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- Convenors:
-
Renzo Baas
(Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
Nicola Brandt
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- New forms of collaboration in African arts
- Location:
- S65 (RW I)
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 1 October, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
African artists, making use of embodies practices, are beginning to relaim public spaces to point toward historical and current injustices. By using their own bodies and forgotten traditions and rituals, they are helping to generate new societies and ways of being together.
Long Abstract:
The global awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement brought to the fore ways of engaging with the legacies of the Middle Passage as well as colonialism within the sphere of public space. Previously sacred material witnesses, such as statues, became sights of demonstrations and spaces for demands by marginalized or oppressed groups. Public space became recodified in order to address historical injustices and to create more open, equal, and pluralistic societies. The removal of problematic statues became the foundation on which artists, activists, and academics could not only point toward histories of violence and exclusion, but to insist on new forms of being together, new forms of remembering, and resisting state-sponsored and state-sanctioned narratives.
Through embodies practices such as performance, the reiteration of lost or forgotten rituals and traditions, and the recoding of site-specific spaces, artists create awareness of racial injustices, patriarchal structures, and the ravages of (white) capital. By employing the own body with reference to its historic continuity and by reconceptualizing past (cultural) practices, artists and activists are at the forefront of revitalizing traumatized and hurt societies, while also doing the emotional labour that the state is (generally) unable to perform.
This panel seeks contributions that look to critically engage with current art practices on the continent, pointing towards trends, impacts, and forms of engagement.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 1 October, 2024, -Najib Mokhtari (Université Internationale de Rabat)
Paper long abstract:
This paper seeks to investigate the rhetoric of representation of a North-Afropolitanism, imbued by YAE’s A Novel in the City project, constructing tenets for an identity in-the-making. Partaking in the experience of nomad literature, exile books, globalized identity, and prescribing their effects of polyglossia, cultural fusion, cross-ethnicity, hybridity, transnationality and intermixture, the author sketches an archite(x)tural design of an innovative novel citizen, moving as a Grio story teller/poet in the city, telling tales of many a city while walking the streets, squares, train stations, library halls and wider public spaces of major cosmopolitan cities such as Amsterdam, Copenhagen, or again Marrakech and Rabat, all the way show-casing ways of reading literature and dictating diasporic living conditions of a novelist on the move with his tablet textos. Transcribing an exported form of North-Afropolitanism, in particular, the nomad novel experiments with a sub-narrative of postmodernist writing style, extending a North-African-centered logos to affect a malleable cosmopolitan pathos. The paper concludes that due to the many cultural influences that shape their characters as well as their readers, the North African novel writing does not have to be categorically set in Africa and yet consent that their adopted Western genealogies are not fully theirs; hence, the author’s quest for his doubles, beyond his own cultural space, probes onto the main question of home-grown truths, to smoke out physical traces of origins and geographies; while suggesting synthetic approaches to re-read traditions, and histories.
Tjijandjeua Uzera Muningandu Hoveka
Paper short abstract:
This study examines how colonial disruptions affected Herero cosmology, particularly the sacred fire. Highlighting clashes in Namibian identity politics, the study emphasises a commitment to preserve cultural heritage through ongoing research by young artists.
Paper long abstract:
Title: Exploring Herero Cosmology, Identity Politics, and Contemporary Struggles
Gift Uzera and Muningandu Hoveka
Email: theprojectnam@gmail.com
Abstract:
This study delves into Herero cosmology, emphasising the vital role of fire connecting generations with ancestral spirits. The sacred fire, disrupted by colonial wars, becomes a focal point for restoration challenges. "The Fire Project", led by Hoveka, So-Oabeb, and Uzera, explores the metaphorical implications of fire in OvaHerero and Nama heritage, aiming for cultural harmony.Examining identity politics and patriarchal tendencies in Namibia, the study highlights clashes between traditional and modern ideals through a performance intervention at a colonial statue's removal. This underscores the persistence of patriarchal privilege in both colonial and pre-colonial contexts, impacting particularly women's experiences. Addressing contemporary challenges, the study references Namibia's Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriages and the consequent rise of religious extremism. The enduring legacies of colonialism impede national progress. The study concludes with a commitment to further research by young artists and activists, dedicated to understanding and preserving their cultural heritage.
Ndirangu Ngunjiri (University of Nairobi)
Paper short abstract:
This article explores how feminist decolonial engagement can transform our understanding and use of public space. It argues that public spaces are often gendered and racialized, reflecting and perpetuating systems of oppression and exclusion.
Paper long abstract:
This article explores how feminist decolonial engagement can transform our understanding and use of public space. It argues that public spaces are often gendered and racialized, reflecting and perpetuating systems of oppression and exclusion. However, much public art reflects and perpetuates systems of oppression, exclusion, and erasure. In this article, we will explore how feminist decolonial engagement can transform our understanding and use of public art. Which is often gendered and radicalized, reflecting and perpetuating dominant narratives about who belongs in public space and who does not. For example, public art may celebrate the accomplishments of white men while ignoring the contributions of women and people of color. It may also depict women and people of color in stereotypical or exoticized ways, reinforcing harmful stereotypes and erasing their agency and humanity. Feminist decolonial engagement offers a way to challenge these systems of oppression and exclusion in public art. This approach involves questioning the dominant narratives that shape public art and foregrounding the perspectives and experiences of those who have been marginalized and excluded. One way to engage in feminist decolonial engagement with public art is to create new works that challenge dominant narratives and highlight alternative perspectives. For example, artists may create works that celebrate the accomplishments of women and people of color, or that explore the experiences of marginalized communities in public space. By challenging dominant narratives and highlighting alternative perspectives, we can create more inclusive and equitable public spaces that reflect the diversity of our communities.
Heike Becker (University of the Western Cape)
Paper short abstract:
The paper revisits research on memory activism to decolonise the public space in postcolonial southern Africa through embodied and performative practices that subvert dominant historical narratives. I explore methodological and epistemological questions relevant to art-based practices of fieldwork.
Paper long abstract:
The proposed paper revisits two decades of research on contestations of memory activism and efforts to decolonise the public space in postcolonial southern Africa, insisting that social memory is primarily about contested claims to power. My earlier work primarily engaged with the historical staging of former colonial empire and postcolonial nationalist narrative through memorialisation and the built environment. More recently, my work has increasingly shifted to include embodied and performative practices that subvert dominant narratives of nationalism and liberation. Artist-activists have (re-)created spaces, in which the meanings of remembrance as a fiercely contested process of past-based meaning production in the present are subverted through artistic interventions.
In the proposed contribution, I will further explore methodological and epistemological questions relevant to art-based practices of fieldwork: How does multimodal fieldwork practice reflect diverse ways of working across, and outside of disciplinary bounds between art and anthropology? How does the site and the dynamic situation in which the artist and the researcher work shape the co-production of multi-faceted knowledge? Which complex questions are raised for radical art and art-based research practices regarding collaboration and ethics?
I unravel these questions through case studies from South Africa and Namibia, where artists, scholars and activists have come together in intersectional activism such as #RhodesMustFall and #ACurtFarewell. These campaigns to decolonise public space through removing colonial monuments have linked mobilisation for the decolonisation of the public space with enduring and entangled structural violence, highlighting issues of racism, gender and sexuality, as perpetuated by coloniality.