• Issue #01
  • Issue #02
  • Issue #03
  • Issue #04
  • Issue #05
  • Issue #06
  • Issue #07
  • Issue #08
Issue #05
Contents
editorial
KHADIJA TRACEY HEEGER
Redefined
GEORGE LEWIS
New Music Decolonization in Eight Difficult Steps
GIORGIO AGAMBEN
The Supreme Music. Music and Politics
Theme Social Impact
SAIDIYA HARTMAN
Riot and Refrain
THOMAS BERNHARD
Executioners
WILLEMIEN FRONEMAN & STEPHANUS MULLER
Music’s “non-Political Neutrality”: When race dare not speak its name
STEVEN ROBINS
Spectres of Racial Science at Stellenbosch University: From Eugen Fischer’s Eugenics to the Department of Sport Sciences’ Retracted Article
MOHAMMAD SHABANGU
Education as the Practice of Freedom: Towards a Decolonisation of Desire
CHUMANI MAXWELE
The Solitary Protest That Gave Birth To #RhodesMustFall
SISCA JULIUS
Chappies bubblegum
EMILE YX? JANSEN
Heal the Hood & World with Afrocation
MESULI NALE
Move For Two: Educating for Leadership Through Dance
SARAH MALOTANE HENKEMAN
On the Social Impact of Telling Your Own Story in Your Own Way
ACHMAT DAVIDS
The Social Impact of Language: The "Coloured" Image of Afrikaans in Nineteenth Century Cape Town
JACKIE SHANDU
On the Social Impact of Self Hatred
AZOLA DAYILE
Imbamba – Uthunyiwe: On the Social Impact of Migrant Labour
YAMKELA F. SPENGANE
On the Social Impact of Name Changes
ANELE NZIMANDE
On the Social Impact of Motherhood
ZIYANA LATEGAN
Problems of and for Philosophy
galleri
JOAN OTIENO
Art as the Social Impact of Repurposing Waste Materials
GARTH ERASMUS
Xnau
GARTH ERASMUS
Virulent Strain
ANDREA ROLFES
Not the Paradise Garden
MZOXOLO VIMBA
Sunday best, kakade!
ROCHÉ VAN TIDDENS
Four Compositions
JAMES OATWAY & ALON SKUY
[BR]OTHER
borborygmus
ZIYANA LATEGAN
Invention as Ideological Reproduction
LETTA MBULU
Not Yet Uhuru (Amakhandela)
TUMI MOGOROSI
De
ANDREA LEIGH FARNHAM
A bad relationship with the truth
DAVID MWAMBARI
On the Social Impact of Reading Radical Literature
PHIWOKAZI QOZA
Choreographies of Protest Performance: 2. Somatic Communication and the experience of intensity
DUANE JETHRO
Shangaan Electro: shaping desire @180bpm
CLARE LOVEDAY
WOMEN IN MUSIC.co.za - A website for South African women music practitioners
ERNIE LARSEN
Escape Routes
LIZ SAVAGE
Myanmar: a post-colonial tale of fear, treachery and hope
STEVEN CRAIG HICKMAN
Weird Literature as Speculative Philosophy
frictions
VANGILE GANTSHO
"we have forgotten who we are"
JETHRO LOUW & GARTH ERASMUS
21st Century Khoisan Man
LUCY VALERIE GRAHAM
Seven settler poems
SERGIO HENRY BEN
Some Monday shit.
RIAAN OPPELT
The Boys in the Box
TRICIA WARDEN
Five Poems Two Songs and a Video
JOHAN VAN WYK
Man Bitch
ARI SITAS, GEORGE & DEBBIE MARI
Cold was the ground - A Requiem for Elephants Too**
ARI SITAS, GEORGE & DEBBIE MARI
Cold Was The Ground- A Requiem For Elephants Too* Part I
ARI SITAS, GEORGE & DEBBIE MARI
Cold was the ground - A Requiem for Elephants Too** Part II
claque
JANNOUS NKULULEKO AUKEMA
Something of Inexplicable Value: A Resurrection
FRANK MEINTJIES
From collective to corrective: South African poems of decolonisation
KNEO MOKGOPA
“This Bloodless Wound” - A Review of Kirsty Steinberg’s Confrontation
RONELDA S. KAMFER
Avoiding the obvious routes: Jolyn Phillips deconstructs the legend of Bientang
UNATHI SLASHA
Partaking in the Séance: Preliminary Remarks on Lesego Rampolokeng’s Bird-Monk Seding
WAMUWI MBAO
There are no barbarians: Michel Leiris - more phantom than Africa
ESTHER MARIE PAUW
Jess Auerbach's From Water to Wine: Becoming Middle Class in Angola
MBE MBHELE
Not nearly a review of Ontologicial Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation by Calvin L. Warren
MBALI KGAME
Mphutlane wa Bofelo's Transitions: from Post-Colonial Illusions to Decoloniality What went wrong and what now?
MALAIKA WA AZANIA
Why Do I Scream at God for the Rape of Babies?
TOAST COETZER
Country Conquerors: van blikkiesband tot firebrands – on the Social Impact of Rastafari
GEORGE KING
One Disc, Two Composers, Four Works: When Seven Defines the Music of Friendship
ERNESTO GARCIA MARQUES
Live Jimi Presley: white noise a la Neubauten
ekaya
DEREK DAVEY
Dodging the sjambok
CHRISTINE LUCIA
A Reflection on the Mohapeloa Edition
THEMBELA VOKWANA
Towards a Decolonial South African Musicology: Reflections on Christine Lucia’s Michael Mosoeu Moerane Scholarly Edition.
ANKE FROEHLICH & INGE ENGELBRECHT
Genadendal Music Collections Catalogue: an introduction
off the record
PETER DELPEUT
The Forgotten Evil pilot project digital version
PETER DELPEUT
The Forgotten Evil pilot chapter 5 charisma
PETER DELPEUT
The Forgotten Evil pilot chapter 9 The Forest of Astravas
PETER DELPEUT
The Forgotten Evil, pilot chapter 11 character
LOUIS CHUDE-SOKEI
When Echoes Return: roots, diaspora and possible Africas (a eulogy)
VEIT ERLMANN
The Disappearance of Otherness: ‘Africa Civilised, Africa Uncivilised’: Local Culture, World System and South African Music
IGNATIA MADALANE
From Paul to Penny: The Emergence and Development of Tsonga Disco (1985-1990s)
NIKLAS ZIMMER
Basil Breakey: Jazz contacts, Jazz culture.
OLIVIER LEDURE
Ted Joans
SAM MATHE
NDIKHO DOUGLAS XABA
CAN THEMBA
The Bottom of the Bottle
DANFORD TAFADZWA CHIBVONGODZE
Jonah Sithole’s Sabhuku
feedback
ALEXANDRA DODD
herri: a plenitude of material, ideas, sounds and voices
FACEBOOK FEEDBACK
Social Media Responses to herri issues 1 - 4
the selektah
ZARA JULIUS
A call for renewed internationalism: A sonic liberation front
PhD | Nicola Deane
DECENTERING THE ARCHIVE:
Visual Fabrications of Sonic Memories
NICOLA DEANE
FRAGMENTS By Way of Introduction
NICOLA DEANE
PASSAGE I: SURFACES A Surface Reading of the DOMUS Archive: framing space & time
NICOLA DEANE
PASSAGE II: INVAGINATION A Subjective Fold of the DOMUS Archive: a pocket of one’s own
NICOLA DEANE
PASSAGE III: NOISE A Hauntological Reconstruction of the DOMUS Archive: the noise remains
NICOLA DEANE
PASSAGE IV: THE MASK (De)Scripting the DOMUS Archive as Faceless Protagonist
NICOLA DEANE
ELISABETH UNMASKED by Nicola Deane
NICOLA DEANE
CONCLUSION Irresolution
hotlynx
shopping
SHOP
Purchase or listen
KOLEKA PUTUMA
Black Girl Live
contributors
the back page
MIKE VAN GRAAN
Covid-19 and its Existential Challenge to Theatre
© 2023
Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
    • Issue #01
    • Issue #02
    • Issue #03
    • Issue #04
    • Issue #05
    • Issue #06
    • Issue #07
    • Issue #08
    #05
  • PhD | Nicola Deane

