contributors

Michael Shakib Bhatch

Michael Shakib Bhatch Lectures English and is a PhD Candidate in Afrofuturism and African Studies at the University of the Western Cape.

Blaq Pearl

was born and raised in the working class community of Beacon Valley, Mitchellʼs Plain, Cape Town. She is a gifted singer and writer, she also holds a degree in Psychology and Linguistics from the University of the Western Cape. She was the only female collaborating alongside 7 independent male artists, in the popular theatre production: AFRIKAAPS (HipHopera) which debuted at KKNK & ran at The Baxter Theatre. This production won several awards at Kyknet Fiestas. Her first poetry collection Karadaa!!! was published in 2015.

Francois Blom

was the organist at the Dutch Reformed Church, Stellenbosch West Congregation, for eleven years (until 2018). He was a member of Stellenbosch Camerata, under choral direction of Acáma Fick, from 1998 to 2002. Francois is also an actor, a cabaret pianist, a choral assistant and an accompanist.

Sindiswa Busuku

is an award-winning poet from Durban. Having been awarded a doctoral scholarship by the Graduate School for Arts and Social Sciences, she is currently reading for a PhD at Stellenbosch University. In 2016, she published her debut collection titled Loud and Yellow Laughter (Botsotso), a cross-genre assemblage of photographs, prose and poetry experimenting with memory and documentation. Sindiswa Busuku-Mathese is the interview editor of New Contrast: The South African Literary Journal She has published various poems in local and international poetry journals such as New Coin, New Contrast, Prufrock, Home is No Longer Here, Aerodrome, Illuminations and Dryad Press: Unearthed Anthology. Loud and Yellow Laughter is the winner of the 2018 Ingrid Jonker prize for poetry.

Mavambo Chazunguza

is a mbira expert who is carrying on the long mbira traditions of Zimbabwe.

Michael C Coldwell

is the artistic pseudonym of Michael Schofield, a photographer and multi-media artist. He is also a lecturer and media researcher at the University of Leeds and holds a PhD in photography. His eclectic work explores memory, illusion, spectrality and obsolescence in a variety of different media, often via representations of the changing cityscape. The artist has staged several solo exhibitions including Lost Leeds in 2019 and Residuum at Left Bank in 2017, which also served as the launch event for his critically acclaimed hauntology album CC-AM. Schofield is currently writing a book on ghosts and photography.

Shane Cooper

is a bassist, composer and producer based in Johannesburg, South Africa.  In 2013 he was selected as the Standard Bank Young Artist for Jazz in South Africa. In 2014 Oscillations won the South African Music Award (SAMA) for Best Jazz Album. As a composer for film Shane has written music for the award-winning documentaries Forerunners by Simon Wood, Orbis by Simon Wood, Port Nolloth: Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Felix Seuffert, and co-produced the orchestral recording of Kyle Shepherd’s score for the feature film Noem My Skollie.

Grayson Haver Currin

has written for Pitchfork since 2006. For a dozen years, he was the music editor of INDY Week; his work has also appeared in The New York Times, NPR, Spin, and Rolling Stone. He once ran a music festival and a record label, but now he just runs marathons.

Lindelwa Dalamba

teaches music history at the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Arts, Department of Music. She is an historian of jazz, focussing specifically on South African jazz history in the country and in exile during the apartheid years.

Derek Davey

is a sub-editor in the Mail & Guardian’s supplements department who occasionally puts pen to paper. He has irons in many metaphysical fires – music, mantras, mortality and moustaches. He has recently published his memoir, Three Foot Tiger.

Gabriel Germaine De Larch

is a writer and blogger writing their way through healing. Gabriel describes the basis of their writing: “Warrioring through every day to live life rather than just exist – living life writ large. Healing from trauma, living with depression and anxiety, one day at a time by recreating my self and what that means for the world around me. Speaking about things that society says we shouldn’t discuss, including my non-binary transgender, testosterone-fuelled journey.”

Ana Deumert

is Professor at the University of Cape Town. Her research program is located within the broad field of African sociolinguistics and has a strong transdisciplinary focus. She has worked on the history of Afrikaans (The Dynamics of Cape Dutch, 2004), co-authored Introducing Sociolinguistics (2009, with Rajend Mesthrie, Joan Swann and William Leap), the Dictionary of Sociolinguistics (2004, with Joan Swann, Rajend Mesthrie and Theresa Lillis), and published on mobile communication from a global perspective (Sociolinguistics and Mobile Communication, 2014). In addition, she is the editor of three collections: Germanic Standardizations – Past and Present (with Wim Vandenbussche, 2004), Structure and Variation in Language Contact (with Stephanie Durrleman-Tame, 2006), and The Sociolinguistics of Everyday Creativity (with Joan Swann, 2018, special issue of Language Sciences). Her current work explores the use of language in global political movements as well as the contributions decolonial thought can make to sociolinguistic theory. She is a recipient of the Neville Alexander Award for the Promotion of Multilingualism (2014) and the Humboldt Research Award (2016).

Phillippa Yaa De Villiers

is an award-winning writer and performance artist who performs her work nationally and internationally. She is noted for her poetry, which has been published in collections and in many magazines and anthologies, as well as for her autobiographical one-woman show, Original Skin, which centres on her confusion about her identity at a young age, as the bi-racial daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father who was adopted and raised by a white family in apartheid South Africa. “Because I wasn’t told that I was adopted until I was twenty, I lacked a vocabulary to describe who I am and where I come from, so performing and writing became ways to make myself up.” As Tishani Doshi observes in the New Indian Express: “Much of her work is concerned with race, sexuality, class and gender within the South African context.”

Sazi Dlamini

is a musicologist and composer in the South African township tradition. He lectures in Music at UKZN. He composes and performs on Nguni musical bows such as ugubhu, umakhweyana, umqangala, uhadi and builds musical instruments including flutes, harps and horns from bamboo, reed, horn, calabash and recycled materials/objects. In 2009, he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree by UKZN for his thesis South African Blue Notes: Bebop, Mbaqanga, Apartheid and the Exiling of a Musical Imagination.

Neville Dube

is a 24 year old gonzo journalist and photographer. His writing draws inspiration from life in Johannesburg and his own personal experiences. He has his finger on the pulse of modern art and lifestyle, while remaining heavily rooted in political cynicism, satire and social justice issues. Neville is currently working on publishing a coffee table book that zooms in on some of the more stand out experiences he has had in and around Joburg.

Aragorn Eloff

is the information and technology manager at New Frame. He occasionally writes articles on subversive theory and radical politics.

Garth Erasmus

was born in 1956, in Uitenhage. A visual artist and musician best known for his innovative use of materials, Garth has extensive experience as a facilitator and teacher. He has been featured in almost every major book survey of South African art since the late 1980s, and is well represented in the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute. More than any other South African artist, Erasmus unsettles the hegemonic, exclusionary constructions of African and coloured identity. By pursuing the ‘Khoisan question’, Erasmus enters cultural terrain that has been proclaimed as ‘primitivist’, off limits to the shallow Afropolitanisms of the trendy set.

Kerstin Ergenzinger

is a visual and sonic artist working across the fields of sculpture, sound, kinetics, light and drawing. The inextricable relations between body and world, perception and the perceived, sensing and sense making are central themes of her practice.

Ben Eyes

is a composer and sound artist working in the North of England. His work is typified by large, complex textures and sound collages using field recordings, heavily treated guitars, acoustic instruments and vintage analogue synthesisers. His performances combine video, immersive surround sound, live musicians and live audio manipulation. His interests lie in working outside the usual musical realms including collaborative work in theatre, performance art and film. Ben has recently completed a Masters by Research in Music Technology at the University of York entitled ‘Multimodal Performance Approaches in Electronic music’.

Katya Ganeshi

is a well known Indo-Russian poet. She is founder of a new literary style Overaggressive Masterpiecism. The edition of her book Blond Beast has brought to her popularity in all societies of vanguard and literary underground associations in Moscow. In poetry Katya Ganeshi continues to develop philosophical ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and Azsacra Zarathustra, as well as risky conceptual ideas of Antonin Artaud (The Theatre of Cruelty). Katya Ganeshi is persecuted in Russia as a free poet and independent performer. Katya was a finalist of the prestigious Moscow prize Nonconformism-2013.

Bnaya Halperin-Kaddari

is a musician and sonic artist. His work explores the intricate connections between sound and space, and music’s place-making abilities. His work has taken the form of concert music, improvisation performance and installation.

Adam Harper

is a musicologist and music critic specialising in historical and contemporary ideas surrounding ‘progressive’ music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and their technological platforms. He has written about new electronic and acoustic music spanning popular, classical and experimental styles for Tempo, the Wire, The Fader and Resident Advisor, and has been invited to lecture on the subject internationally, including at New York University, the University of Oxford, Oxford Brookes, the Darmstadt International Summer Course for New Music, the University of Nottingham and the University of East London, and at festivals such as Berlin’s CTM and 3HD festivals, Unsound in Krakow, Rewire in The Hague, Rokolectiv in Bucharest, Robot in Bologna and All Tomorrow’s Parties in Minehead. He is the author of Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Human Music-Making (Zero Books: 2011). Dr Harper received his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2014.

Khadija Tracey Heeger

was born in Cape Town and raised on the Cape Flats in the township of Hanover Park. She started performing when she was nine years old, her dream was to be an actress, but at 15, she started writing seriously and this is how she expresses herself now. She is a well-known and popular performance poet. In 2007 she was commissioned to write a multidisciplinary theatrical poetry piece in collaboration with indigenous soundscape artists, Khoikonnexion, for the Spier Poetry Festival. Beyond the Delivery Room is her first collection of poems.

