Housed in the Breezeblock building in the suburb of Brixton, Johannesburg, LAPA is a place to gather, for collaboration, experimentation and developing new trajectories in artistic practice. LAPA makes its connection with community and asks what kind of potential could we encourage when we are housed together. Enacting the term LAPA, the residency becomes a space of communing to explore themes of home, family and place.
LAPA Season II
Open Call : Thursday, 16 June – Friday, 15 July 2022
Residency : 3 October – 5 December 2022
Residencies are critical support structures for artists and art professionals which prioritizes processes of thinking and being. The residency aims to support Pan-African artistic research and exchange, understanding the expansive history of Pan-Africanism as an ideology and practice.
In 2022 the open call extends within Africa to expand on the continental network and establish necessary travel and connection. Each artist spends time at LAPA in a self-managed research process, the resident artists will be provided with accommodation, working space, a modest stipend for living, travel and production expenses. They will work alongside other artists and professionals to develop on their research.
Evolving from the LAPA Season I residency, LAPA Season II invites two artists as an artistic duo or pair.
Working from Roger Robinson’s ‘A Portable Paradise’ (2022) and Albert Camus ‘Create Dangerously’ (1957), the residency wonders on theories and practices of collectivity, third spaces, shared inquiry and co-citizenship to consider art as a social practice. How do communities reclaim and redefine their inherent values?
Artists are welcome to use existing material and projects of interest through LAPA to build their research. Rather than be prescriptive, this invites challenges and redefinitions.
You might be working on ideas of communities of place and non-place, black radical imagination, post-independence histories or cultural memory.
For more details on the application and process, download the open call outline here:
The residency was launched in an initial phase in 2021 with an open call to two artists already based in South Africa. Both artists spent four months developing on theories and speculations on third spaces, sonic and colonial archives and digital processes.
blk banaana [Duduetsang Lamola,] is a South African visual artist working primarily in handmade and digital collage, video art and video installation. Her work explores the relationship between fragmentation and speculative reconstruction, questioning the absurdity in the production of reality by Western anthropologic and algorithmic forces. Within the LAPA residency, blk banaana produced a series of works on maternal ancestry and musings on the ocean as a site of memory.
“There is a deep interest in collecting materials, both contemporary and archival, such as vinyl records, books and posters, all of which feed into my work. Collecting and sampling rare obscure and archival material can be read not as a surface interest in ‘vintage’ but a collaboration, a counterpoint with the ancients or even engaging the voices and questions of antiquity.”
Tinofireyi Zhou (@tinofireyizhou) uses the Spoken and written Word, Street Art and Sound-based Intervention to engage and interrogate the world. Exploring themes based around the political and with a keen interest on the personal, he occupies creative landscapes and broadcasts the layers of beauty that are concealed beneath the concrete cover of a world in flux. Inspired by Ray Oldenburg’s thoughts on the ‘third space’, Zhou’s residency created a non-narrative and non-linear audio recording series to document the lives of Brixton residents. Brixton, not unlike all other parts of post-apartheid South Africa is a sophisticated mix of multiple communities existing separately and yet together within a single geographic setting.
LAPA 2021 JURY [CLICK EACH JURY IMAGE FOR MORE INFORMATION]
The first season of resident artists at LAPA were reviewed and selected by a jury who deliberated on the proposals with the interest in selecting artists developing new artistic research and contemporary practice as forms of living. They considered the neighbourhood and multiple communities of Brixton and how artistic practice might negotiate ways of being together. Read more on our jury below:
