore-based writer and activist Achal Prabhala. It is an introduction to the thinking behind the Oral Citations Project – a project he was involved in which explored alternative methods of citation for Wikipedia and ways to redefine who or what is understood to be a knowledge source.

    As a writer, the majority of his work focuses on race and pop culture. However what ties his writing together is his accumulated work in small publications, which he describes as “beautiful, odd magazines” in our exchanges via email. These include Bidoun, Chimurenga, Transition and African Is A Country. As an activist, he currently works on increasing access to medicines for life-threatening conditions like AIDS, cancer and Hepatitis C in India, Brazil and South Africa.

    The Oral Citations Project aimed to bring the periphery to the centre, and simultaneously expand on the way in which knowledge is defined. However, before unpacking the project it is necessary to contextualize its presence.

    Wikipedia has been criticized as a site for reflecting a Western, male-dominated mindset. This is translated into the way in which knowledge sources used for Wikipedia articles are framed, mimicking the old encyclopedias it is supposed to replace. Some critics have stressed the tradition of footnotes and sourced articles as references and citations needs to be re-thought. This is relevant as there is an abundance of knowledge that exists outside of books and the internet that cannot be present on Wikipedia because it cannot be sourced and referenced within the package that Wikipedia requires. Following on from this critique, Achal, who was an adviser to the Wikimedia Foundation at the time of the project, embarked on unpicking this policy and finding a way to present information that did not fit into that mould. This resulted in a short film titled “People are Knowledge“, which demonstrated how much knowledge is lost due to Wikipedia’s citation and verification policy, as well as provided an opening to be able to allow the site to be more inclusive of other knowledge sources.

    The project was planned with three Wikipedia languages in mind – Malayalam, Hindi and Sepedi – and took place across various places in South Africa and India. It involved interviews with academics and ordinary people to document everyday practices that had not been shared on Wikipedia before due to the limitations mentioned above.

    I had an interview with Achal to find out more about the project and if it has assisted in expanding Wikipedia’s knowledge base.

    When conducting interviews, how did you explain what Wikipedia is to the people who had never heard of the site before?

    This is a great question. Let me start by explaining who we interviewed and how. I interviewed people along with Wikipedians who knew them; for instance, in South Africa, we interviewed people in Ga-Sebotlane, a remote rural location in Limpopo, and I was guided by Mohau Monaledi, who lives in Pretoria, but is from Limpopo, and speaks Sepedi. Mohau is a prolific Wikipedian, and founded the Northern Sotho Wikipedia project, which is now a little gem of the Internet: it went from 500 articles in 2011 to over 8000 currently. It is the largest South African Wikipedia after Afrikaans. I was one of the people who helped get it off the ground, and I’m enormously proud of where it is today, way ahead of larger language groups in the country like Zulu, and even on the continent, like Igbo.

    The people we spoke to were working women who were fluent in Sepedi, but not English. They were women who worked in their houses and on the land, and had been doing it for years. Cellphones were common, but none of them had heard of Wikipedia. So, we explained what we were doing, explained what Wikipedia was, and why we wanted to talk to them. They got it immediately. It’s important to note that we weren’t asking the women we interviewed to part with family secrets or private historical memories: we were talking to them about how they prepared Mokgope (a fermented drink made with Marula fruit), and how they played popular village games such as Kgati and Tshere-tshere. In other words, we were interested in bringing everyday aspects of their lives to Wikipedia, and they liked the idea.

    How do you explain the importance of documenting everyday practices to the people you interviewed who fell outside of the academic space? What were their reactions?

    I will confess, wherever we went – from Limpopo in South Africa, to Kerala and Haryana in India – we were met with enthusiasm, but also puzzlement. A number of people I met in Ga-Sebotlane and Thrissur were just flat-out amused that anyone would be interested in documenting the most mundane aspects of their existence. I am almost as much a foreigner in rural India as in rural South Africa, and I suspect they thought of me as some crazy guy who had to be indulged. But once we started asking questions, and they could see our intent was serious, I think they were quite thrilled that someone was showing interest. It’s been beaten into our heads that we have a lot to learn from Professor Humdrum at Harvard, but not so much from Ms Moremi in the field under the Marula tree in Limpopo. And by us I mean not just you and me, but also the people under the Marula tree.

    Speaking for myself, the moment I flipped that ridiculous assumption within my own head, and treated the people I was talking to as important people with important things to say, they saw themselves that way as well. The mere act of listening made it easy for people to see themselves as repositories of knowledge – and this switch was a joy to watch, like a light being turned on.

    Unpack the importance of inserting underrepresented people, practices and languages online, particularly on a site associated with the collation of knowledge sources such as Wikipedia?

    The answer to this question is important. The answer also makes me furious, so I’ll take a deep breath first.

    All right. Let’s take what we did in Limpopo. We created articles, based on our conversations with people, on Mokgope, Kgati, and Tshere-tshere. Until that point, these things did not exist as public knowledge on the internet, even as they had existed for decades as public knowledge in everyday life. Millions, if not all South Africans, know exactly what these things are. Let us consider their equivalents in France: Pastis (which should be a human rights violation) has a detailed Wikipedia article in 22 languages; Pétanque has a detailed Wikipedia article in 41 languages; Boules has a detailed Wikipedia article in 31 languages.

    At this time, because of the project we ran, Sepedi Wikipedia has one article each on Morula, Kgati and Tshere-tshere. Detailed articles, with interviews as citations, and pictures to go with words. No knowledge of these three things, however, exists in any other language; the articles have not been translated. Arguably, no one who speaks Sepedi needs reminding what Morula is. Just as, arguably, the English world would be expanded by a formal understanding of what Morula is. But that hasn’t happened, because English Wikipedia deems Sepedi knowledge unworthy, as well as suspect – since in the case of these three articles, it isn’t based on something published in a book – and we’ve given up holding our breath.

    France has 66 million people. South Africa has 56 million people. Person for person, they’re not that different. On Wikipedia, however, they’re worlds apart. One is a country with Human Beings who Know Things; the other is not. I recounted my experience of documenting village games in India and South Africa to a German scholar.

    He jokingly said, if these were village games in Germany, they would each be given a 7-volume manual to accompany them, and would have become Olympic sports by now. I laughed, but it’s true. I don’t think Mokgope, Kgati or Tshere-tshere are any less real because there’s no record of them in books or the Internet, or because Europeans have no idea what they are. But the legitimation, transmission and circulation of knowledge holds a unique power in the world: the power of universality, the power to render holders of that knowledge fully, equally and undeniably human.

    By far the most tiresome aspect of conducting the exercise was explaining it to Wikipedians. I had some really strange conversations on public mailing lists. The prevailing view on Wikipedia was best expressed by a German historian resident in the Netherlands called Ziko van Dijk. I explained my project. He replied with the condescension of a schoolteacher scolding a naughty child, and asked me to leave history to the historians. I tried to point out that documenting one beverage and two village games in Limpopo hardly constituted messing with history. He did not budge; he remained adamant that my secret agenda was to infect Wikipedia with mythological juju. He kept at it for years, advocating increasingly bizarre theories, such as that recognising oral traditions would, somehow, allow him to claim to be a descendant of Charlemagne. (For good measure, he also threw in an inexplicable incident about “a territory in Africa, occupied by the British” where some King was maybe thought to have had seven sons, and then maybe thought to have had only five, which was, in his view, conclusive proof that you must never trust anyone without a PhD in history).

    Unpack the title for the project and the film, People are Knowledge?

    When books are scarce, people are knowledge.

    I don’t think of this as a problem. It’s simply a fact. It would be nice to have more books, sure. But, as Geetha Narayanan says in the film, “Coming from a culture where so little is written down, do we then say we know nothing?” The assumption that people who don’t have books are dumb, is plainly preposterous. In the course of rearranging our ideas about books, knowledge and stupidity, however, there are some underlying conditions to consider.

    One: Rich countries produce plenty of books, poor countries do not. Every year, the UK produces 1 new book for every 300 people. In South Africa, however, the figure is 1 new book for every 7000 people, and in India, even worse, at 1 new book for every 11000 people. In historical absolutes, the number of books produced in the US and Europe outstrips every other country in the world. What this means is that the knowledge of South Africa and India is not in books.

    Two: Even when local books exist in poor countries, they’re inaccessible. Public library networks are weak, digitization and electronic access is almost non-existent, with the effect that if you live in a country like India and South Africa, and want to reference an existing book, it is frequently not available to you.

    Three: Even when there is media – books, periodicals, journals, newspapers – to cite, if the media comes from a country outside the US and Europe, it is suspect, at least on Wikipedia. Countries like South Africa and India may have huge newspapers that cater to millions of readers, but Wikipedia refuses to accept that something happened unless it happened in the New York Times. The most famous instance of this bias is with the fictional Kenyan phenomenon called Makmende, which, despite being written up in The Daily Nation and The Standard, two respected Kenyan newspapers with gigantic readerships, was refused a Wikipedia entry until the story merited a mention in a ‘real’ paper, the Wall Street Journal. We’re told the way to play the game is to catch up. Write more! Publish more! Then, when we do that, we’re told, umm hold on: that’s not good enough. Because, of course, nothing really happens unless it happens in a journal published out of Cambridge or a newspaper in Manhattan. And Wikipedia is passionately committed to this warped, outmoded, colonial view of the world. Instead of playing the imitation game, I thought, why not turn the tables?

