Futures and Fictions Read online

  There are new technologies developing around ecological or ethical burial, such as http://www.urbandeathproject.org. Another example of an emergent technology is the possibility of an AR grave environment where relatives and friends can activate digital content on the gravesite through dedicated mobile-phone technologies or retinas (see https://www.aurasma.com). Ashes are now made into jewellery, tattoos, vinyl records and other products. AI (Artificial Intelligence) experimentations are dedicated to avatars based on real people — one of the most popular and advanced of which is Bina 48. By making avatars like us, we are creating a version of ourselves that never needs to die and only expands.

  Capitalism inherently changed the way we live; now it is changing the way we are dying. We are a commodity in life and in death.

  Casting for the Future

  On the train back from Kingston > where I wrote the script > to Waterloo, I notice a beautiful stranger, who looks like the future. He is young, not fully formed, something between a teenager and an adult, his ethnicity is mixed and for a while I am not sure of his gender. A woman with a baby in her hands boards the train and he immediately lets go of his seat and lets her sit down. He then sits opposite me. After a while I notice that he doesn’t hold or check his mobile phone like I do and like everyone else around us incessantly does. I want to ask him to be in my film, but feel embarrassed. It’s so cheesy. As we inch towards Waterloo I know that this is my last chance and I ask him if he is an art student, he replies — “no, I study nutrition, what we eat is very important”. I ask him if I can contact him on Facebook and he replies that he is not on Facebook, that he doesn’t want to waste his life. I ask him if he wants to be The Future in my film and he says yes. His name is George Hard. Casting is how we can affect the future, in Genesis’ part of the story there are no white men until episode eleven.

  Works Cited

  Douglas, Mary (2002), Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge.

  Emelife, Aindrea (2015), “‘She’s a wild woman, she’s a shaman’: Nicki Minaj becomes a feminist art muse”, in The Guardian 1 September. https://www.the-guardian.com/artanddesign/2015/sep/01/nicki-min aj-anaconda-camille-henrot-feminist-art; accessed 28 August 2016.

  Gunaratnam, Yasmin (2013), Death and the Migrant: Bodies, Borders and Care. London: Bloomsbury.

  Le Guin, Ursula K. (1974), The Dispossessed. NY: Harper & Row.

  The LifeNaut Project (2014), “Bina 48 Meets Bina Roth-blatt - Part One”. November 27. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=KYshJRYCArE; accessed 10 September 2016.

  Quaintance, Morgan (2015), “Camille Henrot on Nicki Minaj: exoticising like it’s 1989?”, in Flux 1 September. http://conversations.e-flux.com/t/camille-henrot-onnicki-minaj-exoticising-like-its-1989/2412; accessed 28 August 2016.

  Rankine, Claudia (2014), Citizen: An American Lyric. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press.

  Solnit, Rebecca (2014), Men Explain Things to Me. London: Haymarket Books.

  West, Kirsten Savali (2015), “Sister Suffragette: ‘Slave’ T-Shirts Highlight White Feminism’s Race Problem”, in The Root. 7 October. http://www.theroot.com/ articles/culture/2015/10/sister_suffragette_slave_t_ shirts_highlight_white_feminism_s_race_problem/; accessed 30 August 2016.

  HISTORY WILL BREAK YOUR HEART

  A Conversation between Elvira Dyangani Ose and Kemang Wa Lehulere

  Elvira Dyangani Ose: It seems we have two things in common: first, our personal interest in the African artist collective, and, second, our interest in history. We both thought that this beautiful title that you chose for your mid-career show would be an excellent way to introduce your practice. Maybe we can start with one of your projects to begin the conversation?

  Kemang Wa Lehulere: I will begin with a performance piece which was not done for an audience per se, but with the anticipation that an audience might come and witness whatever outcome the performance led to. This is a piece I did in 2008 which was called Ukuguqula iBatyi which means “to turn a coat inside out”, and it was within the context of an exhibition called Scratching the Surface which was curated by a collective called manje-manje projects, meaning “now now” or “in the moment” that operated in South Africa for a short time. We were invited as a collective to take part in this project and activate a space that we had set up in Gugulethu, a township just outside of Cape Town. This was an individual project that I did within a context of working collectively.

  I chose to take the concept of the show literarily — especially the idea of “digging”. My interest in digging was a symbolic gesture, archeologically, but also something meditative that would take place within a context of other works. So I was digging a hole with an afro-comb in a backyard in Gugulethu. This work becomes interesting and important for me because of the chance discovery of the human bones that I found. The space we worked in was a house that had been turned into a shebeen. A shebeen, an Irish term for an illicit drinking place, was very important in South Africa for two reasons: one, because the apartheid government had banned the selling of liquor by black South Africans as a way to prevent economic activity amongst blacks. So it was a very repressive law. But, two, within that, shebeens became very popular and important, most notably for single women who were running these establishments as a way of generating income. These would be for example single black women whose men had gone off to Johannesburg to work in the mines. Shebeens also became very important cultural spaces where intellectuals, musicians and artists met to discuss things — like a form of an open studio really. Our location with the collective, in terms of working space-wise, was in the interest of re-activating these ideas in the historical sense but also to try and re-imagine a way of moving forward with those ideas.

