Episode 3
Listen to Season 3, Episode 3 of The ICA Podcast, featuring cultural worker Qondiswa James!
We sit down with James to talk through her provocative 2022 performance We are everywhere – comprising a public intervention in Cape Town’s Company’s Garden, a film, and a battle rap by James’s developing alter ego, the tragic clown – which interrogates invisibility through acts of witnessing, reflection and disruption. James invites us to consider socio-political functions of public art interventions and how these can be mobilised towards transgression.
Listen on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Podcast Addict, on our website; or wherever you find podcasts.
Qondiswa James, We are everywhere. 2022 ICA Live Art Festival. Photos by Xolani Tulumani.
Qondiswa James is a cultural worker living in Cape Town. She is an award-winning theatre-maker, performance artist, film and theatre performer, installation artist, writer, arts facilitator and activist who recently completed her Masters in Live Art, Interdisciplinary and Public Art through the Institute for Creative Arts, University of Cape Town. She has staged public art interventions at the ICA’s Infecting the City and Live Art Festivals. She has directed theatre works including A Faint Patch of Light (winner of a 2019 Standard Bank Ovation Award) and her original play A HOWL IN MAKHANDA at the Virtual National Arts Festival 2020. Most recently, she staged a reading of an original play script, She Is Alone, as part of the Baxter Theatre Centre’s pilot project, the Masambe Theatre’s Writers’ Lab 2021.
Qondiswa James, We are everywhere. 2022 ICA Live Art Festival. Photo by Xolani Tulumani.
About The ICA Podcast
The Podcast – launched in July 2020 – emerged out of the ICA's 2019 publication Acts of Transgression: Contemporary Live Art in South Africa and extends the work begun by the book through conversations with the creators and curators of Live Art. Each episode is alive with music and audio from artists’ performances, and the weight and emotion of their personal stories.
Season 1 looked at the bodies of work of 8 diverse artists. In Season 2, each episode focused on a single performance, and the creative processes that brought them into being. Catch up on any episodes you may have missed on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.
Season 3 – hosted by writer Nkgopoleng Moloi – explores 7 performances featured at the 2022 ICA Live Art Festival. Listen to each artist bring their immersive and richly layered performance to life, and reflect along the way on how their upbringing has shaped their practice.
The 7 episodes of Season 3 dive into:
I AM by Tandile Mbatsha
Between my finger and thumb by Asemahle Ntlonti
We are everywhere by Qondiswa James
Ingoduko yamaNkazana (The Return of the Home of Harlots) by Lukhanyiso Skosana
UkuNqula kukuThandaza by Nkosenathi Koela
Ifu Elimnyama: The Dark Cloud by Russel Hlongwane; and
Reclaiming the Poetics of Indigenous Horns by Kolawole Gbolahan.
Looking ahead
In Episode 4 we'll be speaking to actress, performance artist, vocalist and theatre-maker Lukhanyiso Skosana. Join us then!
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Qondiswa James, We are everywhere. 2022 ICA Live Art Festival. Photo by Xolani Tulumani.