As promised in Wednesday’s post, here is the first part of the Black Athena Reloaded session from the documenta 14 public program The Parliament of Bodies:
While the second session focused on the brutal slavery document, Le code noir, this first discussion engages the theme of ‘Ideas as Migrants – Our Common Ghosts’, and is presented by two Rwandans, philosopher Isaïe Nzeyimana and artist Christian Nyampeta. (The theme seems especially pertinent following not only yesterday’s post on the decolonization of the transmission of philosophy, but also the topic of the bodies of the past in Wednesday’s post). While you can watch both presentations for yourself, I wanted to direct you to that of Nyampeta, who is discussing late antique culture, especially in the Maghreb and Egypt, using Roland Barthes seminar How To Live Together (his lecture course in 1976-1977) and the concept of idiorrhythmy – a Greekish term that specifies communities that respect an individual’s personal rhythm of life. Nyampeta contrast this communal rhythm with an oppressive rhythm that acts on the individual as a kind of demon. It may be a coincidence that this discussion at documenta in Athens on May 18, 2017, the very day that Nyampeta started an artistic residency at the Camden Arts Center in London. Here is how his residency is described on the center’s website:
Taking as an example the Kinyarwanda word for generosity – ubuntu – which also means existing and being human, Nyampeta considers what it means to be human and the subtleties that lie within the multiplicity of meanings within words, their origins and the space of contemplation and discussion that can occur with the removal of a fixed state. For his residency, he will gather a working group to translate excerpts of untranslated Francophone texts from African philosophers and writers, examining the complexities of translations and the shared space and community of practice that can be built amongst those with differing social and political groupings.
Accompanying this descriptive text is a still from Nyampeta’s 2015 video work Comment Vivre Ensemble starring Nzeyimana, one of the philosophers whose works would be translated as part of the working group project.
Nyampeta’s residency would eventually culminate in the exhibition Words After the World in late 2017 which included spaces for visitors to come together and work together, which the artist describes in a video interview as ‘hosting structures’ (here is his sketch of the space and you can see the actual space in the video).
The artist’s attention to creating a working and resting space within his exhibition is testament to his earlier involvement in The Africa Cluster of Another Roadmap for Arts Education – Africa Cluster, an international initiative under the aegis of the Another Roadmap School. Involving 22 regional research groups who work to critically analyse the UNESCO Road Map for Arts Education (crated in Lisbon 2006) and the Seoul Agenda for Arts Education (of 2010), The Africa Cluster of Another Roadmap for Arts Education, led by Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa, consists of working groups in seven African countries: Uganda, Egypt, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Nigeria and South Africa.
The path that leads Nyampeta from the Black Athena Reloaded session at documenta 14, via the Camden Arts Space residency and exhibition, to The Africa Cluster of Another Roadmap for Arts Education, is also one made by the July conference Under the Mango Tree: Ulterior Sites of Learning in Kassel, as described in the article ‘Host Protocol’ in the issue of the magazine Contemporary And (C&) on education and documenta 14 (you can read the whole issue here). The article is a discussion between Elke Aude Dem Moore, the head of the Visual Arts Department at the ifa – Institute for International Cultural Relations in Stuttgart, and the documenta 14 head of education Sepake Angiama (here pictured below on the left with fellow education program leader Clare Butcher in Kassel’s Peppermint location which housed the library of Lucius and Annemarie Burckhardt):
One of the topics discussed is how art institutions and events can contribute sustainably to new systems of knowledge production. Here is how Angiama replies:
This is a difficult question to answer. Large-scale projects like documenta are of course opportunities to create a platform where practices can find a confluence but also divergence of thinking. I recognize their power to transmit ideas that might ricochet and create new forms of knowledge that can resonate beyond the site of learning.
I was struck by Angiama’s use of the terms ‘ricochet’ and ‘resonate’ to describe how ideas interact and then extend beyond an immediate context as it seemed to perfectly describe the path from a single event or document (e.g. whether the discussion in The Parliament of Bodies, a presentation at Under the Mango Tree, the January workshop Theorizing Africana Receptions in San Diego or the special issue of Contemporary And (C&) on education) to a larger educational community and their diversity of connections (e.g. the public or education programs at documenta 14, Eos, a scholarly society that seeks to promote the study of Africana receptions of ancient Greece and Rome, or C& as a platform for international art from African perspectives). In each case, the question of how we live and work together is essential, especially how we allow for our individual rhythms to connect with those of others and the community as a whole.
