LIVE ART NETWORK AFRICA GATHERING 16-18 February 2023

The Gathering conference programme included four conversations:

Session 1: Pan-African and International Contexts

The session focused on the need to develop and sustain a Pan-African Context that is generative of Live Art work coming from the African Continent. It considered International Contexts that are also crucial for the sustaining of African artists and the conversation with the Diaspora but which also present challenges for the African artist. The speakers for this session were  Divine Fuh and N'Goné Fall.

Key questions included:

• What are the possibilities of Pan-Africanism as a unifying framework?
• What practices and guidelines can be reflected upon to promote a more sustainable flow of work within the continent?
• How do Live Art practitioners respond to the setstructures and limitations of international borders, the rise of nationalism, increased surveillance and enclosure?
• In what ways can we tighten ties between practitioners across geographical boundaries?

Session 2: Dissemination - Festivals and Writing

The session considered the distribution and dissemination of Live Art to African audiences with a particular focus on writing and festivals. The panel was hosted by Khanyisile Mbongwa and Mlondi Zondi. Together they explored:

• What opportunities exist to allow African artists to present their work on the continent? How can these be developed to serve local audiences?
• What platforms exist for a rigorous engagement with Live Art and how do audiences access such platforms?
• What conferences and publications exist that focus on Live Art, African journalists, writers and academics?
• The session will consider the distribution and dissemination of Live Art to African audiences with a particular focus on writing and festivals.

Session 3: LANA website presentation

The session comprised a presentation of the LANA website by ICA Fellow Refilwe Nkomo and ICA director Jay Pather. Speakers offered a walkthrough of the potential website and provided the community with an opportunity to reflect and provide feedback.

The session will comprise a presentation of the LANA website, which is in development, by ICA Fellow Refilwe Nkomo and ICA director Jay Pather. Speakers will offer a walkthrough of the website and provide the community with an opportunity to reflect and provide feedback.

Key questions included:

• What are the challenges of the website as a form of archiving and dissemination?
• What additions to the website may be considered?
• How can the broader community contribute to the website’s development?
• How else should the network exist and continue to be reignited?

Session 4: Spaces of possibility - formal education, research, workshops and residencies.

The session considered different methods through which Live Art is taught and shared on the continent. Taking into account both formal and informal domains, speakers considered processes that are necessary to sustain the transmission of knowledge. Speakers for the panel were Bernard Akoi-Jackson and Jelili Atiku

Formal education and Research:

• What forms of teaching occur outside of the academy?
• How are these forms given salience in terms of their contribution?
• Are there curricula that focus on the study of Live Art on the continent? What successes can be gleaned from such curricula?

Workshops

• What is the role of performance art workshops? How can these be incorporated within art education?

Residencies

• Are there residencies that focus on Live Art on the continent? What successes can be gleaned from them?
• What tensions exist between the goals of organisations offering residency opportunities against the goals of practitioners receiving them? How are these negotiated?
• Artists Talk Back

There are as many different kinds of Live Art as there are practitioners, catalysed by varied experiences, impulses and methods. In this session, artists Kenza Barrada, Qondiswa James and Nelisiwe Xaba (included in the LANA Gathering programme) reflected on the processes that inform the creation of their works.

Performance at the Gathering included:

• Retch by Qondiswa James

Retch is an in-process showcase of new experimental work by Qondiswa James. Part confessional text, object theatre, and sound play, the work is a conversation about grief, heavy drinking and the theatre industry.

• FAKE N.E.W.S by Nelisiwe Xaba & Mocke Jansen Van Veuren

FAKE N.E.W.S., an initiative of InfluenZArt NPC, is a multidisciplinary project integrating performance and digital art. It explores pertinent concepts of misinformation, conspiracy theories and science denialism that are rampant on social media and traditional media platforms. Focusing on the contemporary South African socio-political and cultural context, the project seeks to process aspects of media politics as well as incorporate a critique of the emergent predominance of virtual presence that has characterised the new-pandemic-normal.

FAKE N.E.W.S. pushes boundaries, provokes important conversations and proposes new avenues of thought. The development of this iteration of the project was conducted through workshops involving artists and students in Cape Town. Presented by InfluenZArt in collaboration with the Institute for Creative Arts and funded by the National Arts Council.