    On your project site, I read the argument that Wikipedia does not take advantage of “internet objects”. Can you share why this is an important statement when thinking about expanding citations on Wikipedia?

    Wikipedia is a publisher on the Internet, but it is deeply suspicious of the Internet. This is a fundamental fault line, and it is already fracturing Wikipedia. When you have a new system of publishing, one that is non-profit, public, and supposedly revolutionary, a system that was made by the Internet and that could only exist on the Internet and moreover, relies on the anonymous labour of crowds to work, in that case, to exclusively rely on words printed on paper for authority is ludicrous.

    Wikipedia is an open platform that is made entirely by user contributions. But it disallows citations from IMDB (the Internet Movie Database) and classifies it as an unreliable source, because, wait for it, IMDB is an open platform that is made entirely by user contributions.

    In the early years of Wikipedia, in 2005, Jimmy Wales (the founder of Wikipedia) was fond of saying “We help the Internet not suck.” That was then, before blogging became legit, before the smartphone was invented, before social media took over our lives. Now, in 2018, thanks to the combined force of cheap data, cheap Android phones and social media, we have infinite choices. There are many ways in which social media sucks, but one way it definitely does not is in being a fairly democratic global force in which anyone can participate.

    In 2005, Wikipedia was pitched in a fierce battle for legitimacy against the print edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, and it was arguably better than anything on the Internet. In 2018, Britannica is dead, Wikipedia reigns supreme, and, I would argue, it has become considerably less democratic, less open, less global, less diverse and less inclusive than anything else on the Internet. Everything on Wikipedia says 2001, especially its deliberately maddening interface, but nothing says ‘hello yesterday!’ as much as its refusal to treat the Internet as a place of knowledge, or its refusal to learn the one useful lesson social media can teach us, which is that projects prosper by inviting people in, not by keeping most of the world out. Let me put this more simply. If I wish to learn about French food, which I can’t eat, because I’m lactose intolerant, I’ll go to Wikipedia, but if I wish to learn about South Indian cuisine, which I can eat, and love, I’ll go to YouTube.

    In a New York Times article on your project, you mention that publishing is a system of power. Could you please unpack this, and how this fits into the foundation for People are Knowledge?

    I’m from Bangalore, in India. I studied in the US, but haven’t worked there. The only countries I have  lived and worked in outside my home are South Africa and Brazil. Currently, my work is spread across Bangalore, Johannesburg and Rio de Janeiro. So I know what unequal geography looks like, and I am intimately aware of how colonialism lingers in the mind long after it’s officially gone. I knew a whole lot about Manhattan before I stepped foot in it; I knew very little of Johannesburg before I got there. I knew that words said in London were meaningful; I knew that words said in Bangalore were kind of meaningless.

    One of the nice things about becoming an adult was becoming confident enough to challenge this idiocy. And because the Internet existed when I grew up, and especially because Wikipedia existed, I believed, naively, that this was our great opportunity to rewrite the world. Let’s face it: we will never catch up with the accumulated mass of formal knowledge produced by Europe and the US. Not going to happen.But in the digital world? I did think it was the one place where we could have a kind of equality; new rules for a new world. Every movement in the last 20 years signaled that equality was near: the invention of Wikipedia, the drop in telecom prices, the proliferation of cheap Chinese smart phones, the millions of people coming online in places like India, Indonesia, Brazil and South Africa.

    And yet, it did not work out that way. Publishing has always been about power.

    In the 14th century, you could be killed for translating the Bible into languages people actually spoke. In the 15th century, the printing press gave rise to new anxieties, and for several centuries thereafter, printers in Europe were only permitted to operate with the approval of their monarchs. Things may seem to be completely different now, but a deep dive into the political economy of the book will make it clear we are still operating with a command-and-control version of knowledge. The colony may have come and gone, but knowledge remains a thing produced in the centre – and consumed in the periphery.

    Wikipedia’s lamentable dependency on the book, continuing in this long, grand, and incredibly racist European tradition, is why we in the periphery are avid consumers of Wikipedia, but not producers. Publishing is a system of power, and so is Wikipedia. You look at Wikipedia, and think, hey, it’s on the Internet, it’s made by volunteers, it’s got pop singers and porn stars, anyone can contribute, it must be revolutionary. But don’t be fooled: it’s merely the old system of power, wrapped in a dazzling gauze of technological emancipation and repackaged with a benevolent liberal bow. Don’t take my word for it. Instead, take just one of Wikipedia’s own published statistics: there are more producers of Wikipedia in the Netherlands (population 17 million) than the entire continent of Africa (population 1.2 billion).

    Are you still connected to the Wikimedia Foundation?