  EDO: You are talking about the importance of the transformation of the shebeen which I think is crucial for two factors. What the shebeen represents during apartheid is a space in which people could gather together, but apart from celebrating and drinking it was also a political space of engagement. You reinvented the format, in a way, to turn it into this plural, more community-oriented cultural space of exchange. Both to empower the local actors, the local agents, but also to bring and to try to dislocate the main focus of cultures in Cape Town and the main cultural activity from the city to the outskirts of the city.

  KWL: Yes. To give a bit of context: Gugulethu is a township that was created to house black South Africans who were moved from wherever they lived. So when the Group Areas Act came in, blacks were dispossessed and relocated — if they lived in the city of Cape Town. For example, there is a neighbourhood called District Six which was completely demolished, or another one called Loyolo Village, where all the residents were moved to Gugulethu. My family was moved from an area called Athlone, as this area was then designated for coloured people. There is another one in Johannesburg called Sophiatown, which was very important because it is where a lot of musicians and writers came together specifically and hung out within those shebeen spaces. If anyone has further interest to see an example of this, look at a film called Come Back Africa (1959) by Lionel Rogosin, which includes a documentary scene where Miriam Makeba as a young woman is singing amongst a group of writers who were called the Drum Writers. So within this kind of geopolitics of Cape Town, and South Africa at large, we were interested in the urban space and urban planning and how these affected the lives of black people for the past half-century, and also how these are still real experiences that affect people in the day-to-day post-1994, which is considered the official end of apartheid. We were interested in re-activating that space and creating a space for dialogue with other artists who created platforms, invited people for film screenings, music gigs and poetry readings, amongst others.

  EDO: There is something very interesting about the formation of Gugulective that started in 2007 and includes artists like Zipho Dayile, Unathi Sigenu, who I believe was, together with you, one of the main conceptualisers of the project, alongside Temba Tsoti, Khanyisile Mbongwa and D
athini Mzayiya. The interest in the space, the role of the township in a cultural scene that, perhaps, was dislocated or marginalised was one of your preoccupations, as was the idea of making that composition of the periphery central to the discourse of the artistic community — both in terms of the producer but also the possible audience that was linked to that. One of the aspects of your work that has always been one of my interests is your sense of tradition, your sense of not being pioneers, right? This is one of the things that was extremely important in your conceptualisation of the Gugulective and in the way that you wanted to engage with the socio-historical process that was taking place in South Africa at that point. Ten years after the end of the regime, in a moment in which perhaps the conditions of the community in places like Gugulethu did not change as much as people expected, in a moment in which one can create an account and say: “Well, we can think about what happened and how that was extremely important”. And I remember that you occasionally said that you did not have a manifesto but you have a declaration of intention.

  KWL: We had a statement of intent, which you could say is a manifesto. But it kept changing because we did not want to theorise ahead too much so that we could leave some room for spontaneity. This is something that reoccurs in my individual work as well. So we kept rewriting the statement of intent as we were discovering things because we would rather do something and then reflect and theorise it, than theorise ahead. It reads as follows:

  We would like to introduce ourselves as the creative intellectualism of a society whose value system is grounded on notions of community or the collective. We do not claim to be pioneers. No! Like every aspect of a society or community we have inherited this, our acute collective eyes spies a grave lack of change in this times of transformation. This lack of change also has a stance in spaces outside of our communities, even in institutions of higher learning. Post-apartheid South Africa is failing to realise transformation. Such an exhibition provided space for interrogation as alternative for this lack of change. At this point in this country’s history we need to ask ourselves how do we learn and teach each other that the ideologies that divide us are not necessarily a basis for ostracism or prejudice.

  That is an extract from a bigger text.

  EDO: So then almost twelve years down the line, to what extent can you still recognise yourself in that?

  KWL: Well, I think my work has always been rooted in the collective experiences I had. And this is why I chose to start with this work. Even though I continued making work as an individual, I was always meditating on the collective experience. For example, a piece I made is called Remembering the Future of a Hole as a Verb and it was part meditation on the experience of the digging that I mentioned earlier in the context of the performance piece Ukuguqula iBatyi, but also thinking about this hole that presented this skeleton, which speaks to so many things within the context of South Africa — in terms of transformation, in terms of history, in terms of openness. When I did this work a number of things came up — for example, even today there are a lot of missing political activists who were murdered either by the apartheid government or by the ruling party itself, and their grave sites may never be discovered. These missing people still have to be discovered. Families are still searching for their loved ones, many died in South Africa, many died in exile. In a way the collective has always been with me, and the sensibility that I have learned from working collectively is something that I will always carry forth even though I might not be working within a collective at a particular given time.

