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CLOSING EVENT


eBhish’ – articulations of Black Oceanic Presence eThekwini


BY Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose



Bodies of Water, Bodies in Water: Swimming with Sea Level Rise


by residues of wetness collective


6 July 2022

7:15 - 9:00 PM

Location: University Theater

eBhish’ – articulations of Black Oceanic Presence eThekwini

Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose

 

eBhish’ – articulations of Black Oceanic Presence eThekwini unpacks the legacies of colonialism and apartheid which echo in many forms of social practice in contemporary South Africa. Ibhish’ laseThekwini (formerly the Durban beachfront), a seaside public space, remains imbued with racialized tension. Historically, the beach was the nation’s premier seaside destination and drew crowds of white beachgoers. The beach culture was established and sustained through visualisation, particularly popular culture and media, which exclusively catered to white people. The beach pictorial archives, housed at the Old Court House Museum eThekwini, reflect this bias by depicting predominately white beachgoers throughout the beach’s history. Since the 1990s, the crowds have changed, making the central beaches predominantly black, particularly in the summer. eBhish’ is an intervention on the archive. Through film photography and video, I have been documenting black beachgoers to re-read, re-question and re-inscribe black leisure in the archive. The notion of the ocean as a witness is a key research interest. We might think of the ocean as a subject which holds memory. This is particularly important in my work, as it looks at the self in relation to the ocean and engages with the beach as an articulation of an unnameable space (a metaphysical realm) beyond the constraints of capitalism which is crucial for spiritual survival. This understanding is further reinforced by various Nguni aquatic myths which open the space up for social and spiritual engagements that go beyond racial/capitalist imaginaries.

 

Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose is an artist, curator, filmmaker, researcher, sessional lecturer and a co- founder and member of Re-curators Curatorial Collective. He is interested in developing and cultivating research and artistic methodologies around Black cultural production in Africa and its diaspora. With a decolonial approach as his operational framework, his scope includes curatorial projects such as exhibitions, workshops, acquisitions, and publishing. Nyawose recently submitted his Master’s in Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. He is the 2019 recipient of the Andrew Mellon Graduate Internship at Iziko South African National Gallery and a Creative Knowledge Resources fellow (2019–2020), an interdisciplinary project funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF) and the University of Cape Town which seeks to document and study socially engaged art and interventionism. In 2021, Nyawose presented a solo exhibition eBhish’ at blank projects in Cape Town. He is the 2021–2022 University of Cape Town’s Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) Live Art Festival Curatorial Fellow and an Institute of Creative Arts Fellow (2020).

Bodies of Water, Bodies in Water: Swimming with Sea Level Rise

residues of wetness collective

 

Despite all the uncertainty surrounding the fate of the earth, one thing is inevitable and already underway, the seas are rising. The ice is melting, and excess water in the air is turning the rain violently torrential. A more oceanic future brings with it new sensibilities. Haunted by the sound of cracking ice and traces of deep oceanic times in geological formations, this project considers the past and the future as always present. By plunging into a speculative future, this project imagines how climatic conditions have altered the long-lived but fragile relations between bodies and water. It contemplates how human and non-human bodies exist in a reality where geopolitical, social, economic and cultural infrastructures are shaped by water fluctuations. A body can shrink, dry out, grow big, get hairy, become wet.

 

Swimming with the sea level rise is an invitation to imagine how time and water’s changeability entangle. To question the belief that the end of the world cannot simply be an end to a world. What could begin again and anew? What will have happened in a future that sits behind our present? In discussing the environmental changes, speculative writing could constitute a critical tool in prompting needed social and cultural transformation. With a new collection of four short stories accompanied by images, row’ s digital archive will grow by experimenting with its peculiar research methodology of mixing visual, text and sound in watery imaginaries. The project will take the shape of a performative reading with a discussion afterwards, allowing the space for musings on a ballardian nightmare becoming a drowned world reality.

 

residues of wetness is a collective of four interdisciplinary practitioners who converged at the Ocean(s) as Archive(s) seminar led by Ayesha Hameed in 2019. Together, row is developing a digital archive of thinking with and about water – its entanglements, fluidities and discontinuities. This archive operates as a helm during events and is inhabited by traces of found images, videos, sounds, and readings that invoke divergent aquatic imaginaries. In December 2020, row hosted an introductory event and the following spring, a monthly reading group entitled navigating in/with/through the water. Last summer, row was invited to converse with Natasha Ruwona by David Dale Gallery. 

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