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Contents
editorial
DJO BANKUNA
Pissing On The Rainbow Nation
NATHAN TRANTRAAL
Ôs haatie wit mense nie. Hoekô haat julle vi ôs?
GLENN HOLTZMAN
The Music Department in South Africa as a Mirror of Racial Tension and Transformative Struggle: A Critical Ethnographic Perspective
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Black artists and the paradox of the gift
Theme Johnny Mbizo Dyani
ZWELEDINGA PALLO JORDAN
JOHNNY DYANI: A Portrait
JOHNNY MBIZO DYANI
A Letter From Mbizo
ARYAN KAGANOF
Johnny Dyani Interview 22-23 December 1985
SALIM WASHINGTON
“Don’t Sell Out”
LOUIS MOHOLO-MOHOLO & HERBIE TSOAELI WITH JOHNNY DYANI
In Conversation with Mbizo
ZOLISWA FIKELEPI-TWANI & NDUDUZO MAKHATHINI
When Today Becomes The Past: The Archive as a Healing Process
ASHER GAMEDZE
Tradition as improvisation | Continuity and abstraction
GILBERT MATTHEWS & LEFIFI TLADI
An Interview with Lars Rasmussen
EUGENE SKEEF
The Musical Confluence of Johnny Dyani and Bheki Mseleku in Exile
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script i: The Figure
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script ii: Ontology Of The Bass
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script iii: Musical Offering
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script iv: Home And Exile
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script v: Experimental Philosophic Incantations
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script vi: The Posthumous Life
ED EPSTEIN
Spiritual
CAROL MULLER
Diasporic musical landscapes: Abdullah Ibrahim, Johnny Dyani, and Sathima Bea Benjamin in an African Space Program (1969-1980)
BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH
Riot in Progress (Legalize Freedom)
S’MAKUHLE BOKWE MAFUNA
Notes on the Exile Years
KEI MURRAY MONGEZI PROSPER MCGREGOR
Who the Son was?
ARYAN KAGANOF
Somebody Blew Up South Africa
JONATHAN EATO
Interludes with Bra’ Tete Mbambisa
MAX ANNAS
Morduntersuchungskommission. Der Fall Daniela Nitschke
SHANE COOPER
Lonely Flower
THANDI ALLIN DYANI
"I love you. You don’t have to love me but I love you."
galleri
SLOVO MAMPHAGA
Shades of Johnny Dyani
HUGH MDLALOSE
Jazz is my Life
TJOBOLO KHAHLISO
Shebeening
FEDERICO FEDERICI
Notes (not only) on asemic phenomenology
ANDRÉ CLEMENTS
Vita-Socio-Anarcho
DEREK DAVEY
Verge
borborygmus
MUSTAPHA JINADU
Trapped
VUSUMZI MOYO
From Cape-to-Cairo – AZANIA
MALAIKA WA AZANIA
In a foreign tongue...
SHARLENE KHAN
Imagining an African Feminist Press
DILIP MENON
Isithunguthu (A conversation in Joburg)
CATHERINE RUDENT
Against the “Grain of the Voice” - Studying the voice in songs
GEORGE LEWIS
Amo (2021), for five voices and electronics
STEVEN SHAVIRO
Exceeding Syncopation?
BRUCE LABRUCE
Notes on camp/anti-camp
PATRICIA PISTERS
Set and Setting of the Brain on Hallucinogen: Psychedelic Revival in the Acid Western
frictions
KHADIJA TRACEY HEEGER
Doctor Patient
KNEO MOKGOPA
Vuleka Mhlaba (What Would Happen if Madiba Returned?)