• E Don Tey Wey We Dey by Jelili Atiku

E Don Tey Wey We Dey negotiates spaces for social camaraderie and seeks to create a social intervention in public space. The performance employs techniques of walking and sensing where audiences engage in collective healing and renewed energy, strength and enthusiasm, connection and recovery of indigenous peoples’ memories of their legacies. The work references the South African Group Areas Act of 1950, which influenced forced removals of the Black and Colored community from Die Vlakte and the town centre and present-day Cloetesville between 1964 – 1970 in Stellenbosch. The title, E Don Tey Wey We Dey is a phrase in Nigerian Pidgin-English, which means; we have been existing for a long time.

• Black Card by Zora Snake

It is not a title, nor a show, but a state of being. It is a poetic way to reach the light of peoples’ struggles for liberation and to transform the performative space through the historical ideas that have made South Africa a complex country with problems that threaten to ruin its emancipation. The artist writes: “When I learned of my official visit to South Africa for the 2022 ICA Live Art Festival, the burden of my dreams since my school years in Cameroon woke up. Like a grain of sand in the eye, A Dry White Season by André Brink studied in high school, and the powers of Zulu dance since my youth, I came into contact with the man who today founded a part of my hopes in Africa: Nelson Mandela.”

• Destinations - with anthem for the union... and where, from birth, would they have berthed, should a dearth of destinations have prevailed? by Bernard Akoi-Jackson.

During Ghana’s independence from Britain in 1957, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of the newly formed nation-state, declared that his country’s independence would mean nothing if it was not intrinsically linked with the struggle of all of the other possible states within Africa that were yet to embark on their quests for freedom from colonial oppressors. Indeed, the winds of change blew throughout the continent and liberation became rife. Nkrumah was totally dedicated to the Pan-African project and sought the unification of the continent and its Diasporas on principles of solidarity, equality and pride in an African Personality that as of necessity, had to be constructed out of the complexity and diversity of the continent. Several bodies since have sought to keep these hopes alive. The erstwhile Organisation of African Unity (OAU) has through many failures and challenges, now morphed into the African Union (AU), also bedevilled with a variety of challenges. In DESTINATIONS - With Anthem for The Union (…and where, from birth, would they have berthed, should a dearth of destinations have prevailed?), the public is encouraged to ponder on some of these concerns, whilst they move slowly through the city, observing remnants and ruins of some of the past dreams of our mothers and fathers, with the hope that our futures would not become as bleak as our present.

• Boujloud: Man of Skins by Kenza Berrada

Kenza Berrada discovered theatre at the age of ten. More than twenty years later, she covers her body with sheepskins in "Boujloud" (the man of skins), her first work as a playwright. The stage is the place where she feels free to intuitively express herself and explore her interest in the relationships between language and how different publics engage with it. Boujloud: Man of Skins addresses the subject of abuse and incest, through the concrete questions that arise for those who decide to break the silence and speak out. Berrada questions; how do we make ourselves heard? Is there an appropriate time to share experiences of abuse, to be heard and listened to?

• Koulounisation by Salim Djaferi

What does it mean to speak of the “Algerian War”? How do you say “colonization” in Arabic? What does language do to us exactly? How does it shape history, politics, and our collective stories? Salim Djaferi investigates these questions, piecing together and taking apart the vocabulary of colonialism as he recounts personal and historical narratives. Koulounisation is a research-based installation and performance work that explores issues of colonization, with a particular focus on Algerian-French relations. Through this work, Djaferi merges traditional theatre tools with play to promote a sensory relationship with the audience. The work questions our relationship to truth, memory, transmission, history and language.

• The Black Circus of the Republic of Bantu by Albert Ibokwe Khoza and Princess Zinzi Mhlongo

Exhibitions showcasing artefacts, as well as people, were popular in the western world during the colonial period. This work questions how we deal with a shameful legacy that echoes into the present. It questions whether we should seek to erase it, bury it in the history books, or resurrect and acknowledge it. The Black Circus of the Republic of Bantu reflects on the early recorded study of Black Bodies as a “different species” to the white man. The artists write: “We pay tribute to the spirit of Sarah Baartman and the many Africans whose lives and bodies were turned into a spectacle for white supremacist pleasure. We pay homage to our ancestry who gave up everything for the benefit of the world at large.”

• L'Opera du villageois by Zora Snake

L’Opera du Villageois is performed as a ritual that foregrounds materials of gold and salt to tell the narrative of European plunder of African wealth. The work explores the silence of colonised subjects — silence as resistance but also as protection against death. The artist notes; “This work recalls our ancestors who were mute, not for fear of speaking, but for fear of dying.”

LANA Gathering Programme

LANA Gathering 2023 Album

~ 20 February 2023 ~