INKUNDLA
/ TALKS PROGRAMME
Our talks programme centre Cartography as a metaphor and modality to instigate Breath and Breathlessness as pathways for us to think about curating and creative practices as rehearsals for the things we desire and yearn for in the real world.
Tapping into indigenous ways of being where breathing functions as somatic therapy and a gateway to states of awareness and connection, we engage with breathwork to draw cartographic lines that situate artists, curators, creatives, academic and cultural practitioners to engage with our audiences in discussions that show perspective about our personality and grounding. We are asking us, the collective, to think about how we are implicated in the world’s cultural, ecological, social and institutional tremors. How do we define the problem big enough to implicate ourselves? What are the compositions that keep us in the rhythm of our breath? And more importantly, what and where are the fault-lines that offer life-lines for breathing, thinking, rehearsing and acting our way out of tremor and trauma.
KEYNOTE SPEAKER & RESPONDENT:
Day 1
Panel A - *Inheritance - Museums, Archives, Memory and Culture
Oude Libertas | 1 PM - 2:15 PM
Museum practice is traditionally understood as being embedded in colonial history that formulated what we have come to know as collections and archives – through which curatorial practice, exhibition making, acquisitions, conservation has been developed and defined. With the emergence of ‘new museums’, there are shifts – that give us the capacity to remain / remake / make the language that will constitute how we engage. And so we ask, how can we enter the museum as a project of cultural recovery? *inheritance means what was le: behind for you.
Day 1
Panel B - *Poppyhuis - Play, Improvisation, Rehearsal
Oude Libertas | 2:30 PM - 3:45 PM
Play is about enjoyment and recreation, it is the space of imagination and wonder. Often, children enter it as a rehearsal, sometimes mimicking the world they observe and other times creating a world they desire. They improvise their selfhood, drawing on resources available to them. Play is also political – it is about freedom! Always a question of whether the environment and its conditions is conducive for one to play. How do artists use play as a rehearsal space, as a place of improvisation that allows them to imagine themselves into existence? *Poppyhuis means playing house
Day 2
Panel A - *Kubuzwa kwaba Phambili - Cultural Practices and Indigenous Knowledges
Oude Libertas | 1 PM - 2:15 PM
Social systems whether economic, political, cultural influence form and place-making. We explore Jazz & Architecture as methods of invention and making that draw from indigenous knowledge systems to create cultural practices that allow us to breathe in states of duress. And thus we are asking, when we think of compass and composition - what are the relational aesthetics between wailing in Jazz and the architecture of townships / plantations / mine? *kubuzwa kwaba Phambili means you ask those who come before you.
Day 2
Panel B - Spirituality, Social Practice and Social Justice Intersections
Oude Libertas | 2:30 PM - 3:45 PM
*Dala what you must - Interdisciplinary and Anti-disciplinary work
Fracture lines, tensions, states of duress necessitate reconfiguration in how one situates, engages and positions themselves in their environment. Practice is birthed, developed and defined at most by the resources one finds available and has access to. Interdisciplinary work emerges from curiosities between different practices in finding ways to cross-pollinate and to speak with and through each other. Anti-disciplinary is interested in worldbuilding and imagining beyond what already exists thus manifesting something new; it is also about practicing refusal in how ‘experts’ define and police disciplines. What has been your approach to languaging and defining your work? *Dala what you must means you do what you got to do.