    I’m not. I served on the Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation from 2006 to 2018. I quit, or more accurately, I certainly quit a board that I’m not certain exists, since the Advisory Board has been in a Kafkaesque limbo for some years. I did some good during my term, as well as some things that did not turn out well. I’m proud of helping start the South African chapter, which is flourishing, and not so proud of helping the Indian chapter come into existence, since it blew up in a hot cloud of incompetence and ineptitude. I played a part  in pushing for the Wikimedia Foundation to directly intervene in stimulating producers in India, Brazil, and the Middle East, and I’m glad to have played an early role in pushing the Wikimedia movement to recognize affiliations from broad groups of people, like Catalan speakers, not just those from sovereign states.

    In the end, however, as a result of my work in India, and especially as a result of my work on oral citations, the trolling and harassment from other Wikipedians simply became too much. The hostility was insane: every discussion, every interaction online, was toxic. At the same time, the Wikimedia Foundation decided it had not much use for me. I’m not sure which was worse, being attacked by the community, or being ignored by the Foundation 🙂 Either way, I knew it was time to go.

    How has Wikipedia’s citation policy/strategy changed since the conceptualization of this project?

    The short answer is not one bit. In fact, it’s moved in the other direction, with the rules becoming even tighter. Wikipedia is now unapologetically hostile. If you came to Wikipedia in 2001 and put in some text, it would stay, as long as it was reasonable, and other Wikipedians would work with you to improve it, by adding citations and so on. Try that today, and you’ll be shut down immediately, then flamed, and then shamed into never contributing again. Every new contributor is essentially treated as a hostile vandal or a paid public relations agent until proven otherwise. Of course, it doesn’t help that many new contributors are, indeed, hostile vandals and paid public relations agents. It’s an impossible problem, and the encyclopedia anyone can contribute to has made no attempts to solve it, save for aiming a giant blowtorch at anyone who tries to contribute.

    But it’s not all bad. A few good things came out of the oral citations project. The first is a set of independent initiatives that sprung up, to work along similar lines. Peter Gallert, an academic in Namibia, is working on a project to bring indigenous knowledge to Wikipedia. In San Francisco, Anasuya Sengupta, Siko Bouterse and Adele Vrana, three former Wikimedia Foundation staffers, have launched a grand and exciting initiative to remake Wikipedia. (One of their campaigns is to pry Wikipedia away from the hands of young men, and reverse the giant tide of sexism within; you can help them by contributing images of women to Wikipedia). The second nice thing is that the Wikimedia Foundation finally seems to have figured it out: a key plank in its new strategy is to “focus…efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege.” Given that it’s the community that decides policy, not the Foundation, I’m curious to see where this goes.

    How are you expanding on the project at the moment?

    Having burnt only some of my bridges with Wikipedia so far, I’m now working on ways to burn all my bridges with the community. I’m kidding. Seriously, though, I’m writing a short account of being the brown guy in the ring. I think Wikipedia has got away with intolerable amounts of racism, sexism and hostility just because most people only see it from the outside, slot it as a ‘good thing’, and don’t ever find out about what is going on inside.

    Having said all that, I should make a confession: I love Wikipedia. I loved it the moment I first saw it, and I’ll always love it. To me, Wikipedia is the public park of the Internet; a refuge from the relentless shopping-mall the Internet has turned into, the brave little non-profit in the oligopolistic dystopia that is our online landscape. When Wikipedia is good, it’s wonderful. When Wikipedians are good, they’re great. So I’m going to stick around for a bit, shout from the sidelines, and see if it has any effect. It’s ironic I spend so much time criticizing Wikipedia, because all I’ve ever wanted, really, is to be allowed inside. I’m not sure it’s entirely rational to want to enter a park run by confused white supremacists, but I’ve been going there for so long, I’ve become quite attached to it. Sure, Wikipedia is a racist, sexist and violent enterprise, but it’s my racist, sexist and violent enterprise, and I’ll figure out a way to deal with it.

    Further reading:

    A push to redefine knowledge at Wikipedia

    Lifting the lid on a Wikipedia crisis

    The Believer Interview with Achal Prabhala (The Believer)

    Is Wikipedia woke?

    We’re all connected now, so why is the Internet so white & western?

  • Faggotry (Embodied) // activating queer spaces with multidisciplinary artist Elijah Ndoumbé

    Faggotry (Embodied) // activating queer spaces with multidisciplinary artist Elijah Ndoumbé

    Summing up everything that Elijah Ndoumbé encompasses is no easy task. The magnitude of their brilliance is enthralling and their approach is delicately interrogatory and essentially decolonial. Calling Elijah an artist is a fitting label but really Elijah is gifted & accountable to the need of expressing themselves and members of their community through various channels.

    Born to a French father with Cameroonian roots, Elijah’s father was considered métis in the country where Elijah was born and initially racialised, Paris, France. The term métis suggests “racial impurity” due to being part European and part African, Africa being considered inferior. There was no conversation about Elijah’s father’s Blackness. The only time Elijah would indulge in their ancestry would be through the traditional meals their Cameroonian grandmother prepared. Elijah later moved to the West coast of America, where Elijah’s white mother is from.

