Embodiment and Survival: Ancestral Archives Re-Membered

This seminar “Embodiment and Survival: Ancestral Archives Re-Membered” continues from the winter semester 2024/25. During the summer semester, seminar participants will collectively breathe life into The Library of Forgotten Things, a fluid non-structure to be shared with the public during the 2025 Rundgang.

New participants are welcome to join.

We all begin life in water

We all begin life because someone once breathed for us

Until we breathe for ourselves

Someone breathes for us

Everyone has had someone – a woman – breathe for them

Until that first ga(s)p

For air

- M. NourbeSe Philip, The Ga(s)p

In a world where literacy is mostly understood as the ability to read and write for knowledge acquisition, this seminar leans into other forms of knowing, with a particular focus on embodied knowledge systems that have been historically dismissed, dismantled, or primitivized within institutions of learning. Borrowing from approaches such as Nancy-Angel Doetzel’s honouring of heart wisdom, we will focus on honouring breath, fragmentation, ritual, ester.

Not-knowing as a strategy for survival presents us with a state of productive refusal through which an intersection of indigenous/black/queer/femme/marginalized and other othered existences can continue to counter, interrupt, and escape colonial, hetero-white supremacist and patriarchal ways of knowing the world.

What emerges is a series of rhizomatic approaches that centre on respect, mutual learning, and a recognition of the interconnectedness of all living things. Through oral traditions, stories, and land-based knowledge, the relationality of people, plants, animals, and the environment presents us with possibilities to counter and de-link from often exploitative systems brought on by coloniality, racism, western imperialism, war, and other existing forms of oppression. Amongst other concepts and realities, the understanding of time as non-linear deconstructs notions of ‘common logic’ and becomes a strategy for escaping the pre-determined. Seminar outcomes will vary in timebased media, from performances to multimedia installations, video, and sound. The result is a work of empathy, allowing one to breathe alongside multiple resistances, and oscillate between various selves while escaping predictability. It is, most importantly, a work that insists on breathing as an extension of healing in order to continue to survive.

*Provisional wish-list of invited artists:

Anawana Haloba

Dineo Seshee Bopape

Francisco Camacho Herrera

Jota Mombaça

Tracey Rose

Tabita Rezaire

*Still to be confirmed.

As the majority of these artists and practitioners live and travel across various countries and continents, the invited artists' way of presence will depend on their travel schedules throughout the year.

Reading list:

Bartlett, C., Marshall, M., & Marshall, A. (2012). Two-Eyed Seeing and other lessons learned within a co-learning journey of bringing together indigenous and mainstream knowledges and ways of knowing. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 2(4), 331–340. ka Canham, H (2023)

Riotous Deathscapes. Johannesburg: Wits Press

Doetzel, N. (2018), Cultivating Spiritual Intelligence: Honoring Heart Wisdom and First Nations Indigenous Ways of Knowing, Interchange: A Quarterly Review of Education, Vol. 49 (4), pg. 521-526

Dragojlovic, A., & Quinan, C. (2023). Queering memory: Toward re-membering otherwise. Memory Studies, 16(1), 3-11.

Hunt, S. (2014). Ontologies of Indigeneity: the politics of embodying a concept. Cultural Geographies, 21(1), 27-32.

Magona, S. (1992) ‘The Scars of Umlungu’ in: I Write the Yawning Void: Selected essays of Sindiwe Magona. Johannesburg: Wits Press

Peterson, B. (2020). A love letter to those who passed on and those still tasked with creating a better future for all. Safundi, 22(1), 23–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2020.1823741Pages 23-25

McIvor, O. (2010). I Am My Subject: Blending Indigenous Research Methodology and Autoethnography Through Integrity-based, Spirit-based Research. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 33(1), 137–151.

Philip, M. N. The Ga(s)p, https://nourbese.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Gasp.pdf