9 August 2016
Route starting point – 12:00 Washington Street between Mendi Avenue and Jungle Walk, Langa
- Koleka Putuma – #MudatongoeMalfuxion | 20 min
- African Dance Theatre – Pantsula San’ | 15 min
- iQhiya – The Portrait | ongoing during Session 3
- Langa’libalele – Singamazwi Obawomkhulu | 25 min
- Kenan Petersen – Anton Kannemeyer | 15 min
- Hi!jACK Collective – Pot of Gold | 15 min
- Nolufefe Ntshuntshe – Caught in the Crossfire | 15 min
- Vasiki Creative Citizens – What Do I Tell History? | ongoing during Session 3
- Langa Arts Association – Amaza | 15 min
- Breeze Yoko – Magwalandini | ongoing during Session 3
- DJ Mighty – Healing BlackSpirits Vinyl Sound | 2 hours, from 15:00
Curator’s Note: What Will We Tell Freedom?
There are questions that ask years and there are years that ask questions.
As we wrestle to make emancipatory history, can we draw a line between June 16 1976 and the Rhodes Must Fall Movement? Is the dream differed? Between ‘being’ and ‘becoming’, between object ‘unreal’ bodies and subject ‘real’ bodies, when death and black remain synonymous, then and now-when will we bring Utopia home? When will No-Bodies, the non-recognised bodies that are in literal existential limbo no longer perpetually negotiate and jive for their preservation?
Our attempt to trace and activate our present personality rests in “Kwa-Langa” meaning place of “Langalibalele” – chief and renowned rainmaker who in 1873 was imprisoned on Robben Island for rebelling against the Natal government. We tease out our curatorial practice, in this instance, from the spirit of Langalibalele; that is we attempt REIGN-MAKING premised on memory, lived experiences and educated hope in the quest to cultivate the art of living [not dying], to unlock a system of knowledges, representations, and practices that imagine, direct and act upon bodies, spaces and flows.
As Octavia Paz in “Towards the Poem” puts it, “when history sleeps, it speaks in dreams: on the brow of the sleeping people, the poem is a constellation of blood!” It might no longer be what but how are we thinking.
What is the time now beyond our embodied resistance, from Sharpeville to Rhodes Must Fall?; when names become recitations, fleeting memories, vague imprints of past mass gatherings, agitation, embodied resistances of past, present and future-what remains? Tell Freedom: Memories of Africa wrote Peter Abrahams; Tell Freedom! What is the time now? What do we tell freedom?
Khanyisile Mbongwa
Curator – What Will We Tell Freedom?