Son[i]a #369
Sethembile Msezane
![Son[i]a #369](https://img.macba.cat/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/126.jpeg)
Working from the foundations of historical narrative and its constructs, African knowledge systems, and a contemporary take on colonial wounds, South African artist Sethembile Msezane (KwaZulu Natal, 1991) has an interdisciplinary practice that goes beyond critique. Her work suggests the possibility of generating new spaces that invite reflection and pave the way for other conversations. Msezane’s works question and negotiate the presence and absence of the black female body in the history of South Africa, and the political conflict involved in its representation—a trace of a colonised people—in public and private space. Gestures that persist—in the form of living sculptures, or embodiments, as she prefers to call them—and a certain predilection for ephemeral materials that stem from an interpretation of cosmology and history that seeks to create spaces of conversation and healing in dialogue with the great beyond and also with the ground beneath our feet and with the more-than-human.
In this podcast, Sethembile Msezane talks about her rejection of modern throwaway culture, convinced that the history and experiences of ancestors contain clues and know-how that allow us to imagine different futures. She believes that good omens must enter through spirituality and dialogue with ancestors. Art is simply a tool.
Lydia Ourahmane
Lydia Ourahmane is an Algerian-born multidisciplinary artist who has spent much of her life in the UK. In her installations and interventions, the notions of object and subject—considered separate in Western thought—converge and dialogue between the public and private, the alien and borrowed, migration and extractivism, everyday life and the affective materiality of things. In this podcast we talk (in total darkness) to Lydia about her relationship with echo as a phenomenon for the creation of negative space, about listening as a trigger for singular experience. We also talk about her connection to spirituality through her family experience, a community persecuted for its faith in her home country. Finally, we hear some open questions about the idea of home, belonging and freedom, and about the miraculous, the unexplained and the absolute.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some outtakes from our conversation with South African artist Sethembile Msezane, who riffs on our disconnection from nature. Movement, water, ancestry and spirituality also come up, along with some side notes on the different types of relationships that institutions and public space make possible.
Arjuna Neuman
Artist, filmmaker, and writer Arjuna Neuman has been working in tandem with philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva since 2016. The result of their collaboration is an ongoing series of films and installations that merge poetics and critical theory, in a dreamlike polyptych that is disorientating and grounding in equal parts. Their so-called “elemental cinema”—part documentary and part personal essay—considers often overlapping events and disasters of the past, present and future history of the planet: from slavery and police brutality to ecological collapse and the biodiversity crisis.We sat down with Arjuna Neuman to talk about planetary body horror, wind, clouds, blues, tenderness, and the not so evident autobiographical threads in their films.
Sarah Nuttall
Over the past 10 years, South African scholar Sarah Nuttall's work has focused on post-colonial criticism, urban theory and literary and cultural studies, especially in relation to Africa and its diasporas. Her current area of interest revolves around water, heavy rainfall, flooding and hydrocolonialism, and how they intersect with materiality, time and daily life. But also around how water can be traced and analysed across works of literary fiction from the African continent. ‘Pluviality’, the umbrella term she coined for this purpose, serves as a conceptual framework and a methodological approach to her study of rain in an era of extreme climate emergency.
Kendell Geers
South African artist Kendell Geers talks about structures of power, terrorism, linguistic violence, Africanness and socio-political tensions before and after apartheid.
Oyèrónké Oyèwùmi
Professor Oyèrónké Oyèwùmi examines the ways in which universalism in academia distorts our understanding of African cultures, especially in relation to race and gender. In this podcast, Professor Oyèwùmi talks about age, seniority, and respect, about unscrupulousness and academia, dispossession and spirituality. She considers the oxymoron of the notion of “single mother” from the point of view of Yoruba culture, and she also notes how observance of community practices from non-Western cultures may be a necessary step as we face the planetary challenges to come.