The ICA Podcast

“And that title, Reclaiming the Poetics of Indigenous Horns was basically just trying to bring together this art form I so much adore with these instruments I also have so much respect and love for, and also using those two mediums to like, redefine and re-elevate what these instruments were, are and can still be.” Multi-instrumentalist and creative writer Kolawole Gbolahan reflects on his 2022 musical performance Reclaiming the Poetics of Indigenous Horns, which incorporates horns made from conch shells and the greater kudu, alongside contemporary musical instruments. Through poetry and storytelling, Gbolahan re-evaluates the capabilities of indigenous instruments in terms of both their use and social function, and seeks to trouble perceptions of indigenous instruments as archaic, naive and unsophisticated.   The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.

“There's a school of thought that says indigenous knowledges need to be protected. And what that often means or implies is that it has to be concealed, and not shared in any way with anyone. And I'm not sure I completely agree with that. I see and I totally understand and appreciate the need to conceal. But [I] also understand that one of the ways of preservation is to increase access to those knowledges...” Artist and cultural producer Russel Hlongwane transports us to unexpected places in his speculative performance Ifu Elimnyama: The Dark Cloud, which draws on Zulu cosmology, folklore and systems of transcendence, and places them within a digital framework delivered through video, installation and a performance lecture. The work seamlessly merges myth, fact and fiction while proposing non-linearity and the displacement of hegemonic knowledge.   The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.

“How I came about that title [ukuNqula kukuThandaza] was, I was really very much interested in the phenomenon of recitation and prayer, within an indigenous ecology of knowing, that really focuses on sound as a medium and a technology to activate energy of umoya, but to activate energy in whatever sense… Then it was centralising that activation of energy through the process of reciting and prayer.”  Performer and multi-instrumentalist Nkosenathi Koela reflects on his transportive 2022 musical performance ukuNqula kukuThandaza, which meditates on practices of prayer through sound. Focusing on the vibrational power of words, chanting and incantation, Koela explores healing practices, indigenous music therapies and ritual making.    The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.

​​"Ingoduko yamaNkazana, for me, became a conversation with myself and my ancestry. Because I wanted them to explain to me as to, when my body is brought home to its final resting place, whenever that day comes, how will the family and the friends and the rest of the world begin the conversation of speaking about this person's death? Who’s going to bathe my corpse? Are you going to remove certain things? Will you be ashamed of me leaving the ancestral realm with a flat chest and a penis between my legs, and then coming back with a vagina and a set of breasts? Will you be offended? Will you be upset? Will you be rejoiceful? Will it even matter?" We embark on an intimate journey with interdisciplinary artist Lukhanyiso Skosana through her haunting performance Ingoduko yamaNkazana (The Return of the Home of Harlots), a deeply personal work that sees the artist grappling with her identity and family histories. Death, grief, loss and ultimately recovery, rest and return are all the heart of this work, layered with memories of personal experiences, both traumatic and transformative. The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.

“We are everywhere is a performative explication of some of the theoretical concepts and how they found themselves as public interventions through last year. It was public interventions, not interventions in school. So it was important to be like, my practice is in the public and a public that goes beyond the institution. And it's also a practice of movement, like marching, that asks of the audience to move together from one place to another place.”  We sit down with cultural worker Qondiswa James to talk through her provocative 2022 performance We are everywhere – comprising a public intervention in Cape Town’s Company’s Garden, a film, and a battle rap by James’s developing alter ego, the tragic clown –  which interrogates invisibility through acts of witnessing, reflection and disruption. James invites us to consider socio-political functions of public art interventions and how these can be mobilised towards transgression.   The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.

"At the time, when people were talking about the land issue in South Africa, yes, I was for it. But it's only when it hits you personally, that you’re like, okay, how do we then talk about this? And how do I resolve this in my own personal space?... So that's always been an issue. And this investigation in this performance was an investigation of land, at home in the Eastern Cape." In this second episode of Season 3, visual artist Asemahle Ntlonti takes us through her arresting 2022 performance Between my finger and thumb, which considers how histories are written, and speaks of digging up the past in order to retrieve what has been lost or forgotten. Ntlonti explores the weight of the pen, and the burden of remembering and recording, particularly in relation to land and dispossession.    The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.

