[Dis]rupting, [mis]understanding, [un]learning and [re]membering—Lerato Shadi, Hamedine Kane and Euridice Zaituna Kala

Abstract

Ordinary activities, performed by billions of persons all over the globe every day in a myriad situations feature in live art interventions by Lerato Shadi, Hamedine Kane and Euridice Zaituna Kala, respectively South African, Mauritanian/Senegalese and Mozambican. The unobtrusive and intimate nature of their gestures may strike the reader as incommensurable with what is habitually understood by ‘knowledge production’ in institutionalized situations. Their gestures seem paradoxically counter-performative in the sense that they are not geared to ‘performance’ as understood in the neo-liberal corporate world, yet they are intimately pertinent to knowledge production as well as to contemporary art. This text suggests that critically positioned knowledge is acquired via bodily action as the artist’s body functions as a vehicle for memory, for perceiving by acting. Awareness of the body as a political entity brings awareness of the embodied specificity of knowledge and the egalitarian nature of intelligences. The processes of individuation set in motion are of particular interest to urgent Earth-wide concerns, namely the crucial need to [un]learn former thinking patterns preventing us from thinking outside of the colonial mind-set. Protesting the political circumstance of the processes determining the hegemonic standardization of knowledge is not an African prerogative, but, given the complex recent history of the continent, the political crystallizes here in particularly telling ways. In the three artist’s actions the everydayness of knowing or not knowing, the wisdom of [un]knowing and of misunderstanding is re-activated, re-cognized and re-membered in continual flux. They perform everyday resistance and disruption though commonplace gestures acted out in situations where collective ways of [un-]knowing may come about, as [un-]learning is discovered as a gesture of [re-]membering.

ACKNOWLEGEMENT

Research for this article was made possible by a post-doctoral fellowship from the University of the Free State, South Africa and by the Günther Uecker Institut, Schwerin, Germany.

Notes

1 In the context of contemporary art in South Africa the expression ‘live art’ refers to artists from the fine-art context actively intervening in public space or in spaces dedicated to contemporary art (Boulle and Pather 2019: 3).

2 Hannah Arendt (2002: 702, 711), for example, writes in reference to the 1968 student movements. As I write, in October 2020, I am under the shock of an ideologically motivated murder of a Parisian history teacher, Samuel Paty. Entirely unrelated, this incident occurred at a time of growing public impatience with the time-consuming process of knowledge advancement when understanding an as yet unknown virus and its effects on the global population. The coincidence of the two circumstances led French academia to deeply question its role in society.

3 Thaluki analyses work by Chuma Sopotela.

4 Moremogolo (Go Betlwa Wa Taola) (2016) and Motlhaba Wa Re Ke Namile (2016).

5 Shadi’s preoccupation with breath and choking seems to resonate ‘I can’t breathe’, a phrase that is today heard in worldwide protest against police brutality, but that has appeared in demonstrations protesting race-related incidents since 2014, following Eric Garner’s death.

6 Yvette Abrahams presents herself as feminist academic, economic historian and organic farmer before mentioning the institutions, government bodies and universities she has served.

7 Matsogo (2013) and Mabogo Dinku (2019).

8 Kane (n.d.) chooses this expression, which is used in French to refer to the South African Black Consciousness Movement. The authors he chooses are, among others, Frantz Fanon, Cheikh Anta Diop, James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

9 L’Université du Futur africain and l’École William Ponty at Sébikotane, thirty kilometres from Dakar city centre.

10 One such assembly took place at Sébikotane on 1 December 2019 and was attended by close to 300 locals.

11 They actively took part in militant experimental projects linked to the zone à défendre at Notre-Dame-des-Landes close to Nantes in France.

12 This is one of Hannah Arendt’s (2002) main preoccupations and features throughout all her main publications.

13 One of the authors of Publica[c]tion, Julie Nxadi, thus proclaims the necessity of ‘equality of chaos’ (2018: 4). The ramifications and the bifurcations of dialogue in tree-like complexity pervade her vividly pictorial text, a ‘Letter to the academy’ (ibid.). Imagined as an institution perched in the high branches of a tree, the academy is experienced as purposely ill adapted to the learning it is supposed to foster.

14 Titled Batho Ba Ha Ba Tlhaloganye (2019).

15 Titled Batho Ba Me (2020).

16 Incidentally, two days before the French government proclaimed the first lockdown in the COVID-19 pandemic, on 4 March 2020.

17 This thought has accompanied her during several itinerant projects: Sea[e]scapes and an archive-project conducted on Facebook referencing the impossible situation of migrant workers on the leg Maputo–Johannesburg titled Will See You in December … Tomorrow (2015).

18 ’An emancipated community is a community of story-tellers and translators’ (my translation).