Now, I know that these five posts have been a twisting and winding path (where’s the Classics?), but indulge me a little longer. I want to end this remote participation in the Eos panel by thinking about unfinished business and where it fits within the dynamic between community and rhythm. Please take a moment to peruse the list of participating institutions and the program of activities for the Under the Mango Tree conference held on July 18-19, 2017 in Kassel by clicking on the image below:
You will see that two of the institutions – KUNCI School of Improper Education from Indonesia and Rockston Studio from Zambia – were also featured in the education issue of C&. But the institution I want to direct you to is not found in the issue of C& that we have been focused on over these past five days, but they lead us forward to some unfinished business. The institution I am referring to is the Johannesburg-based Kelekela! Library, and the founding member Rangoato Hlasane.
Here you see Hlasane delivering his ‘sonic lecture’ about a project called the Thath’i Cover Okestra at Bar Mantanzas, an installation and space created by the US-based Cuban artist of Yoruban ancestry Maria Magdalena Campos Pons and her partner and collaborator Neil Leonard. Here you can get a better view of the whole set-up:
In a written account of his lecture, published in the book aneducation – documenta 14, called ‘Radioke’, Hlasane describes how the Thath’i Cover Okestra as a:
new super-nostalgic African futuristic spiritual chant non-genre
Specifically, the ‘Okestra’ brings together groups of musicians to explore and intervene in the legacy of the genre of South African dance music called Kwaito that originated in the late 1980s and was popular as a form of ‘bubblegum’ music on the cusp of the first free elections in 1994. (Here is a clip of M-M Deluxe’s title track of their 1989 album Where Were You? so you can get a taste:
In spite of the genre’s popularity and important influence on a range of music genres and other cultural formats including fashion, film and fiction throughout the 2000s, Hlasane laments its ‘toxic masculinity’, not only in its messaging but also in the music industry itself. By forming the Thath’i Cover Okestra, Hlasane argues that they were not making remixes or covers of classic Kwaito tracks, but:
Rather, we were considering:
Extensions
Recommendations
Omissions
Proposals
Speculations
Of what kwaito’s direction is, could be
This living and collective reception and transformation of a cultural moment in South African movement brought Thath’i Cover Okestra from Keleketla! Library from the Under the Mango Tree conference to an invited artist at the 10th Berlin Biennale (curated by South African Gabi Ngcobo, with the theme We Don’t Need Another Hero) and the subject of the most recent issue of C& . Here is a video about the project in Berlin (and you can also read a C& article on it here).
While I cannot know what Classicist Jackie Murray will say in response to the presentations at the Theorizing Africana Receptions panel in San Diego in a few weeks’ time (for more info click here), I wanted to share these two paths to and through documenta 14 and C&, from The Parliament of Bodies to Under the Mango Tree, of Rwandan Christian Nyampeta and South African Rangoato Hlasane and their collective projects, communal works and rhythmic messages, as a roundabout way of asking the most important question I have for the Eos workshop, for readers of C& and for anyone out there reading this: why Classics?
Why with the richness of critical and creative work by artists, philosophers and educators from Africa and the diaspora do we (or now as an ex-Classicist I can say you) want to narrow your focus to an exclusive engagement with a compromised (i.e. racist, misogynistic, colonialist, authoritarian) discipline?
You could say that it was precisely the study of late antique communities by Nyampeta that lead him to Barthes and to his artistic work about working and living together. Or you could point to the correlation between Hlasane’s rejection of Kwaito’s toxic masculinity in the very process of redirecting its reception. But what if – and here I am only whispering it into a hole here on this blog, not announcing it through the conference rooms of the Annual Meeting of the Society of Classical Studies (of which I am no longer a paying member) – what if you took all the amazing skills you have as Classicists, all your abilities with languages, all your attention to detail and detective-like curiosity and dogged determination to intervene in the past in the present for a better future, in short all your good intentions, and move on past and get over serving a misguided and obsolete discipline?
How can anyone justify calling a discipline Classics today, let alone Classical Reception Studies? There is a better argument for a discipline called documenta 14 Reception Studies because the exhibition encompasses and frames Greek antiquity, puts it in its place the mantras of white German philologists and philhellenes, between Athens and Kassel, rather than stubbornly maintaining the ‘canon’ through noble gesture of Reception Studies? To quote a Classicist friend of mine (and they may very be there with you in that conference room) what if Classics cannot be saved? What then? What would you do? Or more realistically, when Classics departments are closed, where would you do your research, where would you teach?
Well, we can still study ancient Mediterranean cultures, we can still read, teach and love Homer, but do we need to do so as Classicists? Can we not seize the opportunity of the expansion of our discipline to create a new community, a new discipline. Could Eos be the beginning of this? Could it join with C& to make the leap? The first step may be to take a copy of the C& magazine and read it without worrying about how it relates to Greece and Rome. Or take the trip back to 2017 with me and visit Peppermint in Kassel where amid the library of Lucius and Annemarie Burckhardt you come across a glass case containing books and on it is written the mysteriously enticing title “The Center of Unfinished Business”.
We can start our new curriculum of connections from here.