DECENTERING THE ARCHIVE:

Visual Fabrications of Sonic Memories

by Nicola Frances Deane

Dissertation presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Visual Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Stellenbosch University

 

Supervisors: Prof. Stephanus Muller & Prof. Willemien Froneman



December 2021

Declaration

By submitting this dissertation electronically, I declare that the entirety of the work contained therein is my own, original work, that I am the sole author thereof (save to the extent explicitly otherwise stated), that reproduction and publication thereof by Stellenbosch University will not infringe any third party rights and that I have not previously in its entirety or in part submitted it for obtaining any qualification.

 

Nicola Frances Deane
December 2021

 

Copyright © 2021 Stellenbosch University
All rights reserved

Abstract

Decentering the Archive: Visual Fabrications of Sonic Memories navigates various strategies of inverting and subverting the ordered, categorised and confined cultural archive, in this case, the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) at the University of Stellenbosch. This practice-based doctoral study treats DOMUS as the site for a creative production of decentered reading and writing from archival fragments, while interrogating the role and power of the archive in manipulating time and collective memories by asking the question: How should fragmented or destabilising experiences be remembered given the delinking option from both modernity and post-modernity?

My referral to Decolonial theory at the start of this study prompted me to test new possibilities through the “decolonial options” that Walter Mignolo describes as operating “from the margins and beyond the margins of the modern/colonial order. It posits alternatives in relation to the control of the economy (market value), the control of the state (politics of heritage based on economic wealth), and the control of knowledge” (Mignolo & Vázquez, 2013). Since my heritage lies on the side of the coloniser while I grew up within the context of a colonised nation, my position as a South African citizen is divided and complex, hence my attraction to the margins.

As an artist who cuts up and rearranges image, text, and sound, my study of an archive can never be strictly scholarly, as in, disciplined and inhibited. Hence, I determined a decolonial option of working with the archive: to re-invest it with an ability to bleed – to traverse the rigid taxonomies and artificial fictional separations between categories that are generally foundational to the archival process of storing (and building on) records of social, cultural and political practices. Sound in the archive, however, carries traces of pulse in rhythm, breath and voice – traces of blood beating – and brings to awareness the vibrations of one’s own tympanic membrane. It is the fabric of sound, the pulse of a particular history through sound that stimulates the composition of memories. “Through the ear, we shall enter the invisibility of things” (Edmond Jabès, 1984).

The work which is embedded in herri is divided into four passages, these are Surfaces, Invagination, Noise and The Mask. These passages are further infused by my conceptual framing through the terms dehiscence and pentimento, borrowed from the fields of medicine and painting, indicating the leap across mediums, disciplines and territories of knowledge towards a multidimensional understanding of time and space through and beyond the senses.

Opsomming

Decentering the Archive: Visual Fabrications of Sonic Memories volg verskeie strategieë van omkering en ondermyning van orde, kategorie en die ingeperkte argief, in hierdie geval die Dokumentasiesentrum vir Musiek (DOMUS) aan Stellenbosch Universiteit. Hierdie geïntegreerde doktorale studie gebruik DOMUS as ‘n terrein vir die kreatiewe skep van gedesentraliseerde lesings en skrywes in argivale fragmente.

Die studie neem die rol en mag van die argief in die manipulasie van tyd en kollektiewe herinneringe onder oorweging, en vra: Hoe word gedestabiliseerde en gefragmenteerde ervarings onthou in die lig van die uitoefening van die opsie om te ontkoppel aan moderniteit en post-moderniteit? Dekoloniale teorie, met verwysing na die “dekoloniale opsies” wat Walter Mignolo beskryf as synde aktief “in die kantlyne en duskant die kantlyne van die moderne/koloniale orde”, was ‘n vertrekpunt om nuwe moontlikhede te toets in hierdie verband; opsies wat alternatiewe postuleer “in verhouding tot die beheer oor die ekonomie (markwaarde) die beheer oor die staat (die politiek van erfenis gebaseer op ekonomiese welvaart), en die beheer oor kennis” (Mignolo & Vázquez, intyds: 2013).

Aangesien ek grootgeword het in die konteks van ‘n gekoloniseerde land, is my erfenis ‘n koloniale een, en is my posisie as Suid-Afrikaanse burger gesplete en kompleks. Daarom fokus ek op dít wat marginaal is. As ‘n kunstenaar wat werk met beeld, teks, klank, uitvoering, hauntologie en remix, kan my bemoeienis met die argief nooit net streng vakkundig en akademies wees nie. Een moontlik dekoloniale opsie om met die argief te werk, sou kon wees om dit te her-investeer met die moontlikheid om te bloei – om die rigiede taksonomieë en kunsmatige fiktiewe verwyderings tussen kategorieë wat oor die algemeen funderend is tot die argivale prosesse van die berging (en uitbouiing) van rekords van sosiale, kulturele en politieke praktyke, oor te steek. Klank in die argief dra die polsing van ritme, asem en stem – eggo’s van pompende bloed – en skep ‘n bewussein van die vibrasies van die eie tempaniese membraan. Dit is die tekstuur van klank, die polsing van ‘n partikuliere geskiedenis deur klank, wat die komposisie van herinneringe stimuleer. “Deur die oor sal ons die onsigbaarheid van dinge binnegaan” (Edmond Jabès, 1984).

Die studie is verdeel in vier gange: Oppervlaktes, Invaginering, Geraas en Die Masker. Hierdie gange word verder belig deur konseptuele rame aan die orde gestel deur die terme “dehiscence” and “pentimento”, ontleen aan die studievelde van die geneeskunde en die skilderkuns. Hiermee poog ek ‘n sprong tussen media, dissiplines, en territoriums van kennis om te reik na ‘n multidimensionele verstaan van tyd en ruimte, deur en buite die sintuiglike. Dit alles word gekalibreer en gefokus deur die lens van die domestieke.

Acknowledgements

To all those whom I benefited from throughout this treacherous journey – in supervision, archival assistance, advice, wisdom, talent, constructive criticism, interest, encouragement, concern, recognition, understanding, empathy and faith, as well as emotional, psychological and financial support – I thank you dearly and deeply from the bottom of my humble heart, you know who you are and I could never have reached the end of this line without each and every one of you.

I dedicate this study to my dearest Aryan and Abraxas Kaganof – thank you for your love and patience.

Share
Print PDF
PhD | Nicola Deane
NICOLA DEANE
© 2023
Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute