On the 28th of January 2023, Race:Gender:Class and the Practicing Refusal Collective presented a curated offering of sonic, performative and poetic responses, as part of the Joburg convening of Think from Black: a Lexicon. Hosted by the Johannesburg Art Gallery and @occupation.jag, the programme featured readings and art activations by Canisia Lubrin, Gabrielle Goliath, Danai Mupotsa, Christina Sharpe and Nelisiwe Xaba.

Please note: this is a 2-minute preview video. The full video was made available as a 1-week screening window, courtesy of the artist.

Gabrielle Goliath, Elegy (2015-)

Elegy is a long-term commemorative performance initiated by Gabrielle Goliath in 2015. Staged in various locations, each performance calls together a group of female vocal performers who collectively enact a ritual of mourning, sustaining a single haunting tone over the course of an hour.

Responding to the physical, ontological and structural outworking(s) of rape-culture in South Africa, Elegy performances invoke the absent presence of individuals whose subjectivities have been fundamentally violated, and who are as such all too easily consigned to a generic, all-encompassing victimhood. Each performance commemorates a named, loved and missed woman or LGBTIQ+ individual subjected to fatal acts of gendered and sexualised violence. Significant to the work is how loss becomes a site for community, and for empathic encounters with and across difference. Refusing the symbolic violence through which traumatised black, brown, femme and queer bodies are routinely objectified, Elegy performances open an alternative, relational space, wherein mourning is presented as a social and politically productive work, not in the sense of healing or closure but as a necessary and sustained irresolution

Gabrielle Goliath situates her practice within the histories, life worlds and present-day conditions of black, brown, femme and queer life, refusing its terminal demarcation within a paradigm of racial-sexual violence. The conditions of hope that underscore the social encounters of her work ask for what she terms a life-work of mourning – “for to imagine and seek to realise the world otherwise is to bear with us those lost to or still surviving an order of violence we hope to and must transform”.

Goliath’s immersive installations have shown across South Africa and internationally. She has won a number of awards including a Future Generation Art Prize/Special Prize (2019), the Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2019), and the Institut Français, Afrique en Créations Prize at the Bamako Biennale (2017). Her work features in numerous public and private collections, including Kunsthalle Zürich, TATE Modern, Frac Bretagne, Iziko South African National Gallery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and Wits Art Museum.

www.gabriellegoliath.com

- - -

A note from Deb Thomas…

Practicing Refusal Collective member Deborah A. Thomas introduced the screening of Elegy - Lerato ‘Tambai’ Maloi, presented at JAG on the 28th of January 2023, with the following words:

I first encountered Elegy at the Cape Town Slave Lodge in 2018.  It was the opening of an exhibit called “Under the Cover of Darkness:  Women in Servitude in the Cape Colony,” that was curated by Carine Zaayman.  The exhibit itself was meant to surface the untold stories of women forced into slavery in what would then have been the Dutch-controlled Cape during the eighteenth century.  Twelve specific women were commemorated, their lives detailed throughout the exhibit.  One of these women, Louisa van de Caab, was the subject of the critically-speculative eulogistic text written by historian Saarah Jappie for the performance of Elegy. 

This is what is so beautiful about Gabrielle’s Goliath’s work, and it is what makes the work both mourning and memorial, a citational practice that acknowledges and amplifies the ubiquity of sexual violence, and celebrates specific lives lived.  Central to Elegy, and to all Gabrielle’s work, are these questions:  How do we make work that bears witness to violence without trafficking in violence?  How do we share trauma without directly representing it?  How do we give voice without giving transparency?

What was so striking to me in 2018 was that this work of memorialization was so profoundly interior, but also collaborative and collective.  The performers created a sonic landscape that was shared, in that the note they vocalized was durational but simultaneously individual.  I came to anticipate particular voices, looking forward to specific women’s tone.  I watched as some audience members, initially entranced, became uncomfortable.  After about ten or fifteen minutes, some began to fidget, some left.  Those who remained settled deeply into the sound, and into the worlds evoked by and through that sound.  Consciously and unconsciously, we surrendered to what Gabrielle has called a “sonics of knowing,” a “collective transference of likeness,” and “a condition for survival and hope.”  As the women began to peel off and sit among audience members, I watched their own release.  One woman sat next to me and began quietly sobbing.  I placed my hand on hers and felt the spark of relation and care.

That experience of Elegy felt incredibly vulnerable, yet extraordinarily powerful.  It created the conditions for reflection without laying out a pre-determined end point for that reflection.  At the time, I had been thinking with some colleagues about ways to memorialize and release the spirits of those ancestors who live in the Penn Museum, the space where I spend most of my days.  Gabrielle’s work opened up those discussions in ways that have subsequently prompted me to think about what it would mean to experience and practice authority without sovereignty, freedom without autonomy, and surrender without subordination. 

Mourning, for Gabrielle, is life work.  It is, in her words, “a reaffirmation of the conditions of hope through the ritual invocation of named, loved, missed, and grieved after lives.”  Elegy, and indeed all of Gabrielle’s work, is a kind of portal.  It creates the conditions for us to give ourselves over to the work of mourning, and, potentially, to reflect on the conditions that create the need for mourning in the first place.  In generating a feeling in relation to, rather than a feeling “for,” specific lives rather than faceless victims, Elegy not only makes these specific lives grieve-able, but also becomes a necessary precursor to something that will take place afterward.  It models the act of yielding, of giving oneself over to something or someone, of surrender to modes of vulnerability grounded in embodied practice, process, and dialogue.  This surrender is fractal and recursive; it requires witnesses and generates archives.  It lays out political and social possibilities beyond those imagined to follow from recognition, inclusion, and the extension of rights, those certainties of liberal possessive individualism foundational to state-centered onto-epistemological phenomena that produce whiteness, maleness, and Europeanness as the apex of humanity.  Surrender is an iterative practice rooted in love that is future-oriented yet enacted in the day to day. 

As you surrender to this version of Elegy, and to the kind of community it makes possible through the ritual invocation and collective mourning of a specific absent presence, I will read for you the eulogistic text written for Lerato “Tambai” Moloi by her cousin Zandile Motsoeneng.

To my darling Lerato Tambai,

How it saddens me to write about you when you are no longer with us, how am I supposed to write about your smile, never mind your laugh?

 Dear cousin of mine, I am sorry, so sorry I wasn’t there on that fateful night, I sleep with regret every night knowing how those monsters assaulted you, took your dignity and right to live. They acted as God and made decisions that not only af­fected you but everyone.

I recall when I got the call about your passing, I was at work, and it was from Jade my friend. She said, “Mazee Tambai (ore sile mfethu), she has passed away”. No, how could it be? I recall screaming, tears failing, because I was numb to hear the way of your passing. She said you were sexually assaulted, and that it looked as though you had been stoned. Anger filled my whole entire body and does till today. 

Ntwana (Lerato), when I think of our olden days of playing soccer in the dusty streets of Naledi, summer days when we would pour water on people returning from work, and run so fast to hide, it tears me apart. When those animals hurt you, they hurt everyone. It’s no longer the same at home, aunty expects you to walk through that door every time; or when your favorite song comes on, instead of singing along as we used to, we weep. How we wish we could see you one last time, take away the pain you went through before your last breath, even grant you one wish.

I made a promise that I won’t rest until those animals rot in jail, hence I am at every court appearance outside chanting, asking for their heads. Maybe in that we will find closure. Maybe then sleeping will be normal again, and maybe then our be­loved Tambai you will rest knowing your friends, family and community members were united because of you. Where everyone saw each other as humans, and sexuality did not come into play…

Till we meet again Ntwana, you are loved.

- - -

‘Think from Black: a Lexicon’ is imagined as a collective effort to create a more expansive conceptual vocabulary that takes Black life - in all of its diversity and multiplicity - as its point of departure.

Click here to find out more about Think from Black: a Lexicon

Click here to return to the screenings menu