As a collaborative space, LAPA facilitates residencies as a form of artistic research. It invites and develops modes of research and collaboration with artists working in the continent and diaspora. Learn more about the artists in residence research projects below:
Working in collaboration as an artistic duo, Wyssolela Moreira and Anita Sambanje, used their time at LAPA to explore the notion of rituals of passage.
Having noticed that these rituals follow patterns, this led them to thinking about life cycles and transitions, and the role of the Dikenga Cosmogram to map the journey of an individual's life. Their research at LAPA is based on traditional and contemporary rituals of passage and healing within Africa and its diaspora, with focus on spiritual systems from the ancient region of the Bakongo.
Portable Paradise
Our residency envisioned how the flat reed box, a common percussive instrument in Uganda, works. Seeds encased in reeds and bark cloth, rattle against each other in echoic memory.
In the Midst is a study of living, artistic duo Liz Kobusinge and Darlyne Komukama ask: How are we verbalising the things that are most crucial to us? What sound will these things make when they bump into each other? Or when we pursue release/peace/ease/joy/always reaching, always stretching? What shape is this sound taking in our bodies? How do these shapes we throw, layer onto our collective histories? What are our bodies aching to remember? What does it look like for us to place pieces of the survival we carry within us in new places, alongside other paradises? We find out, together.
In The Midst
IIII aka 2+2=5 or, the Brixton No Jazz Society is a research project to mirror the journey of my ancestors to address ideas around refuge and migration, home, and collaboration.
What I have done with the tools of music, graffiti and urban practice, tools that may be read as ‘not originating on the continent’, is to inform them with my own heritage as a black Zimbabwean, and as an African. One of my long-term projects links my passion for modern anti-establishment expressions such as hip hop, punk, reggae and jazz to the poetry, healing traditions and travails of my Lemba/ black Jewish ancestry.
2+2=5 AKA Brixton No Jazz Society
OUR BODIES ARE CLOCKS MADE OF WATER is an open window into the residency process by artist blk banaana (Duduetsang Lamola).
She asks how collage might perform as a method for visualising the re-construction of the ‘fragmented self’, and by extension, the histories and trajectories produced by this state. She reconsiders the ways in which ‘We’ might approach identity construction as a process of deep imagination and re-coding.
‘OUR’ BODIES ARE CLOCKS MADE OF WATER when do ‘We’ belong?
LAPA exists as a project space through conviviality, interjection, development and collaboration.
We host and share space with organisations, individuals and other professionals with like-minded missions and projects. LAPA functions as a co-working space, reading room and residency. This is adaptable to host forms of conversational programming, workshops and presentations. Ko Lapeng Image Gallery
Food is a system of thinking, of sensing and a process at work in the world.
LAPA makes space for projects on plate experiments. Here we think about ingredients, food systems and the senses of home.
This is led by food researcher Langelihle Mthembu.
Lapa Food Image Gallery
Working in tandem with the artist's collaborations and research, we host a reading room for a deeper study of the wider practices of artistic and cultural practices.
The Reading Room is developed through artist's research focus, fictional and non-fictional books as well as critical and historical publications on practices of culture, art, design, architecture and more.
Lapa Reading Room Image Gallery