    PXSSY PALACE ST. GEORG [Munroe and Nadine] (Point n Shoot | Berlin, Germany | 2017) by Elijah Ndoumbé
    Elijah’s ballet classes in suburban America subtly posed questions about their race and gender. Ballet class was filled with slender, white girls with perfectly arched feet and Elijah had a more prominent ass, darker skin and flat feet.

    “The thing about ballet is that it is a form of dance that relies on a particular and biased body type…this experience of art was very fucking gendered and very racialised and I didn’t realise it at the time because of the context of the space that I was raised in…I don’t want to be the only weirdo in the room, I want to feel seen. When you feel desperately isolated and alone because you know something is different about you and there is shame attached to that, like throughout my childhood, there was shame attached to the desire I have and the ways in which it would show up in my life or the ways I would respond.”

    U DON’T EVEN KNOW ME, captures of @zengaking & @ma_tayo (1) from larger series (120mm | Berlin, Germany | 2017) by Elijah Ndoumbé

    Elijah’s becoming was profoundly jolted during their time at Stanford University where they were “severely politicised.” Studying “Power” and “History” within the context of their bachelors in African & African American Studies and Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies intensely informed Elijah about the dynamics of the violent histories that riddle their body, their family’s bodies, and the bodies of members of their community. Subsequently, this questioning of embodiment has nuanced Elijah’s work. “It’s actually quite a decolonial way of thinking – to burst out of the frameworks and to imagine what it looks like for us to build our own while simultaneously infiltrating the ones that exist…I’m a non-binary trans person, who has body dysphoria, also regardless of my complexion, I’m also Black, I’m a person of colour, I’m of African decent; I carry these things in the end. I carry a multitude of things and those things are going to show up in all spaces.”

    Untitled [A Kween, Ascends] (120mm | Cape Town, South Africa | 2017) | Credits: Shot by Thandie Gula-Ndebele and Nazlee Arbee
    Creative Direction and Styling by Elijah Ndoumbé, Nazlee Arbee, and Thandie Gula-Ndebele
    Makeup by Thandie Gula-Ndebele
    Assist by Tandee Mkize
    Initially through the pen, Elijah struggled with this questioning in the form of written pieces that require prolonged simmering in love and care. Elijah was then captivated by expressing themselves through a camera lens and with inspiration and guidance from BBZ London based cultural consultant and video artist, Nadine Davis, Elijah began poetically capturing themselves and members of their community through photography and videography in various personal and global contexts.

    Now based in Cape Town, South Africa, Elijah has captured the emotionally intense experiences of Trans womxn who experience a lot of casual violence, through their work with the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT) in a video called SISTAAZHOOD: Conversations on Violence. There are also a couple of photoseries’ accessible on Elijah’s website. The prominence of visual work attributes to the attention paid to this creative outlet but there are infinite ways for Elijah to exist.

    Danyele, a muse (120mm | Palo Alto, California, USA | 2017) by Elijah Ndoumbé

    More recently, Elijah has had the privilege of “doing the work of making space to think”, this time has been an incubation period, in which Elijah has played with other mediums. For example humbly picking up a pen to doodle with some Miles Davis in the background and a “fuck it” mentality. Elijah’s exploration of themselves as an illustrator stems from their desire to be free from operating in fear, especially through a medium that will potentially fuel their other creative expressions. Furthermore, Elijah wishes to deconstruct the notion that only formal training like “art school” certifies one as an “artist” and the labelling of their creation’s as “art”.

    Elijah has also been gravitating to the creative medium they first formally explored, dance. Complimentary to these embodied movements  that resemble freedom and release are Elijah’s well versed music mixes, which could blare through the speakers of events like the Queer Salon. Created by Elijah and facilitated with a Black & Brown Queer DJ duo, Nodiggity, the Queer Salon makes space for Queer, Trans and non-binary Black, Brown and indigenous people of colour to be prioritised through art. While lamenting with me over experiences on dancefloors in Berlin and public restroom lines in Johannesburg, Elijah accentuated their urgency to continue building and facilitating safe and sustainable community spaces.

    Elijah’s current phase of rest has revealed a beauty of the unknown to them and reinforced that despite daily negotiation of their textured identity, their artistry will always be an unyielding, irrefutable and indispensable embodiment of them and theirs.

    Catherine, portrait of (120mm | Palo Alto, California, USA | 2017) by Elijah Ndoumbé
    Express. (Point n Shoot | Cape Town, South Africa | 2017) by Elijah Ndoumbé
    Habibiatch (Point n Shoot | Berlin, Germany | 2017) by Elijah Ndoumbé
    Portrait of the Artist in Their Home Studio (120mm b&w | Cape Town, South Africa | 2018) by Thandie Gula-Ndebele
    Eli Ndoumbé live at Yours Truly (Digital | Cape Town, South Africa | 2018) by Thandie Gula-Ndebele

  • Exploring the place of social justice and sustainability in urban planning and design

    OluTimehin Adegbeye is a Nigerian speaker, writer, and activist. Her work is derived from a self-perceived duty to social justice with a focus on gender, class, sexualities and sexual violence. Other concerns addressed in her work are Sustainable Development and Urban Poverty.

    When asked about her career path, OluTimehin expresses “I don’t know that I ‘chose’ to follow this career path; I speak and think about problems that seem to me to be pressing and in need of urgent engagement. In the course of that, opportunities present themselves, and I take those which help me inspire more people to engage with our societies’ many ailments where gender, class and other sites of marginalisation are concerned.”

    OluTimehin gave her first TED Talk titled “White Sands, White Flags: The Demolition of Lagos State Waterfront Communities” at TEDLagos Ideas Search in February of this year. Her second TED Talk titled “Who Belongs in a City?” was held at TEDGlobal in Arusha, Tanzania. She was also a speaker on several panels that include “Rewriting Herstory: Harnessing the Power of Feminist Writing Platforms and Networks at the Black Feminisms/AWID Forum” (Brazil, 2016), “Spirit Women at ChaleWote: Spirit Robot” (Ghana, 2016) as well as “Intersections: Culture, Social Justice and Feminist Narratives” (Ghana, 2016).

    Her writing has been published in multiple languages and can be found in StyleMANIA Magazine (Nigeria), Klassekampen (Norway), Women’s Asia 21 (Japan) and Essays Magazine (South Africa) to name a few. Online, her writing has become part of the content in the African Women’s Development Fund, the Association for Women’s Rights in Development, and the African Feminist Forum, along with other platforms. Besides what has already been mentioned, OluTimehin is an alumna of the Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop (Nigeria, 2015), the inaugural Writing for Social Justice workshop organised by AWDF in collaboration with FEMRITE (Uganda, 2014) and the Farafina and the BRITDOC Queer Impact Producers Lab (USA, 2017). The list of her written output continues to get longer, emphasizing her determination to address the social justices issues mentioned earlier.

    OluTimehin’s personal writing consists of memoir writing, autofiction, and poetry that explore motifs such as solidarity, autonomy, trauma, motherhood and radical love. Working towards the deconstruction of exploitative and aggressive power structures fortifying globalised societies, she aspires to re-inscribe the core value of human life.

    “I started to identify as a feminist in 2013 and since then I have benefited from and continue to contribute to many physical and digital communities that share stories and strategies about how to make our realities less violently exclusionary. I began engaging with questions of urban development about a year ago, and since then I’ve had opportunities to share my perspective on what an inclusive vision of my home city, Lagos, might be.”

    OluTimehin forms a part of African Mobilities‘ Friday Lecture series and shares the following thoughts on her involvement, “I think it was very discerning of the organisers in Lagos to think about not just the physical landscape, but also the social aspects of how the city functions, and thus to invite someone like me who doesn’t work in the traditional design space to speak to the impacts design, urban vision and ‘development’ might have on the populations of my city. I’m honoured to have been invited to add this perspective to the layers of discourse around African Mobilities.”

    Identifying as a decolonial feminist, OluTimehin is currently based in Lagos, and is actively working towards unravelling societal dilemmas from this viewpoint.

  • Kampire Bahana // ColabNowNow Storyteller

    Kampire Bahana is a DJ, writer, art organizer and storyteller from Uganda, and part of the ColabNowNow residency. I had an interview with her to discuss her background, practice and the ColabNowNow project

    The various aspects of Kampire’s work have a tendency to overflow and interlink. “I started out writing about festivals and events that I enjoyed going to, art I thought people should see.” Kampire tells me that her travels to Sauti za Busara in Zanzibar in 2014 introduced her to Santuri Safari as well as some East African DJs and producers. She expresses that the people she met and the experience of it all seduced her with music – “the sound of a good party”. In 2015 Kampire assisted her friends in organizing and hosting the first Nyege Nyege Festival. She felt connected to a community of people she found who create beautiful art outside of the mainstream. “Now, more so, I am compelled to help make the art I want to see and hear, and the events I want to attend.”

    With regards to being a dj Kampire says that “I am not the best musician and I have no desire to perform for other people.  I just found something fun that other people seem to find fun. In the end, I only aspire to make my friends dance anytime I’m playing.” Kampire is a resident DJ at the Boutiq Electroniq and explains that they host underground parties that are out of this world. By being a resident DJ, Kampire has been able to connect with many inspiring underground acts and scenes across the continent such as Africa Bass Cultures in Burkina Faso and Amani Festival in Goma, Congo.