Steven Craig Hickman

philosopher blogger; very intelligent guy in terms of articulation; a prolific Facebook blogger, and has his own WordPress blog as well: «Social Ecologies»—the latter’s first post dating from September 2012. He sometimes blogs about Nick Land, and occasionally has commented on Nick Land’s Weblog Xenosystems.

Jitsvinger

is an established Cape Flats-born conceptual writer, composer, guitarist, educator, musician, poet and performing artist. After the success of his debut album, Skeletsleutel, Jitsvinger has collaborated with classical musicians, jazz nominees, pioneers and legends, and has performed on stages and in festivals both locally in his home country of South Africa and internationally including Taiwan, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Chile. He has composed and written music for theatre productions and film, most notably Afrikaaps. Jitsvinger is a social commentator on issues concerning heritage, culture, and especially the Afrikaaps language.

Athi Mongezeleli Joja

is an art critic based in Johannesburg, South Africa. A member of the art collective Gugulective, he is currently studying toward his MFA at the University of the Witswatersrand on the critical practice of late critic Colin Richards. His writing has appeared in publications such as The Mail and Guardian, Art Throb, Contemporary And (C&), Chimurenga Chronic, and Africanah.

Zara Julius

is a multidisciplinary social practice artist, social researcher, and vinyl selector based in Johannesburg, South Africa. With a background in anthropology, religious studies and photography, her work is concerned with the relationship between aesthetics and culture, African futures, and the interplay of identity, faith, religion, urbanity, migration, race, and desire throughout Africa and its diaspora. Working with sound, video, performance and objects, Zara Julius’ practice involves the collection, selection and creation of archives through extensive research projects. As a vinyl selector, Zara’s sets reflect her desire to travel land, seas and time. Her collection explores organic and bass heavy sounds from Africa and the Diaspora. She selects vinyl regularly in Southern Africa, most notably at The Orbit Jazz Club, MTN Bushfire, Rocking the Daisies, Red Bull Music Festival and AFROPUNK Johannesburg. In 2017, Zara toured London, being hosted by Touching Bass, Balamii radio, Hoxton FM, and Total Refreshment Centre.

Aryan Kaganof

is conceiver, curator and editor of herri.

Mbali Kgame

holds a MA in creative writing (with distinction) from Rhodes University. She wears many hats which include being a journalist, children stories author, creative writer and early childhood program facilitator. Her children’s story ‘Hair Magic’ was featured on the Nal’ibali Radio stories, Season 5. She is also a contributing creative content creator for a foundation language education app MenjikPot. Mbali’s lived-experiences influence her work as well as her everyday praxis which includes learning and teaching in Black Consciousness Pan-Afrikanist organizations such as Black House Kollective and Ebukhosini Solutions.

Michael Khoury

is an Arab-American composer, improviser, and curator focused on composition, performance, and documentation. Khoury’s focus has been on the establishment of the Arab-American avant-garde. An interest in alternative tunings and the desire to create sonically intense music reflective of his Arab background and interest in psychedelia led Khoury to form the Urban Farmers. Upon migrating to the metro Detroit area, Khoury resumed his violin performance and private studies on the instrument with a focus on free improvisation. Khoury is a firm believer in learning the rules in order to break them, although the learning and breaking sometime happen simultaneously. He cites Halim El-Dabh, Lata Mangeshkar, Bill Dixon, Lucia Dlugoszewski, and Charlie Patton as influences. As a trained economist, Khoury’s approach to improvisation and music theory is informed by his knowledge of statistics, mathematics and the behavioral sciences. Today, Khoury conducts both ethnographical, sonic and historical research from his laboratory and studios in Redford, Michiugan, USA.

Kiran Kumar

is a dance artist, researcher and writer. His work focuses on unpacking understandings of the human body-mind through a trifold practice of dance as art, science and ritual, and on the proposals for change that these understandings may hold for our contemporary world.

Lizabé Lambrechts

is a Volkswagen Stiftung Research Fellow, partnered between Africa Open, Institute for Music, Research and Innovation (Stellenbosch University), the School for Oriental and African Studies (University of London), and the British Library and Archive. She completed her PhD in 2012 on five South African music archives as sites where embedded notions of power and politics become visible. During her post-doctoral work, she has published and worked with a variety of media and contexts in order to explore notions of archive, its impact on the present and our understanding of the constructions of history. Some of these projects include the collaborative exhibition project Lingering absences: Hearing landscape through memory (2013), a collaborative sound installation As you are standing here (2016), and a performance piece, Archive in Process (2016), wherein the daily life and routine of an archivist was performed in front of a window where passers-by could view and interact with the various processes that determine archival collections.
Whereas her work is historically concerned with re-inscribing marginalized voices into the historical record, it is also aware that institutional and personal archives harbor the potential to reinvent and to look at things anew.

