Spirals: Post-Preservation on Friday, 28th of May

Circulating ideas about art, art practise and archival engagement between two lively, dynamic, yet different global north and global south settings, the Spirals series draws Berlin based art practitioners, curators and scholars into conversation with scholars and students based in Cape Town.

We are excited to host Talya Lubinsky, an artist from Johannesburg, currently based in Berlin. Her talk is titled, Permanence, Decay and the politics of Post-preservation. In it she discusses her exhibition,Marble Dust (2020), as a way of considering the politics and poetics of disintegration and decay in reconfiguring our approaches to heritage management. The exhibition focuses on a particular cemetery archive in Mamelodi, South Africa, as a node for investigating what is at stake when the ostensible durability of stone memorials is placed in tension with the ephemerality of disintegrating paper, and indeed, disintegrating bones. Processes of decay and disintegration are framed not as loss, but as productive material transformation. Thinking through the limits and potentials of what Caitlin De Silvey calls ‘post-preservation’ (2017), Lubinsky explores the ontologies of the material qualities of commemorative forms and in so doing, complicates relationships between living and dead, nature and culture, absence and presence.

Dr Duane Jethro is the discussant. 

Join us via Zoom on Friday 28 May 3-4:30pm (SAST) by following the Spirals Zoom link
(Meeting ID: 987 6907 4253/Passcode: 169097).