    In her practice as a writer Kampire has done work for publications such as Okayafrica, Jalada Magazine, Afripop Mag and Dynamic Africa to name a few. She writes on the arts in Uganda and other countries in Africa with a keen focus on cultures and music that she believes are carrying a strong message that people should know about. “I write to organise my own thoughts and participate in a community of like-minded young Africans who may feel like their values and opinions make them minorities in their own countries.”

    Kampire has worked with aid organizations such as the Maisha Foundation. She expressed that she has received some remarkable opportunities through her association with them such as working on the film Queen of Katwe and curating the art garden/Maisha Garden. “I got to showcase my favourite parts of the Kampala art scene in a non-typical location and one of the city’s few green spaces. Events there like the live performance of Doreen Baingaina’s ‘Tropical Fish’ have been a definite highlight.”

    The Salooni is a pop-up hair salon project that Kampire and her friends came up which began as a proposal for the Chale Wote Street Art Festival in Ghana that they wanted to partake in. The Salooni created an installation that has visited 5 countries on the continent as well as the United Kingdom and will be on display in Rwanda in either October or November of this year. “It’s our attempt to create a judgement free space in which black women can enjoy whatever hair they have, interrogate it as a history, culture and science and imagine futures in which it is a source of strength and not a site of politics and trauma.”

    When asked why she applied to be a part of ColabNowNow, Kampire expressed that she has always aspired to work with Jepchumba, the curator of the project organized by British Council Connect ZA. For her it seemed like a unique open-ended prospect to collaborate with some interesting people. Kampire’s objective for the residency is to “make some cool work with some people!”.

  • Andy Mkosi wants to visit your bedroom

    A musician, writer and photographer based in Cape Town, Andy Mkosi’s music is influenced by a variety of genres but it was through hip hop that she emerged into the world of music as a performer. Fascinated by the lyrical content of songs, she started writing her own material which she assumed at the time was poetry “but when I recited them for friends in high school, that’s when I started having the confidence and the comfort to share stuff with people, they’d say it sounded something like rap music instead of poetry,” Andy Mkosi recalls.

    Immersing herself in hip hop culture she started attending cyphers in places such as Gugulethu and buying Hype Magazine. “That’s when I was introduced to the fact that people at home were making music of this nature. People like Kanyi Mavi, Driemanskap and so forth.” Her first performance in 2010 convinced her to take music seriously. “We travelled to Gugs that Saturday afternoon and when we got there there was a performance happening and people were just forcing me to go on. I was so nervous. The response was so overwhelming. I think that was a turning point for me to say okay cool, this is what I want to do,” says Andy.

    Meeting OBie Mavuso via Soundcloud in 2012 led to a partnership that saw the two of them create a platform for themselves and like-minded musicians to perform. Initially planned as a once-off event, the Jam That Sessions grew to become a multi-media event that featured artists such as Zoe Modiga and YoungstaCPT, and collaborations between artists such as poets and painters or beatboxers and vocalists. “It was pure art, something which was lacking at the time within the Cape Town performance scene.”

    Since 2015 Andy Mkosi has dropped a number of releases starting with her debut ‘iPressure’ which dealt with the pressures of being a young artist who hadn’t yet put out music laid over a heavy boom bap sound. Her follow up release ‘Ndine Feelings’ spoke to her “romantic affairs or lack thereof”. Soon after she released ‘This Audio is Visual’ which saw her combining her two creative outlets, music and photography and working with a number of artists such as Tsoku Maela and Darkstar. “I collaborated with a lot of people and it sort of pushed me out of my comfort zone,” says Mkosi. The release is accompanied by a self-published book which features an image for each song along with their lyrics.

    Most recently she has been sharing her music through intimate performances. Her Bedroom Tours sees Andy visiting the homes of fans and performing in their bedrooms to audiences of 10 to 20 people. Having performed around Cape Town, as well as in Johannesburg her next stop is Lesotho. She has also recorded a compilation of songs performed at the Bedroom Tours to be distributed at the next show.

    Andy Mkosi already has ideas in place for her next release as she is always writing. “You always have to contribute to the skill everyday. My most recent visit to Germany made me realise that sometimes at home in Cape Town and in South Africa in general we’re so focused on perfection that we forget that there are people waiting on us to share our abilities with them.”

  • Julie Nxadi // Stories as sonic and visual interruptions

    “My relationship with writing is in its infancy compared to my relationship with storytelling,” explains Julie Nxadi. She has always taken the value of a story seriously, whether it be communicated via music, film, photographs, performance art, or politics. For her writing is simply one medium with which to tell stories. “It’s a medium that I have been fiddling with for a while, but it has never been the medium itself that is important to me, it is the story that is being told,” Julie continues. I interviewed Julie to find out how she has nurtured her writing and her creative process when writing her short story ‘Love Back’.

    How do you like to describe your writing style?

    Audio-visual. I hear and see things before I write them down. The stories often come as sonic and visual interruptions. I hear a sound over and over again or I see something, a girl, a bench, a bucket of water and I have to wander after it in the form of a story. Sometimes it is easy to vomit out, other times it takes a lot of patience from me (and thus my supervisor). But I think that when people do read what I have written it gets stored in their memories as sound and sight more so than words. I try to make sure that I stay as true as possible to those audio-visual interruptions from whence the stories come .

    Who/what inspires your writing? What are some of your favourite genres?

    I don’t believe in genre. A good story is tragic, funny, romantic, uncomfortable, good, bad, everything, and nothing at all. Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, K. Sello Duiker, and Bessie Head are writers who made me understand the politics of storytelling. The politics of being honest in one’s writing.

    Following on from this, how to these writers and genres feed into how you think about your own work?

    Well, they help me to be patient and calm about my storytelling. But also, they help me to be brave. Telling a story that nobody asked to hear is a pretty scary process. Telling it your own way is terrifying as well. There is this strange balance one has to strike whereby you are not precious about your work, but at the same time you need to be able to stand up for it. I write black as fuck stories. I don’t need white characters in my stories for my characters to read as nuanced and deserving of anybody’s attention, Toni Morrison taught me that. I write in English and my characters speak isiXhosa, so their dialogue is in isiXhosa and that comes with no apologies and shame, just like my English narration comes with no apologies or shame because I am a product of THIS South Africa and I would rather hold that conflict than hide it, Bessie Head and Duiker taught me that. So you have to be brave, you have to be able to just say “yeah, this is important” and all these writers that I have mentioned have given me the strength to say “look, I’ve done the research, I’ve crunched the proverbial numbers and I can say that this is important.”

    Share where the story of ‘Love Back’ came from? How did you develop this short piece?

    Well, like I said the stories often come as sonic or visual interruptions. ‘Love Back’ was no different. I kept seeing this little girl in a white dress stomping her way home. Eventually I had to ask myself where she was coming from and where she was going. I realised that this little girl was just dealing with something that’s all too common, heartbreak. The incident itself was not important on its own, rather what became as important to me was the banality of abstract violence in our communities and how we are (from a very young age) expected to instinctively know our own unimportance. The refrain “if you are not bleeding you are not hurt” is really just a chant we say on our slow march to social death, because what are we asking when we suggest that “there are worse things” to a child whose heart is aching? Are we not asking that this child know what is worse, either via imagination or experience? Are we not insisting that their only currency is their flesh? In this story you have a little girl who has to find where her broken heart fits in the hierarchy of problems that her family might be facing, and she has to bury her broken heart there on that rung where it fits (the privileged fantasy of the objective reader would be that she might one day return to the site where she buried her heart and attempt to heal, but we know that that is not a reality for an overwhelming majority of people). So, in the meantime, we watch uLoli decide on childhood. That is a very grown up thing to do at 9 years old; to decide on childhood. To bury. To suppress. To create distance and time between oneself and what horror they may have experienced moments ago. But at the same time, who is better equipped than someone who is eloquent in the language of imagination? A child. Who is better equipped than one who can make the rain stop with a single glance, one who still has a sibling like relationship with the elements? As magical as all of that is, it is also incredibly unfair. I mean, we often forget that there is labour involved in making magic. And that is something that I try to discuss with my writing; just how much we ask of the most vulnerable amongst us and within us.

    ‘Love Back’ takes the form of a poem in the way that it is laid out. Would you like to share something about the decision to do this?

    The form has more to do with pacing and spacing than anything else. Michael Ondaatjie was suggested to me by my supervisor as a means of inspiration for this and he did exactly that. It’s amazing how a word appearing somewhere you may not have expected it to has the ability to slow one’s reading down or speed it up. But there is also something about the spacing of the phrases that helps one to imagine the village and uLoli’s own feelings walking through it; clustered at times and isolated at others.

    In the story you personify the wind which is quite interesting. Could you please share more about this?

    It is less an act of personifying the elements and more an honest depiction of how my own family and a lot of families I know speak about the elements; as living. When one translates that relationship to English it may strike as curious, but perhaps that is just a reflection on the English language and the particular cultural tones it possesses which render nature and the elements as little more than backdrops that showcase the lives of human beings. I have never understood things that way, I was never taught to. I was taught to listen. I was taught that the rain can cry with you and cleanse you. My only real job now is to remember to listen in the face of English.

    What are you working on at the moment that you would like to share with our readers?

    I am currently working on a collection of short stories as part of my Master’s thesis. Should I be lucky enough to find a publisher, it will make its way out into the world.