This conversation with Zara Julius concludes the third season of Sonic Interventions on South African Sound Art. Zara Julius shares about her debut solo exhibition “Whatever You Throw At The Sea” at the Weltmuseum in Vienna critically reflecting about postcolonial structures in museums and archives. She speaks about her editorial work, her research, and her artistic practice.

In Conversation with

Zara Julius

Zara Julius (1992) is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and cultural worker based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is also the founder of Pan-African creative research and cultural storytelling agency, KONJO. Working with sound, video, performance and image-based installation, her practice involves the collection, selection, collage and creation of archives (real, imagined and embodied) through extensive research projects. Informed by her working methodology of ‘rapture’, Zara Julius is especially engaged in thinking through the internal workings of the Black sonic, and how they might help us imagine new futures, and experience different present(s) in the face of various unfreedoms, as well as thinking through the carceral logics of intimate and museological archiving practices. Many of Zara’s projects have focused on mapping the sonic and spiritual mobilities of spiritual rapture and rupture with congregants of syncretic traditions, and on (post)apartheid / (post)colonial narratives around race, place and time as. Zara holds a BAHons in social anthropology from the University of Cape Town (2014) and a MAFA in Fine Art by Research and Practice from the University of the Witwatersrand (2021). Zara has exhibited her work across South Africa and internationally. As a vinyl selector, Zara’s sets reflect her desire to travel land, seas and time. She is currently in residence at the Oscillations project, a cooperation between the Akademie der Künste (Germany) and the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape (South Africa).


Website

Instagram

Whatever You Throw at the Sea Exhibition at Weltmuseum Wien (27 April 2023 – 2 April 2024)

Oscillations (Cape Town – Berlin) Exhibition on view in Berlin (27 April 2024 - 19 May 2024

References

• Liner Notes for Whatever You Throw at the Sea
  


• Fred Moten (USA, poet and scholar) and Stefano Harvey (USA, scholar and activist)
  
  Harvey, Stefano & Moten, Fred (2013): The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Williamsburg: Autonomedia.


• Dionne Brand (Canada, poet, essayist, and novelist)
  
  Quote excerpted from "A Nomenclature of Everything"
  
  Brand, Dionne (2022): A Nomenclature of Everything. New and Collected Poems. Durham: Duke University Press.


• Edouard Glissant (Martinique, cultural theorist, novelist, and poet)
  


• Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados, poet and historian)
  
  "Tidalectics" as defined by K. Brathwaite proposes an opposition to the Western philosophical concept of "dialectics" in the context of Caribbean Poetry. Cf Brathwaite, Kamau (1999): conVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey. New York: We Press.)


• Vuyiswa Xekatwane, also known as Gogo Mahlodi (writer, healer, and diviner based in Johannesburg)
  


• Tina Campt (USA, scholar) Frequencies of Care Project
  
  
  
  Credits
  
  Sounds
  
  Whatever You Throw at The Sea Vinyl by Zara Julius
  
  With additional field recordings provided by the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
  
  Participants: Tabea Briggs, Emily Joost Chychy, Faris Cuchi Gezahegn, Louis Deininger, Ava Binta Diallo, Masimba Hwati, Katia Ledoux, Vuyiswa Xekatwane
  
  Visuals
  
  Podcast Cover: Vinyl Cover, Whatever You Throw At The Sea, Photo courtesy of Zara Julius
  

Podcast Info

Concept

Dr. Layla Zami, Postdoctoral Researcher in Performance Studies

Producer

Freie Universität Berlin, Collaborative Research Center Intervening Arts

(SFB 1512 Intervenierende Künste, TP B05)

Funded by

German Research Society (DFG)

In Cooperation with

FU Berlin, Institut für Theaterwissenschaft

Eufoniker Audioproduktion