LAPA at Breezeblock
29 Chiswick Street, Brixton, 2019, Johannesburg
The programme on this day is offered in collaboration with LAPA, housed in the Breezeblock Building in the suburb of Brixton. LAPA is an experimental thinking space open to various publics to offer a space for gathering, shared ideation and reflections on restorative artistic and communal Pan-African histories and practice. Along with offering artist residencies, LAPA’s intentions are to initiate intersecting conversations between artists, communities and cultural organisations.
10h00 Exhaustion
Panel Discussion in collaboration with LAPA, Breezeblock
This panel is centered around the question of working with, in proximity to, against or through institutional bodies at various and multiple levels of scale. This is the work of working across, working in many different and concurrent directions, in ways that extend our capacities. This exhaustion is work, work that is working on things and making things happen. This is the work of existing across many registers, and multiple hyphenated identities. Where does the work stop and the other work begin? How do we begin to recognize forms of labour that are often misrecognised as not work - the work of care, the home, mothering, and what falls under the frames of “women’s work” that stretches beyond the capacities and frameworks of nine-to-five work. How do we begin to establish, rethink and reorient ourselves to ideas of work?
Panelists are invited to open up a discussion for participants to engage with questions of work, relationships, proximities to institutions, bodies and stakeholders that set the frame for what work we do and how we work. This question of work is also tied to questions of time - how we use our time productively, capitalise on time, waste time, spend time, buy back our time and try to use that time to generate other ways of working altogether. Exhaustion in this frame also reclaims the generative potentiality of an exhaustive orientation to work - intimacy, relation, cooperation, non-cooperation, vulnerability, radical detachment. Our panelists are asked to speak from their various hyphenated positions to frame a broader discussion of the landscapes of operating around, beside and across these various, and often powerful stakeholders. The premise of Exhaustion might also offer a vernacular of the process of doing/making work that radicalizes detachment. At both levels of what exhaustion implies, we note the ways that the public and private space of work, the person and their work operate in the interactions between the work itself and its re/presentation, as well as the relationships artists hold with critical stakeholders. This discussion hopes to offer an encounter with that intimacy.
Panelists: Dee Marco, Tiffany Ebrahim and Tammy Langtry
Facilitator: Naadira Patel
12h30 Lunch, Food by Lady Day
Food researcher, music selector & social entrepreneur Langelihle "Lady Day" Mthembu is currently on a personal journey to learn the different oral histories of ingredients, recipes and food. Lady Day is currently investigating how, when displaced, we use food for comfort, to create & reimagine home recipes and share them with our communities. In her reimagining lives the recreation of our memories of home and possibilities of what was gained and lost along the way. Through a gastrostomy-centered approach and practice, she attempts to create intimate social spaces to share in people, music and food. Food tells a history of the meeting and sharing of people but also of the intimate memories of a home. The phrase ‘a home cooked meal’ references food with soul and hints at our ability to heal ourselves.
14h00 Zine Workshop with INVADE- Collective
LAPA, downstairs space.
Following the panel on Exhaustion in the morning, the zine making workshop will be a space and moment to respond and reflect in more embodied ways to question and engage ideas arising from the morning conversation. The process, facilitated by INVADE-, will allow participants to use the process of making – to cut, to copy, to paste, to collage, to write, to ask, to fold, to unfold, to re-fold, to ask over and over again, as a means to process conversations that are layered and complex.
INVADE- is a collective of three queer black women - Queenzela Mokoena, Omphemetse Ramatlhatse, and Nyakallo Phamuli who are a collective of artists and cultural workers that specialise in Riso printing, silkscreen printing, book design, and new forms of publications. INVADE- is fundamentally interested in the value of knowledge and power in different spaces. INVADE- creates and collects content around gender, sexuality, social cultures, power and positions in spaces, race, as well as the personal and public narratives embedded in the South African experience. The collective grows from the idea of ‘invading’ different spaces with a thought, words, and beckoning that may or may have not often touched those specific spaces – ones that might challenge or re-inspire existing thought channels, ‘decided’ truths, or ways of being in that space.