"I saw this thing that was growing literally on gravel; this flower that had popped on gravel. It was the most gorgeous thing… And I use that metaphor, or that image of that seed growing on rugged [land], arid sometimes, but specifically concrete, and I kept on thinking about that. And I'm like, well, isn't this what we're doing as queer people and femme people, women in this country? Isn't this what we’re doing every day, when we dare to live?" Join us as we journey with performance artist, activist and educator Tandile Mbatsha through their performance I AM, which premiered at the 2022 ICA Live Art Festival. Mbatsha invites us to reflect on queer histories and survival in a work permeated with deeply personal recollections, and captivating sounds and movement.    The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Season 3 is hosted by Nkgopoleng Moloi, and produced and edited by Catherine Boulle. Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season3.

“The body remembers more than through the head. Nerve and vessel, artery and synapse, all carry information from point to point, suffusing muscle, bone and cell with a plethora of image and sound, a flicker of light, a scream or a touch. Sometimes we wish that a delete button might annihilate some of this information. But the body instead stores relentlessly, file upon file, bottomless cabinets of memory, individual and collective…” In this final episode of Season 2 of The ICA Podcast, academic, curator, choreographer and director of the ICA, Jay Pather, draws us into his visceral and haunting 2008 work, Body of Evidence – the intricate workshop process from which it emerged, and the work’s grappling with precarity, memory, the inexpressibility of pain, and the long aftereffects of trauma lodged in the body – for the individual and for the nation.   This marks the end of Season 2, but Season 3 is just days away! Join the ICA for the public launch of Season 3 at 18.00 on Friday 7 October 2022 in Cape Town! BOOK YOUR FREE TICKETS TO THE S3 LAUNCH EVENT HERE: www.qkt.io/ICAPodcastS3Launch   Music and sounds in this episode are from Jay Pather’s Body of Evidence performed at the Durban Playhouse in 2009 by Siwela Sonke Dance Theatre, and sound designed by James Webb.   Books referenced in this episode are: Jay Pather, Performance, and Spatial Politics in South Africa by Ketu H. Katrak;  and Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice by Catherine M. Cole.   The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.   Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2. 

“When my grandmother died, I thought about all the stories that she took with her in the ground, and I thought a lot about how, in Romania, you have so many people having such interesting memories and interesting pasts that are not archived… And I started to record things because I talk a lot with people – I think that's what makes me happiest, you know, to encounter people and learn from them and exchange things.” Romanian interdisciplinary artist nomi blum invites us into the experimental performance space, and rich written and aural archive of Fragments of Encounters – an immersive installation, first performed at the Infecting the City public art festival in 2019, that emerged out of blum’s everyday encounters and conversations with people of different ages, backgrounds, nationalities and languages.    The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.   Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.

“Post 1994, it felt like you were being made part of a body national, and there was something slightly and softly violent about it... Utopia, balloons, zebras, multi colours – all of those things, for me, were used to be a very dark critique of the utopia that we thought we built in South Africa for ourselves. The one that we burn people for.” Performance artist Athi-Patra Ruga takes us on an immersive journey through the sights, sounds and movement of his epic retrospective work, Things We Lost in the Rainbow. Performed at the 2018 ICA Live Art Festival curated by Jay Pather, Things We Lost in the Rainbow unfolded as a two-hour long multi-sited, multi-media procession in which a cast of over 30 avatars led the audience through Cape Town’s city centre, from the digital dome of the Planetarium to the walls of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God on Buitenkant Street.   Music by Blue Dot Sessions, and additional sounds and music are from Athi-Patra Ruga's video works Over the Rainbow and Public Service Announcement.   The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.   Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.

“I just knew that I wanted the audience to be the catalyst, or driver, of the action. I don't know if it's from a particular type of training in theatre, but there's always so much pressure to do, and to fill the space with actions and sounds and whatever. And we find the audience doing the complete opposite. They're just like, sitting there quite still and quietly. And I knew I wanted to kind of flip that around.” Winner of the 2021 Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art, Gavin Krastin, invites us into the intimate Bindery theatre to re-experience his visceral and spectacular 2018 participatory performance Yet to be Determined – a haunting meditation on vulnerability, connection, pain, personhood and transformation.   The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.   Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.

“In the beginning, I began to think: ‘Okay, how can I save the world?' Now, I'm more like: ‘What kind of world do I want to live in?’ And how can my expressions become a language that begins these worlds. As a proposition of another kind – I think what Fred Moten calls ‘another kind of presencing’; another way of presencing yourself. I'm proposing a way of presencing oneself.” Join us as we journey with choreographer and academic Nomcebisi Moyikwa through the research, creation and performance of her 2017 work Qash Qash. Comprised of a series of visually and aurally arresting portraits of black subjectivity, Qash Qash is both an exploration of, and an insistence on, everyday moments of aliveness; lineage and continuity; sexual pleasure; interruptions; and community.   The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.   Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.

“Associating Jesus with whiteness, associating Jesus with the upper class, the way that this person gets utilised sociopolitically – it's completely antithetical to everything that he was, and everything that he ministered. And so, I guess, I just needed to re-script that, and the way that I could re-script that was by projecting or taking my biography and putting it into the life of Jesus.” Performance artist, writer and cultural worker Kopano Maroga guides us through the reverberant soundscape and rich imagery of their 2019 performance, Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations, and considers how their spiritual background, study of comparative mythology, and reading of Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation” shaped and inspired the making of the work.   The ICA Podcast is creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.   Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.

“I didn't want to become trapped in this cycle of only speaking about violence when speaking of marginalised bodies’ experiences. I wanted to know, also, how we heal, how do we stay afloat? How do we survive? How do we begin to change the narrative, to own the narrative in different ways?” Visual artist Donna Kukama invites us into her immersive 2018 performance, We the Not-Not People! -Things done, not told. Inscribed, not written. Reflecting on the conception and performance of We the Not-Not People, Kukama explores multiple intersecting forms of oppression, alongside questions of memorialisation and healing.   The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.   Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.

Welcome to Season 2 of The ICA Podcast! Featuring: Donna Kukama, Gavin Krastin, Nomcebisi Moyikwa, Kopano Maroga, Jay Pather, Athi-Patra Ruga and nomi blum. We’re doing things a bit differently this Season – offering each episode not as a broad overview of a body of work, but as a deep dive into a single performance. Over the course of the next 7 episodes, we invite you to encounter 7 remarkable artworks, and to enter into the creative processes that brought them into being. In this introductory episode, get a sneak peek at what lies ahead!   The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.   Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/Season2.

“When I think of Cape Town, I don't think of the Indian or Atlantic Ocean, or Table Mountain. I think of borders, boundaries, dividing lines which mark territory, and I think of personhood. And the harder, more devastating question, as novelist Madeleine Thien says, of who, here, is allowed to be a person?” In this bonus episode, our Season 1 finale, we switch focus to bring you the profile of a writer – Bongani Kona. Beginning at a war monument in central Cape Town, and with a public performance that Kona witnessed there in 2010, this episode is about memorialisation, master narratives, home and belonging, and the politics of place and memory. Interspersed with readings from Kona's non-fiction writing, we discuss the history of Zimbabwe as Kona lived it, about immigrating to South Africa, living in Cape Town, and people and things left behind. Bongani Kona is a writer, editor and co-curator of the Archive of Forgetfulness project. His work has appeared in a variety of places including Chimurenga, Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction, The Daily Assortment of Astonishing Things and Other Stories, The Baffler and BBC Radio 4. He was awarded the Ruth First Fellowship in 2019 and shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2016.   Music in this episode features the tracks 'Further Discovery', 'Learning from Kids' and 'Emphatic Solace' by Blear Moon, licensed under: CC BY-NC. And by Blue Dot Sessions: An Accumulation, Helmer Sprak, Emmit Sprak, Halpver, Exquisite Motion, Flor Vjell, Kovd and Pull Beyond Pull.   The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.   Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/abouttheicapodcast and keep an eye on our social media for Season 2, to be released later in the year.

“Around grade 10, there was this whole drama in the school because of what I felt was different treatment – that when the white girls coloured their hair, so they'd come in one day, their hair’s blonde, next week hair’s red, week three the hair’s black, and nobody says anything…So I coloured my hair ginger. My parents were called in, I was suspended, I was set up for expulsion…So this whole thing stuck to me, of how hair then became this very small symbol for this underlying injustice and unfair treatment.” Nkule Mabaso, an artist and curator with a Fine Art degree from the University of Cape Town (UCT) and a Masters in Curating from Zurich University of the Arts, is best known as a curator of visual art. This includes her role as Curator of UCT's Michaelis Galleries – where she curates and coordinates exhibitions, talks and symposiums – as well as major independent projects like the South African pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which she co-curated with Dr Nomusa Makhubu in 2019. But in this episode, we explore a critical but lesser-known facet of her diverse practice: Mabaso’s experience creating and curating performative interventions and installations that probe the politics of hair and beauty. In particular, we dive into her 2012-2013 performance The Black Threat, a collaboration with artist Maninzi Kwatshube, starting with a walk through Cape Town’s CBD to re-visit the site where the work intervened into the public life of the city in March of 2013.   Music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions: Careless Morning; Smooth Stone; Steadfast and The Summit.   The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.   Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/abouttheicapodcast.

“My stories, my way of expressing always comes in these very strong images. And then I always think of, what would it make the other person feel? More than think, what would it make the other person feel? Is it a kind of precarity? Is it nostalgia? Is it missing?... What it means to not be in a place you're so familiar with which is home – I think that is something very personal. And then in a choice of stories, when I find something which plays on this personal aspect, then I pursue that.”  Visual artist Meghna Singh, whose immersive environments draw on video and installation, documentary and fiction, invites us into three such installation-based works – Arrested Motion, The Rusting Diamond and the 180-degree virtual reality film, Container – which foreground her academic and personal interests in oceanic flows of trade, labour and migration; abandoned spaces and lives; historical and contemporary servitude, and the meaning of home.    The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.   Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/abouttheicapodcast.

“It's almost like you become an intercessor of particular stories, where your responsibility is to illuminate certain histories. But also, one of the things that I've learned with this form of working is to do with how one is named, really. My name is Sikhumbuzo Sizwe Makandula. My two names ‘Sikhumbuzo Sizwe’ speaks to: be the one who reminds the nation." We dive into two works by visual and performance artist Sikhumbuzo Makandula, Ingqumbo (2016) and Ingoma ka Tiyo Soga (2018-2019), to interrogate the areas of academic and artistic enquiry that have shaped – and which continue to propel – his deeply layered artistic practice: the violence of the missionary agenda in South Africa and its lasting effects, how to negotiate the intersecting influences of Christianity and African spirituality, and the necessity of excavating silenced historical narratives. “The work really starts with music, before I even get to the image,” Makandula explains – and this powerful soundscape that inspires his work and fills his performances also threads its way through our conversation as we journey between Makandula’s art studio, the South African National Gallery, and the Eastern Cape town of Makhanda.   The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.   Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/abouttheicapodcast.

“If there’s anything that I’m trying to decode in my work, it’s power. And my understanding of power as it relates to my body, as it relates to my intersections of power, and oppression – and how they work together to create this context in which I live.” We trace the trajectory of Dean Hutton’s artistic practice from their early career as a photojournalist at the Mail & Guardian, to their experiments with self-portraiture, the birth of their performance avatar, Goldendean, and the realisation of – and vast range of responses to – their infamous 2016-2018 work, FuckWhitePeople. Hutton reflects on how, at each turn, their practice has been informed and propelled by their experience of growing up in apartheid South Africa, and of living as a “Fat Queer White Trans body” visibly and vocally resisting hegemonic whiteness.   The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Catherine Boulle.   Read more about the ICA and the vision for the podcast: http://www.ica.uct.ac.za/ica/podcast/abouttheicapodcast.