The three-day Power Talks Durban programme was divided, thematically, into Provocation (day one), Reimagining (day two), and Reflection (day three). Guests were provided only a cursory insight into how these three days and themes would unfold, which engendered an air of intrigue but also uncertainty.
The role of provocateur was undertaken by Ismail Farouk, the director of Art for Humanity, an art-based, non-profit organisation at the Durban University of Technology (DUT). Farouk led an uncomfortable discussion, in an unsettling site, with most of the people participating having clearly arrived with high defences. Farouk’s stated intent was to unsettle colonial land relations, mappings, and architectures of power. In the debrief at the conclusion of the first day, one participant characterised it as ‘not good, not bad, but strange'.
On the second day, the role of animateur was assumed by Russel Hlongwane, a Durban-based cultural producer specialising in curatorship, writing, research, and design. Hlongwane endeavoured to re-orient guests with umlahlankosi, a plant from the south coast of KwaZulu-Natal traditionally used to find and guide lost spirits from their place of demise back home. Hlongwane revealed the day’s theme to be Umkhombandlela, which is a Zulu phrase meaning ‘to show the way’. Hlongwane’s session proved auspicious, as an attendee made a request to have Durban’s cultural power relations mapped out for him.
The Chairman on Mahatma Gandhi Road proved a most appropriate venue for the task of reimagination. The Chairman is part indoor-outdoor restaurant and bar, part social experiment and art project; the venue itself is a reimagined space in what is potentially the most economically vibrant urban precinct in Kwazulu-Natal.
Hlongwane was asked by the co-curator of the Durban Power Talks to remind guests that some of them represented problematic sites of power within Durban’s cultural economy. Hlongwane had difficulty wresting space away from participants who claimed disproportionate attention and allowing those who had barely spoken the opportunity to be heard.
Hlongwane’s observation following the first tea break was: ‘I don’t think we’ve confronted the power in this room.’ Unfortunately, this state of affairs obtained even at the conclusion of the Umkhombandlela session. Nevertheless, other gains were made. Hlongwane facilitated a process whereby commitments were elicited from the various stakeholders in the room for practical support in the form, for example, of mentorships for emerging creatives, business advice and grant-proposal guidance, and the provision of spaces in which to exhibit, study, or run programmes.
On day three, Nocebo Bucibo assumed the role of reflecteur. A photography lecturer at the Durban University of Technology, Bucibo curated an exhibition of her student’s photographs in the Diakonia Council of Churches’ Denis Hurley Hall in Durban Central. Bucibo invited participants to sit in silent observation of the image that most captivated their attention. Several rotations were facilitated over the course of the morning to provide participants with the opportunity to engage with several artworks, after which a discursive debriefing was held in plenary.
This sharing, initiated on the third and last day of an emotionally charged programme, opened the space for guests to share, in some instances quite vulnerably, the challenges – personal and professional – they experience as creatives working in Durban. Perhaps to help make sense of this programme, which had proven to be quite fraught, Bucibo posed a question to representatives of the Goethe-Institut about the motive for the selection of Durban as a site for implementation of the Power Talks programme. The response from the Goethe-Institut representative was: ‘Why not Durban?’ This answer was not well received by the Durban curatorial team, who ostensibly perceived this as an attempt to evade the question. They pressed the Goethe-Institut to provide a more substantive response or else leave the room. An interjection at this point reminded those present that everyone there had been invited – to share, to be vulnerable, and to contribute. The observation was also made that Durban is an important space for the hosting of dialogues such as this one on power, especially in light of the recurrent calls to decentralise power so that cultural opportunities and resources are not overwhelmingly centred in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