  EDO: There is a sense of the digging, this archaeological research, in the whole of your work. Another aspect that we see in your murals, as we see in many of your works, is this sense of the erasure, what it means to write but also to erase. Perhaps we can take the opportunity to look at that and talk a bit more about what that means in your practice.

  KWL: Within the collective, a lot of our work was concerned with the socio-political, but also institutions of power; including the art world itself and how it was structured, its lack of transformation, both racially but also in terms of gender dynamics, queer politics and its lack of representation of the society at large. But we were also concerned with institutions of higher learning. We made works that spoke directly to these issues but we also held workshops with young people. We organised film screenings that were politically oriented, for example, and we would have conversations and dialogues that were very pedagogically driven. And it is interesting that the country is currently on fire where students are standing up because of the lack of transformation in many spheres.

  Personally, I took an approach where I was interested in the writing of history. In the case of the discovery of the bones in this residential area, for example, neighbours came and spoke about their experiences and gave testimonies. Because a lot of people did not believe I had discovered the bones, they thought I had planted them. So elderly people came to give evidence to say “no, this was the context of the time”, “it was in the early 1970s”, and so on. I became interested in both the importance of oral history but also in unwritten narratives. At that time when we were working with the Gugulective, I worked for a television production company and I was given a script by this woman — it is still something that gives me chills when I think about it. It is about someone who had been re-classified in South Africa from “black” to “coloured” in order to be upwardly mobile, both socially and economically. And they had to change their name and relinquish all relations with their family and went to Cape Town to start a new life. Only on his death-bed did he tell his wife and children his real name or his given name. The woman I was working for, the producer happened to be his child, and she gave me it and said, “Would you be interested to develop the script?” They wanted to turn it into a feature film. But that never really happened because I quit working for them for other reasons. However, I was really interested in the erasures of history but also histories that had yet to be told.

  EDO: Your practice is multi-faceted, and includes performances, as well as mural drawings that form an extended way of writing; creative writing as a political gesture. And you have mentioned a script and also narratives for movies that you will never make; stories yet to be told that are also part of what you do. I remember talking to you, years ago, about some of the drawings that we presented at the Arte inVisible at ARCO in Madrid in 2009, how certain characters keep coming to your practice, and how these consistent narratives are possibly trying to challenge what you have said at other occasions, like the institutional amnesia that is both part of the country and also part of the culture.

  KWL: How I came into the art world as I exist in it now was the result of a series of moments. I grew up amongst a theatrical family, spending time at rehearsals, watching the construction of stage plays. So I developed a stronger interest in theatre and film than in the fine arts. I did voiceovers for radio commercials as a teenager that I think really came back in my work. For example, in 2009, before this work was even made, I had a pirate radio station that was about the idea of occupying the public space in an immaterial sense, and I had a newspaper publication which was distributed for free. Both were a direct response to Naomi Klein’s No Logo. So it was about how to manifest theory. I took the book and I presented it as a project in a literal sense. This was Recess: Street Credit, 2009. Then, I had a soccer tournament with various political groups which I was flirting with at the time: the anarchists, the black nationalists and the leftists/socialists. I was flirting with these various kinds of activist groups and became interested in bringing people together. So the soccer tournament became a way to do this, amongst other things. But in terms of the writing, of script writing, it is all based on experiences I had as a child and it was a way of working out how to include these in my practice.

  Figure 1. © Kemang Wa Lehulere (2013) A Homeless Song (Sleep is for the Gifted), video still.

  The video entitled A Homeless Song (2012), as an example, I co-choreographed with a friend, K
hayelihle Gumede, and we worked with four dancers. It was a way of still meditating on the digging piece because it is something that I always go back to, and this time using a stage play that I had seen as a teenager — but a video of it, not the live staging — which was The Island. I have always had this image, an opening scene of a play, where you have two characters who are punished and have to move soil from one end to the next in this continuous kind of absurdity. But what was interesting when I went back to the play is that I discovered that the play had no written script for a number of years as the script could be used as evidence for the political nature of the play at a time of gross censorship in South Africa. So when John Kani, Winston Ntshona and Athol Fugard staged the play in South Africa in 1973, later in London and New York, they did not have a script because it could have been used against them. So again, it was in line with my interest in the unwritten and also in a certain kind of erasure, but also in strategies of how people work around these things. A Homeless Song is a way of trying to activate that, using the image from this play but also meditating on past works as well.

  EDO: The skeleton and the bones: I don’t know if you can tell us a little bit about what is happening apart from moving objects from one side to the other. They are moving bones which also connects with the earlier piece.