Cathy Lane

Cathy Lane is a composer, sound artist and academic. Her work uses spoken word, field recordings and archive material to explore aspects of our listening relationship with each other and the multiverse. She is currently focused on how sound relates to the past, our histories, environment and our collective and individual memories from a feminist perspective. Aspects of her creative practice have developed out of these interests and include composition and installation-based work. She also writes and lectures on these and related subjects as well as collaborating with choreographers, film makers, visual artists and other musicians. Books include Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice (RGAP, 2008) and, with Angus Carlyle, In the Field (Uniformbooks, 2013), a collection of interviews with eighteen contemporary sound artists who use field recording in their work and On Listening (2013) a collection of commissioned essays about some of the ways in which listening is used in disciplines including anthropology, community activism, bioacoustics, conflict mediation and religious studies, music, ethnomusicology and field recording. Her CD The Hebrides Suite was released by Gruenrekorder in 2013.Cathy is Professor of Sound Arts and University of the Arts London and co-director of CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice), University of the Arts London.

Herman Lategan

I’m an independent journalist/writer and I’ve been published locally and internationally. I’ve worked in newspapers, magazines, radio, websites and television. I’ve lived for most of my life in Green Point and Sea Point.

Maurizio Lazzarato

is a philosopher and sociologist. In the 1970s, he was involved with the Autonomia Operaia movement in Italy and was a founding member of the French journal Multitudes. His books in English include Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (2014) and Governing by Debt (2015).

Olivier Ledure

I was born in 1959 in a non musical or literary French family. I found myself in love with jazz after attending a duet: Archie Shepp with Max Roach in Paris, 1976. Since 2005, I write simply as an amateur about South African jazz in Improjazz, a French jazz magazine. My main aim is to make a better knowledge of South African jazz (history, main dead or living players) among French readers of this magazine. So, I’ve been six times in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg. And Johnny Mbizo Dyani is my man!

George E. Lewis

is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, where he serves as Area Chair in Composition and Faculty in Historical Musicology. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Lewis’s other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (2002) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), a Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), a United States Artists Walker Fellowship (2011), an Alpert Award in the Arts (1999), and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis’s work in electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, and notated and improvisative forms is documented on more than 150 recordings. His work has been presented by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonia Orchestra, Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, Mivos Quartet, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, London Sinfonietta, Spektral Quartet and many others. Lewis received the 2012 SEAMUS Award from the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, and his book, A Power Stronger Than Itself:  The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008) received the American Book Award and the American Musicological Society’s Music in American Culture Award. Lewis is the co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016).

Marco Longari

Tsepo Wa Mamatu

is an academic, drama lecturer, playwright, actor and director and visual artist. He studied drama at the University of the Witwatersrand, obtaining a BA (Dramatic Art) in 2003, and a MA in African Literature and Film in 2007. He was a lecturer in the University of the Witwatersrand Drama Department for many years, later becoming a senior lecturer, and at one time deputy head.

Siphelele Mamba

Slovo Mamphaga

is a Johannesburg-based artist and creative (BA Multimedia) whose work and subject matter is mostly based around the nature of the current conditions throughout the landscapes. He uses the artistic view as an expression to question and depict these conditions through Fine Art, Illustration, Digital Art & Design.

Maakomele R. Manaka

is a Soweto born poet with a strong artistic heritage. Mak, as he is widely known, has published three collections of poetry; If Only, In Time and Flowers Of A Broken Smile. His writings have appeared in literary journals and news papers around the country, Mail & Guardian, Aerodrome, New Coin, Botsotso, Kotaz, The Chronic and Poetry Potion. He also recorded a dub-poetry album titled, Word Sound Power. Manaka runs creative writing classes in and arround South Africa, and he holds a Masters Degree in Creative Writing from Rhodes University.

Mkhulu Maphikisa

is a Multimedia artist and a sangoma. Born in the small town of Empangeni, Obizo Mission, he is a mix of a ‘farmboy’ and a ‘ghetto boy’. He likes to rage against the machine.

Pone Mohammad Mashiangwako

also known as “Hebz” is a young spiritual collector, who’s been spinning since 2005 but only became a full time collector in 2009. Known for his fascination in abstract sounds, he also dabbles with break beats/Electronica /jazz/Afro beats/Samba & Bossa/funk/disco/psychedelic & high life/chance and other sounds that make the human heart smile.

Sam Mathe

is an award winning journalist, writer and publisher. He is a founding editor and publisher of Jazz Life Magazine as well as contributing author of South Africa’s Greatest Entrepreneurs (MME Media, 2010) and Brenda Fassie: I Am Not Your Weekend Special (Picador Africa, 2014). His journalism career started in 1994 at the now defunct PACE magazine. Mathe has contributed widely to a number of South African newspapers and magazines including Drum, Mail & Guardian, The Star, Sunday Independent, Sowetan and Rapport. His articles are currently published in the Sowetan on Fridays. Mathe is the 2018/2019 recipient of the Literary Journalism Award at the annual South African Literary Awards.

