INTIATE SHIFT
point man the shift of the black in now in progress.
The act of rendering Blackness is on the body and the land, is prototyped with in a museum through the performance of mapping the characteristic of black, as drawn in Apartheid legislator, to evidence the hauntings of the colonial gaze, that transfers of agency of blackness. Prompted by the writings of Achille Mbembe Necro politics, where he argues, to include not only individuals experiencing death, but also experiences social or political death.
The rupture of the surface of black. As coloniality cracks the surface of black through how it is framed. Creating discrepancies between the looter and looted. By overlaying the poem on the photogram images that rupture the surface of the original narrative.
Aftershock
This prototype Evidences the forces that trigger the fault line in terrain that assist in rendering the Black surface as illegal through divergence, the tectonic boundary of separation, for spreading ridges on a territory.
INTIATE SHIFT
point man the shift of the black in now in progress.
The act of rendering Blackness is on the body and the land, is prototyped with in a museum through the performance of mapping the characteristic of black, as drawn in Apartheid legislator, to evidence the hauntings of the colonial gaze, that transfers of agency of blackness. Prompted by the writings of Achille Mbembe Necro politics, where he argues, to include not only individuals experiencing death, but also experiences social or political death.
The rupture of the surface of black. As coloniality cracks the surface of black through how it is framed. Creating discrepancies between the looter and looted. By overlaying the poem on the photogram images that rupture the surface of the original narrative.
Aftershock
This prototype Evidences the forces that trigger the fault line in terrain that assist in rendering the Black surface as illegal through divergence, the tectonic boundary of separation, for spreading ridges on a territory.
Ukhuqhekeka: the heist of Sanfoka
Keywords
Quake, rupture black, land, body, loot, shift protoytpe,
A FOUR PART ACT
ABSTRACT
“the term ‘Black’ was the product of a social and technological machine tightly linked to the emergence and globalisation of capitalism. It was invented to signify exclusion, brutalisation, and degradation, to point to a limit constantly conjured and abhorred.” - Achille Mbembe
This project, in its final culmination, is a collection of cartographic surfaces, which links measures of skin to that of land. Part of the work is contained in a counter archive online.
Through the frames of Achille Mbembe’s ‘The Aesthetics of Superfluity’ (2004) and Christina Sharpe’s Into The Wake (2016), the work studies how the term Black is weaponized by coloniality as a device to render the surface of anything it is applied to as a super-surface of inherited states and structures of violence and anxiety, that dispossess the African body of its agency.
The project is situated in the juxtaposing timelines of The Berlin Conference of 1884- 1885, and the riots and looting of July 2021 in South Africa. Geological and climatic processes and how these are drawn to describe characteristics of current, transient and deep-time surfaces through events of the Earth are studied, thinking of land and atmosphere. These, placed in conjunction with narrative, etymology, performance, and material explorations meld into methods for recollecting, processing and making sense of the spatial constructs of Black.
The work begins with in-depth research of memorial sites of ‘Black’– in the first instance, the body of the black female, and secondly, Apartheid legislation as read through the Population Registration act of 1950– to uncover the visibly invisible systems and surfaces that hold bonds of trauma and violence. Using ‘act’ to denote both embodied performance and legislation in text, as second skins of space, the work considers sites (both skins and lands) that are subjugated to forms of continued resistance and manipulation across time, to highlight the role that the construct of Black plays in corpsing the bodies and environments which they occupy within colonial and contemporary South Africa.
While consumption, devouring and destruction of black surfaces are studied, performance and a speculative event portrayed through an allegorical tea party and conference hall, a new counter narrative is produced; to temporarily rupture the perpetual hold on the agency of African territories and bodies; to disrupt the lens of the archive; and to speculate new methodologies of reading and drawing African territories, by shifting and reimagining current methodologies of language, mapping, and performance.
THE ACTS OF BLACK
THE CARTOGRAPHY OF BLACK
