Community in Practice
Our public programme, which encompasses talks and education, embodied interventions, sonic mappings and the bioscope, centralises the body as the site of inquiry, archive and speculation. Community in Practice is where we gather practices to breathe alongside each other, thus forming a community.
As a community in practice, these convenings become anti-disciplinary as they imagine world building beyond what exists and, at the same time, work against the rigid confines of discipline, thus manifesting new narratives of possibilities whilst practising deep time refusal. Community in Practice as anti-disciplinary is ukuphefumla ngenxeba – breathing through the wound, by entering rehearsal as an improvisation of time, space and beingness.
Here we are in a deep rehearsal space, moving through the impulses of where breath takes us, our capacity to breathe, and where we are unable to draw breath owing to financial limitations, institutional processes, language tensions, time, infrastructure, political and economic warfare, racism, religion, borders. As we are developing the various projects, in some cases we hold our breath with no retribution. Sometimes our lungs are passageways for excited air bubbles. At other times we carry and move through the grief of an unrealised or deferred dream where our lungs cannot tell the difference between drawing and releasing breath ... so we sit and exist in the space of deep time improvisation.
THE BIOSCOPE /
FILM FESTIVAL
Bioscope is a motion picture projector that transports us into worlds imagined, fantasised, mythologised, re-enacted, animated.
‘Bio’ means life / biography – the course of a person’s life. ‘Scope’ refers to the extent of an area / subject matter that something deals with.
Here we are recalling, remembering, retracing Bioscope as an archival space of nostalgia, play, curiosity, wonder and amazement. The Bioscope is a conversation with moving image as a geography of the possible, where we can situate our breath in the motion, choreography, framing of anti-disciplinary. It is unpacking breath and making worlds through breathless impulses from below. Film-makers and artists working with the moving image thrust our gaze, our ways of looking and seeing into the geography of the possible.
EMAQABINI /
EDUCATION PROGRAMME
The programme takes its cue from Ellen G. Levine who said, “Healing must be understood as the restoration of a person’s imaginative capacity.” We trace a lifeline between our respiratory system and the restoration of our imagination. By stimulating curiosity and imagination, art as a lens can create spaces for a course correction to be ignited, thus allowing us to breathe. Artists have the capacity to confront us with what’s possible, offering us a possible renewal through restorative practices.
Our education programme explores restorative practices by examining how arts-based methodologies can address the profound barriers that children in South Africa, particularly in Stellenbosch, face in their learning. These barriers include a lack of spaces for containment, self-expression, play and exploration – the essential aspects of childhood that are often missing in a context like South Africa, where trauma is a significant part of daily life. By engaging in different artforms in the Triennale, we aspire to equip ourselves and participants in the education programme with empowering tools, enabling the young to reawaken their imaginations, create their own solutions, express themselves, and craft their own futures. Our attempt is to co- create a space that invokes a position where we are not victims of our future, but its designers.
INKUNDLA /
TALKS
Our talks programme centres cartography as a way to engage with Breath and Breathlessness, asking questions such as: how are we implicated in the world’s tremor? / how can we define the problem big enough to implicate ourselves? / what are the compositions that keep us in the rhythm of our breath? / how have we sustained ourselves in states of duress and breathlessness? / what does wailing give us as an ancient, indigenous practice? / who are you uninterrupted?
The attempt with our talks programme is to draw cartographic lines that situate artists, curators, creatives, academics, cultural leaders, and museum and gallery directors to engage with our visitors in discussions that probe us to ask different questions in relation to exhibition-making as a rehearsal space for the things we desire and yearn for in the real world.
IMIZWA /
EMBODIED INTERVENTIONS
What is the relation between body and site? What does it mean to intervene in a space charged with a history and a body marked with a history? How does architecture determine the tactile body as a site? What lies between the tremor of the earth and our lungs? How has our breath been disrupted, distorted, dislocated? Embodied interventions engage in how trans- indigenous collaborations can build infrastructures of dreaming that can sustain our capacity to breathe. We have been drawing passageways between indigenous peoples across African countries, Indonesia, Taiwan, Australia, Brazil and Colombia as an attempt to hold the wound of the land and the wound of the water whilst asking for iyeza – medicine. The embodied interventions take the form of site-specific constellations, interactive installations, offerings and happenings that position the body as a somatic conjunction.
ABALOZI /
SONIC MAPPINGS
Calls on ixilongo – the horn to instigate a space for sonic mappings that centralise wind instruments. It is an ancestral and forensic listening to our breath and how it is funnelled through ixilongo to announce sound. It is about tracing wailing and ululating, a reading of how sound makes itself present, what and how it holds being here. Sonic mappings engage with rehearsal and improvisation as an act of breathing. Here we are working with musicologists, producers, musicians and sound artists to map the relationship between our breath and wind instruments.
ST2025 is brought to you by Outset Contemporary Art Fund and many more
SPONSORS + PARTNERS
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