Wamuwi Mbao

is a literary critic and cultural studies scholar. His short stories have been published in various collections. He lectures at Stellenbosch University on the practice of literary criticism and post-transitional South African subjectivities.

Khanyisile Mbongwa

is an artist, sociologist and chief curator of the inaugural Stellenbosch Triennale.

Hugh Mdlalose

I draw from within to reflect an experience of jazz as a powerful medium of collective dreams and an unending endeavour for the total freedom of humanity. My approach to the subject is to let my personal encounter and journey with the medium of jazz speak for voices bigger than mine. I hope my work will be judged as a sincere artistic statement, a lone voice that seeks to get healing and spiritual restoration through the images as well as the sounds and souls behind the images

Jurgen Meekel

is a multi media artist who studied audio-visual art and sculpture at the Rietveld Academy of Fine-Arts in Amsterdam where he graduated cum laude in 1989. In 2018 he recieved an MAFA with distinction from Wits University. He works and collaborates on contemporary art installation pieces, sculptures, animation, motion graphics, film and video work that he exhibits/broadcasts nationally and internationally. He currently teaches Post Production at the Wits School of the Arts in Film & TV in Johannesburg. He is also part of the design team of herri.

Kamila Metwaly

is a music journalist, and curator based between Berlin and Cairo. Metwaly founded an independent arts and culture publication in Egypt, which specialized in music, arts, and cultural writings, from 2004 to 2009. Later, she worked in radio and the independent film scene, maintaining a strong presence in Cairo’s cultural and activist scenes for many years. Since 2014, Metwaly has specialized in music journalism for various independent Egyptian and Arab publications. In 2017, Metwaly joined SAVVY Contemporary and is currently curating an ongoing sound project titled “Untraining the Ear: Listening Sessions.” She has been involved with various sound-based exhibition projects in the space, including “What Has All This Got To Do With Coconuts And Rice: A Listening Exhibition on José Maceda” and “We Have Delivered Ourselves from the Tonal: Of, With, Towards, on Julius Eastman” and has co-curated a retrospective exhibition “The Dog Done Gone Deaf: Exploring The Sonic Cosmologies of Halim El-Dabh” with Bonaventure Ndikung at the Dak’Art Biennale in Senegal (2018). She has been appointed as a guest music researcher for the Donaueschingen New Music festival 2021 edition.

Dr Thokozani Mhlambi

is the NRF Postdoctoral Fellow in Innovation, at the Archive & Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town. An internationally recognized KZN-born cellist & composer, Mhlambi’s style of music draws from the rich heritage of KZN, while still asserting global standards of quality music-making. In 2016 his composition Uyambona lo Mfana, was performed by the Delta Ensemble of Modern Music in Brazil. He is a winner of the African Studies Prize. In 2016 he was also commissioned by New Music SA to compose an electronic piece which was performed at the Unyazi Electronic Music Festival in Cape Town. He has been a guest lecturer in Music at the University of Marinhao (Brazil), University of Jyvaskyla (Finland), where he showcased indigenous music traditions of South Africa. He has published on numerous music related topics including kwaito, house music, loudspeaker broadcasting. His paper on kwaito, Kwaitofabulous remains one of the most cited papers on popular music in South Africa.

Tseliso Monaheng

has been a freelance writer, photographer, videographer and video editor for the past 10 years. Based in Johannesburg, his writing has appeared in print and online, and he has contributed to publications worldwide such as The Guardian, Red Bull, Chimurenga, Rolling Stone and Africa is a Country.

Palesa Segomotso Motsumi

is the founder of Sematsatsa Library, a social events initiative focused on empowering and strengthening the rich imagery and work of women of colour in the creative industries. She is a writer, communications practitioner by training and has worked as Art consultant for various artists in the past. Her writing has mostly been featured in independent publications related to life in South Africa’s urban and creative spaces and she is currently working on her memoir titled, Mantsho.

Thokozani Tk Mthiyane

is a Johannesburg based artist.  He has been largely influenced by his time spent under the tutelage of artists Sfiso KaMkame and Thami Jali.  T.K. has experience in children’s theatre with the Madcap’s Educational Theatre Company, after which he had his first solo exhibition at the Flat Gallery in Durban.  His artistic flair stems from his creative combination of painting and poetry.  He has exhibited for Alliance Francoise and Resolution Galleries in Johannesburg. When T.K. paints he plays a lot of jazz in the background and that also fuels his thought process.

Tariro Mudzamiri

is a financial services professional.

Stephanus Muller

holds masters degrees in musicology from the University of South Africa and Oxford University. In 2001 he was awarded a DPhil from Oxford University before returning to South Africa in the same year. He is currently Professor of Musicology at Stellenbosch University and Director of Africa Open – Institute for Music, Research and Innovation, an ambitious institutional project that responds to the challenges and opportunities of music studies in South Africa. His most recent book, Nagmusiek, was awarded the Eugène Marais Prize by the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns, the Jan Rabie Rapport Prize, the kykNET-Rapport Prize and the University of Johannesburg Debut Prize for Creative Writing in Afrikaans.

Neo Muyanga

was born in Soweto. He studied the Italian madrigal tradition with choral maestro, Piero Poclen, in Trieste, Italy. In the mid 90’s he co-founded the acoustic pop duo, BLK Sonshine with Masauko Chipembere, garnering a following throughout Southern Africa and Internationally. Neo writes music plays, chorus songs and has a variety of works for chamber and large ensemble (his operetta, “the Flower of Shembe”, premiered to critical acclaim in 2012). Neo co-founded the Pan African Space Station in 2008 with Chimurenga’s publishing editor, Ntone Edjabe, as a continually evolving host of cutting-edge Pan African music and sound art on the internet and across stages in Cape Town and other parts of the globe.

Talla Niang

is Director at Afrikannect, Owner of House Of Baobab. Worked at Africa Gal. Studied at University of Cape Town Went to Unisa – The University of South Africa Lives in Johannesburg, Gauteng From Dakar, Senegal.

Lewis Nkosi

was born in Chesterville, Durban, Kwa-Zulu Natal and was educated at local schools before enrolling at M. L. Sultan Technical College in Durban. Nkosi began his writing career at the publication Ilanga lase Natal in Durban. In 1956, he joined other African writers on the staff of Drum magazine, which was founded in 1951. In 1960, Nkosi accepted a fellowship to study at Harvard University, and left South Africa on an exit permit. Nkosi has also been a Professor of Literature at various universities, including the University of Wyoming, the University of California-Irvine, and universities in Zambia and Warsaw, Poland. Nkosi also shared the writing credits with Lionel Rogosin and William “Bloke” Modisane for the film Come Back, Africa in 1960. Nkosi lived in various countries, including Switzerland and England, where he taught and wrote articles on African literature. In recognition of his contribution to South African literature, Nkosi was awarded the Order of Ikhamanga on 28 October 2008. Lewis Nkosi died on 5 September 2010 in Johannesburg, after a long illness, at the age of 74.

Riaan Oppelt

is from Paarl, and teaches English and Film Studies at Stellenbosch University. He lives in Cape Town and likes to imagine its apocalyptic reckoning in his creative work. He writes plays, short stories and has released a few albums. He is in three or four bands at any time, all of them making original music and one of them shooting for Afrorock, in which Cape Town gets its apocalyptic reckoning. When he isn’t trying to figure out what coloured identity means, his academic writing tries to focus on post-truth, the attention economy and Cape Town’s apocalyptic reckoning.

Marietjie Pauw

is an Andrew W. Mellon-funded postdoctoral researcher with Africa Open – Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University where her research focuses on aspects of curating music in local contexts. Her current music curations are inspired by the investigation of interventionist approaches that contemporary curating, artistic research and decolonial aestheSis bring when brought into orbit with classical sound installations. Marietjie completed the degrees BMus, BMus(Hons) and MMus at Stellenbosch University, and received the Unisa Teaching Licentiate in Music and the Unisa Performance Licentiate in Music (with flute as instrument) from the University of South Africa in 1991. As flutist she has played with chamber musicians, poets and artists that have premièred South African compositions, and performed on national festivals such as the National Arts Festival, the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees and the Woordfees.

Martijn Pantlin

is a full stack web developer specialized in making custom web experiences. He has more than 20 years of IT experience, working in the fields of 3D animation, art direction and executive management of video games before switching to web development 10 years ago. With roots in Amsterdam, Martijn is a free roaming world citizen and based everywhere the web goes.

Maël Péneau

currently works at the Centre Georg Simmel-recherches franco-allemandes en sciences sociales, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Mael does research in Cultural Anthropology. His current project is Nouveaux lieux de la création musicale ouest-africaine : les studios d’enregistrement au Sénégal.

Mario Pissarra

is an art historian and director of the Africa South Art Initiative (ASAI), a collaborative visual arts platform that he founded in 2005. He received his PhD from the University of Cape Town for his thesis, Locating Malangatana: Decolonisation, aesthetics and the roles of an artist in a changing society (2019); and is  currently expanding this research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Stellenbosch. Mario has published extensively on contemporary African art and artists – credits include editor-in-chief of the four-volume Visual Century: South African art in context, 1907-2007 (Wits University Press, 2011); editor of Awakenings: The art of Lionel Davis (ASAI, 2017); author of Against the Grain: Sculptors from the Cape (ASAI, 2013); and co-editor of the online journal Third Text Africa, published by ASAI.

Koleka Putuma

is an award-winning poet, playwright and theatre director. Her bestselling debut collection of poems Collective Amnesia has taken the South African literary scene by storm. Since its publication in April 2017, the book is in its 9th print run and has been prescribed for study at tertiary level in South African Universities and Gothenburg University in Sweden. It was recently awarded the 2018 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry Collective Amnesia. The collection was also named 2017 book of the year by the City Press and one of the best books of 2017 by The Sunday Times and Quartz Africa. Her theatre works include UHM (2014) Woza Sarafina (2016), and Mbuzeni (2017/8), her theatre for young audiences include Ekhaya  (2 – 7 year olds), and SCOOP: Kitchen play for carers and babes, the first South African theatre work for audiences aged 0 – 12 month old. Putuma was recently appointed as creative director for the 2019 Design Indaba Conference, She is a Forbes Africa Under 30 Honoree, recipient of the Imbewu Trust Scribe Playwrighting Award, Mbokodo Rising Light award, CASA playwrighting award and the 2019 Distell Playwrighting Award for her play No Easter Sunday for Queers, which will also be published by Junketts later this year.

Phiwokazi Qoza

completed a Bachelor of Social Science Honours from Rhodes University.She also did her undergraduate degree at the same institution. She is a MA in Politics candidate. Her research interests are: – Student Politics X Student Protest X Keyboard Warriors.

Andrea Rolfes

is a femme artist, designer and curator who lives in Johannesburg. Rolfes’ artworks often combine drawn, painted, stitched and machine sewn elements . Her work is autobiographical and experiential, exhibiting a fine and fragmented aesthetic approach. She is also the web designer of herri.

Hilde Roos

is the General Manager of Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University. Her research interests concern the archive, historical representations of the practice of Western art music and the concomitant (colonial) mutations thereof in South Africa. Her book The La Traviata Affair: Opera in the Age of Apartheid is published by University of California Press.

Hans Roosenschoon

studied music in South Africa, and in England. Orchestral works form the larger part of his output for which he has received numerous commissions from all of the most significant commissioning bodies in SA. Apart from many performances throughout the country, his music has been featured and broadcast in the USA, in several West- and East European countries, Australia and in the UK. His discography includes recordings for the SABC’s transcription service, as well as a variety of commercial recordings. Hans Roosenschoon has also made important contributions to cultural life in other areas – as a broadcaster and music producer, as an arts administrator, a promoter of South African music, an adjudicator at competitions, and, for some time, as a member of the Board of Directors of the Southern African Music Rights Organization (SAMRO).

Jesús Sepúlveda

is the author of ten poetry collections and three books of essays, including his green anarchist manifesto The Garden of Peculiarities (2002), his book on Latin American poetry Poets on the Edge (2016), and his collected poems Poemas de un bárbaro (2013).  His third poetry collection Hotel Marconi (1998) was made into a film in Chile in 2009 and his first collection Lugar de origen (1987) remains a work representative of his generation growing up under Pinochet’s dictatorship. Sepúlveda’s work has been published in twenty countries and translated from Spanish into twelve languages, leading him to participate in many poetry festivals and readings throughout the world (Medellín, Granada, Struga, Chiapas, Bremen, Tabanan, Puerto Rico, Trois-Rivières, among others).  The Sylt Foundation sponsored him to be a writer-in-residence in South Africa in 2016 and Germany in 2018.  In summer 2019 Sepúlveda won first place in the state of Oregon’s Spanish poetry contest.  His other works include Correo negro (Buenos Aires, 2001), Escrivania (Mexico, 2003), Antiegótico (Viña del Mar, 2013), Secoya (New York, 2015), and Wirikuta (Puerto Rico, 2019).  Sepúlveda was born in Chile in 1967 and moved to Eugene, Oregon (USA) in 1995. He currently teaches at the University of Oregon.

Nikki Sheth

is a sound artist currently based in Birmingham, UK. She uses field recordings to produce site-specific soundscape works. Her practice involves extensive field recording trips, multi-channel soundscape composition, working collaboratively to produce multimedia installations and augmented reality soundwalks. She has been on field recording residencies around the world including in Finland, South Africa, France and the UK and has been commissioned for sound works for Artefact Gallery, Ten Acres of Sound, Return to Nature Festival and The Barber Institute of Fine Arts. Her installation and sound works have been presented internationally.

Brenda Sisane

is famously known as host of The Art of Sunday radio show at KayaFM.

Eugene Skeef (FRSA)

London-based South African percussionist, composer, poet, educationalist and broadcaster. Works in conflict resolution, acts as consultant on cultural development and teaches creative leadership. His innovative global projects include community music, jazz, European classical music, contemporary dance theatre and children’s storytelling. Has composed for London Philharmonic Orchestra, London Sinfonietta and Royal Scottish National Orchestra,trained their players and helped to set up their education departments. Fellow of Royal Society of Arts and winner of Harry E. Schlenz Medal for Water Music.

Stelarc

is a Cyprus-born performance artist raised in the Melbourne suburb of Sunshine, whose works focus heavily on extending the capabilities of the human body. As such, most of his pieces are centered on his concept that “the human body is obsolete”.

Ibukun Oladipupo Sunday

is a sound artist and a violist living and working in Lagos Nigeria. I use sound to create ambientmusic live electronics soundart soundscape synthesizer music noise experimental sound dark ambient and also make sounds to connect wild and human feelings.

Warrick Swinney (Kalahari Surfers)

has been involved in music / sound practice and studies for most of his adult life. His work in sound in film as a sound recordist, sound designer, sound mixer, composer and performer, helped finance the Shifty Studio project in the late 1980’s. Straddling the analogue / digital change over in recording technologies, Shifty Studios developed a DIY/Punk ethic which laid the foundation for Sony’s experimental projects thereafter. He recently completed a Masters in Fine Art (sound) at UCT and is currently enrolled in a PHD programme at the Centre for Humanities Research at UWC .

Michael Taussig

teaches anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of The Devil and Commodity  Fetishism (1980); Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1987); The Nervous System (1992); Mimesis and Alterity (1993); Law in a Lawless Land (1993); and My Cocaine Museum (2004).

Pablo van Wetten

is an Amsterdam based audiovisual artist and performer. Champion of the underdog and slave to the impulse. He is the singer of Bordello Roses and Moviestars, two avantgarde music projects.

Johan Van Wyk

was born in Jansen Street, in the suburb Dagbreek of the mining town, Welkom in 1956. He studied at the University of the Witwatersrand in 1975, leaving the university at the end of 1976, fleeing the country as objector to military service. His first volume of poetry Deur die oog van die luiperd was published in 1976. He lived in Swaziland in a tent for a few months and was arrested during a return to his parents farm in 1977. He returned to university and completed his BA and Hons degree. He then enrolled at Rhodes University for an MA degree, which was eventually changed into a Ph.D. In 1989 he compiled, with Pieter Conradie and Nic Konstandaras, the anthology SA in poësie/ SA in poetry. His English novel Man Bitch(2001) is about the people of the Point Area, in Durban. He had a stroke in 2002, and about two months later was attacked in his flat by a lover. His output diminished dramatically after this.

Carina Venter

is Lecturer in Music at Stellenbosch University. She holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford. Her research interests include apartheid aesthetics, music and violence and decolonial thought. Recently, she has published a co-authored chapter in an edited volume on Jacques Ranciére and music (Edinburgh University Press).

Stephanie Vos

is a postdoctoral fellow at Africa Open Institute, where she runs the Interdisciplinary Forum for Popular Music. She’s the curator of the Jazz Conversations, a series of public interviews and performances featuring the likes of Nduduzo Makhathini, Kyle Shepherd, Carlo Mombelli and Thandi Ntuli. Stephanie’s research interests include South African jazz and the politics of place, the music of Abdullah Ibrahim, contemporary South African jazz and the anthropology of events.

Pierre-Henri Wicomb

is a South African composer based in Cape Town. He works in musical environments encompassing everything from theatre/film music to acoustic/electroacoustic art music. Wicomb’s music has featured at the Festival D’Automne (Paris), New York City Electronic Music Festival and International Computer Music Conference (Utrecht) among others. He completed post graduate studies at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague where he started experimenting with improvisation as choreographed sound movement. He is currently completing an opera as part of his PhD at the Africa Open Institute, examining relational aspects in psychoanalysis to inform the compositional process in working with free improvisers.

Niklas Zimmer

completed his Honours degree in Fine Art (sculpture) at the University of Cape Town in 1996, and his research MA(FA) on jazz photography (which interconnected reflections on Fine Arts, Social History and Music) in 2012. He also has a BA in Education from University of Cologne. He worked for three years as an art teacher, heading the Visual Arts Department at the German International School in Cape Town. After being employed by the Centre for Popular Memory (UCT) as an audio specialist and digitisation manager, he is now the Head of Digital Library Services at UCT Libraries. Zimmer occasionally lectures in theory and discourse of art, and gives workshops in video, sound and photography. He also works as an independent photographer and drummer. Zimmer has performed, exhibited and published in the fields of visual art studies, theory of photography and sound studies.

Paul Zisiwe

I am a writer and filmmaker, who uses his creative expertise and art to interrogate and hold memory to account. Being of the conviction that art also judges history and how history is recalled, I find my craft becoming a social barometer, where remembering is an act of activism in an era of forgetting.

&and

We’ve read Fred Moten now we’re coming for the &and.