CHURCHIL NAUDE
Die mooi mooi gedig en anner massekinners ….
OSWALD KUCHERERA
Travelling on the Khayelitsha Train
SISCA JULIUS
Islands in the stream
FAEEZ VAN DOORSEN
Nobody’s Mullet
GADDAFI MAKHOSANDILE
The Face of Hope
VONANI BILA
Extracts from Phosakufa (the epic)
NIQ MHLONGO
Mistaken Identity
OMOSEYE BOLAJI
People of the Townships part 2
SIMBARASHE NYATSANZA
How to Become an African President
JEAN RHYS
The Doll
OSCAR HEMER
Coyote
MICHALIS PICHLER
Bibliophagia
claque
LINDELWA DALAMBA
From Kippie to Kippies and Beyond: the village welcomes this child
GWEN ANSELL
Zim Ngqawana: A child of the rain
MKHULULI
Black Noise: Notes on a Semanalysis of Mogorosi’s DeAesthetic
LIZE VAN ROBBROECK
DECOLONIZING ART BOOK FAIRS: Publishing Practices from the South(s).
DYLAN VALLEY
The Future lies with folk art: Max Schleser’s smartphone filmmaking THEORY AND PRACTICE
PAUL KHAHLISO
Riding Ruins
DIANA FERRUS
Ronelda Kamfer’s Kompoun: unapologetic and honest writing.
UNATHI SLASHA
Piecing Together the Barely Exquisite Corpse: On Tinashe Mushakavanhu’s Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on the Speculative Archive
WANELISA XABA
One from the heart: Dimakatso Sedite's Yellow Shade
BLAQ PEARL (JANINE VAN ROOY-OVERMEYER)
Uit die Kroes: gedigte deur Lynthia Julius
FRANK MEINTJIES
Wild Has Roots: thinking about what it means to be human
MPHUTHUMI NTABENI
The Land Wars: The Dispossession of the Khoisan and AmaXhosa in the Cape Colony - a discourse on the unrelenting and ruthless process of colonial conquest
ekaya
MKHULU MNGOMEZULU
Call Me By My Name: Ubizo and Ancestral Names for Abangoma
HILDE ROOS
In Conversation with Zakes Mda: "The full story must be told."
INGE ENGELBRECHT
Tribute to Sacks Williams: A composer from Genadendal
ESTHER MARIE PAUW
A tribute to Hilton Biscombe
WILLEMIEN FRONEMAN
Resisting the Siren Song of Race
off the record
SANDILE MEMELA
Things My Father Taught Me
HEIDI GRUNEBAUM
On returning to my grandmother’s land (notes for a film)
HILTON BISCOMBE
A boytjie from Stellenbosch
KHOLEKA SHANGE
Art, Archives, Anthropology
RITHULI ORLEYN
On Archives, Metadata and Aesthetics
KEYAN G. TOMASELLI
The Nomadic Mind of Teshome Gabriel: Hybridity, Identity and Diaspora
FINN DANIELS-YEOMAN & DARA WALDRON
Song For Hector - the utopian promise of the archive
TREVOR STEELE TAYLOR
Censorship, Film Festivals and the Temperature at which Artworks and their Creators Burn - episode 2
GEORGE KING
Sustaining an Imagined Culture: Some Reflections on South African Music Research in Thirty-Five Years of Ars Nova
RAFI ALIYA CROCKETT
Loxion Fabulous: Temporality and Spaciality in South African Kwaito Performance
feedback
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MOHAMMAD SHABANGU
Monday 20 January 2020
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Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
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    #07
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ANDRÉ CLEMENTS

Vita-Socio-Anarcho

Artist’s Statement

Dear Observer,

Thank you for looking through some of my pictures. I hope you find them engaging, and through that, some beauty.

When we look, what we view is not quite what we see, is it?

I think these all matter in their own right: the choices we make to look, of what to look at, and what to see. They also matter through how they inevitably affect each other. As a picture maker though, my main concern is with what you see, and I would like that to be as enduring and true as possible.

Sometimes we can find the absolute in the ordinary, a kind of truth through synthesis that happens through our looking, where the stage is the cinema-of-the mind, the neuro-image (see e.g. Patricia Pisters if you are interested in this).

In programming there is the idea of overloading certain things, allowing different inputs and outputs from the same thing. Layering images through, for instance, multiple-exposure photography allows something similar – not unlike the holographic character of how we, I believe, experience and use memories, thoughts, feelings, emotions, sights, scents and what not.

Photography can arguably be a point-of-departure rather than only a destination. Instead of aiming to capture a moment, it can become a vehicle, create space, and through that facilitate a freedom and ideally – ultimately – agency.

Developing an aesthetic language of its own is one thing, what it allows to be said through its grammar, what poetry it affords, is arguably much more important.

In every-day life, and especially in these times, it is all too easy to become so wound up in ‘putting out fires’ – in the pathogenic perspective that our cultures are arguably most steeped in, that one neglects ‘planting the forest’ – the salutogenic perspective – which means looking towards the creation of wellness. The scientist Aaron Antonovsky says in what he called the theory of Salutogenesis: a framework for health and wellbeing, that wellbeing results from the ‘sense of coherence’ that emerges from the realisation of meaningfulness, manageability and comprehensibility. Artworks also have those dimensions: meaningfulness, manageability and comprehensibility. If beauty entails some of that, and if we recognise that those elements are not static, do not function in isolation, then how does one achieve that in a static image?

herri has kindly selected a few of my recent figure-study-based works to show. Why do I create human-figure based works in the way that I do? I prefer to photograph subjects while they are posing for figure drawing sessions that I facilitate. Among the reasons for doing this is that it creates a different relational dynamic compared to the typical model posing for a photographer setup. In the conventional model photo-shoot contexts, the model is arguably focused on the photographer and the artifice afforded by instantaneous photography and the photographic studio context – it is a context that is conducive to illusion and pretence. Life drawing on the other hand, at least at its best, is a space of honesty – for the model, who is subjected to sometimes challenging postures for extended durations while being acutely observed, and also for the artists who encounter their own limitations and shortcomings. The subject is not posing for the camera, yet there is still a transactional dimension of consent that is arguably absent from, for instance, candid street photography.

My work is influenced by ideas like autopoiesis (cognition’s role in the self-organisation of living systems, see e.g. Maturana and Varela), self-determination theory’s emphasis on autonomy, competence, and relatedness (see Deci and Ryan) and e.g. Piaget’s constructivist ideas’ (e.g. our ‘knowledge’ being the intersection of ideas and experiences), and more (yes, I do like layering A LOT). I try to expand the authorship of ‘my’ works in a direction that counter-points my technical proclivity towards the generative in order to avoid what to me seems like the clinical, even dead, aesthetics of generative aesthetic process that seems to so easily degenerate into banal data-visualization or formulaic rendering while trying to also resist the allure of the romantic idolisation of the whims of the artist and art establishment (neither of these ideals ultimately being completely achievable but that does not negate the value of trying). I like what Kandinsky has to say about the role the elements of personality (let’s call it ‘spectacle’), style (‘fashion’) and artistry (a.k.a. ‘care’ in my reading) in Concerning the Spiritual in Art – but I am not an academic. I make pictures.

There’s a lot more to the tradition of the human form in art but enough written and said about that elsewhere. Suffice it to say here, layering multiple photographs of typically the same person in different gestures allows creating a space that implies a space of time and meaning, that can be as complex as the theatre of the mind allows it to be, yet also as simple as an incidental impression of an-other. It suggests narratives that are at once both impossible to grasp, the subject’s actual histories and experience, and the alienation of being confronted by that and its ambiguity, yet mediated by the reality that we can recognise only by that which we know, that which we impose.

How beautiful is intimacy? Can art be intimate? Is intimacy possible without honesty and consent?

Vita-Socio-Anarcho
(…roughly translated might mean : life first, community, dismantle domination.)
André.
Sunday, 2022-05-15, Kensington-B, Gauteng, South Africa.

Untitled (Chanel, Portrait) (2022)
Melancholia (2021)
gita-scuro (2022)
gita-scuro-detail (2022)
Divination (Chanel) (2022)
See (2022)
Leaf 16 (2021)
Leaf XII (2022)
Untitled (Last 6 of 12 for Leaf XII) (2022)
Untitled (Lila, 1-8, Motion) (2022)
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Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute