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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
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Monday 20 January 2020
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    #07
  • frictions

MICHALIS PICHLER

Bibliophagia

We refuse to think a text without a body. Materialzartlichkeit.

We are only interested in what isn’t ours. Law of human. Law of Bibliophagia. We make many acquaintances, choosing but a few as favorite meal. We are polemists, but also anthologists: we devour only the opponents we consider courageous. Bibliophagia.

Poetry exists in the facts. Worn books colourful and grey, yellowed paper, obsolete contents, are aesthetic facts. Satin-matt photographs from the 1980s, paginations, white pages. Name lists, indexes, printer’s ink. That which is left, that which is neglected, vanquished and gathered together under the name of the outdated.

The aimless derivé in the forest of cheap second-hand bookshops and flea-markets. Overflowing banana boxes. Books for 1.00 Euro, 1.50 Euro, 2.00 Euro.

Libidinal economy: the anal bibliophile, who preserves the mint copy, stores away the book, shrinkwrapped, without even opening it. The oral bibliophile, Bibliophage, who enjoys the book, with muddy hands maybe, not protecting much, reads it to death, or physically interacts with it, like a child.

Agile and illogical. Agile the New Book, born of Bibliophagia. Agile poetry. Agile Bibliophagia. Agile and candid. Like a child.

Reading. Reading. Reading. Reading. Reading. Reading. Reading. Reading. Reading.

The reader cannot protect themselves against the erosion of time, unless they eat the book, which is no more than a substitute (the spoor or promise) of moments “lost” in reading. To be able to write, one has to have read. To be able to read, one has to have lived.

Bibliophagia first of all indicates the intense relation between reader and book, the loved book, its being read, being loved. The Ur-Bibliophage would be the child that enjoys its picture book to a degree that it gets consumed.

A book, any book is for us a sacred object: we do not listen to everything that everybody says, but read even “the torn scraps of paper in the streets”.

A suggestion of El Lissitsky (also Carrión): Don’t read.                   
fold
color
build

The millionaire-contribution of all the errors. The way we (don’t) read. There is only print. Reproducibility.

Art/literature indicated here, that it would return to everyday life. Whatever force in this direction will be good. Bibliophagia.

One cannot rely on Bibliophagia as such. It can be mobilized for the most different politics.
From              
until.
The transfiguration of Taboo into Totem.

Against …                    ….                    and …

Against the white cube. Against Duchamp. Against the cultivated practice of the autonomous aesthetic sphere.

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but Bibliophagia borders on the chaos of memories. The natural lust in demolishing, a literary drunken-ness, nurtured from memories.

As the age is miraculous, Bibliophagia was born from the dynamic rotation of destructive factors.
Cutting, tearing out.
Gluing in
Collage Surgical interventions: Penetrage, Recto-Verso-Collage
Negative Space: Holes, Cuts, Cutting Windows and Tunnels
The verso of fragments
Doppelganger
Chamaeleons
Butterflies
Production mistakes
Shadows when turning the page
Pages glued together
Erasing, Filtering, Highlighting
Crossing, Queering
Blacking
Reordering
Rebinding
inserted pages
cut-off spines

Invention, through copy and surprise.

A new scale: with letters in books, children in laps.

Bibliophagia is a Friday night bar with birds singing in the condensed forest of cages, a thin fellow playing Rembetiko and Mari-Elena browsing the internet. The present is all there, online.

We have a plural and actual base – the forest of data, online second-hand bookshops, flea markets, wastepaper bins and the library.

Our quotes are mutilated and approximative, like the left-overs of a torrential digestion. Re-writing and ruminating.

Everyday love, desire and the capitalist modus vivendi. Bibliophagia. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform into a reproducible Totem.

Everything digested. Barbarous, credulous, picturesque and tender. Internet surfers. Bibliophagia. The forest and the library. The kitchen. The sea. Bibliophagia.

This essay was first published in IDEA POLL, edited by Michalis Pichler (MISS READ, Berlin, 2021). Re-published in herri with kind permission of the Author.  http://missread.com/ideapoll/

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Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute