Elegy, selected performances, 2015-

 

ELEGY

2015 -

Elegy is a long-term commemorative performance project, initiated in 2015 and staged in locations from Johannesburg to São Paulo, Paris, Basel, Munich and Amsterdam. Each performance gathers a group of seven female vocal performers who collectively enact a ritual of mourning, sustaining a single haunting tone over the course of an hour. Invoked in the ritual gesture of each performance is the absent presence of a named woman or LGBTIQ+ individual raped and killed in South Africa. For those immersed in its sonic wake, Elegy is an opportunity not only to grapple with a normative crisis of patriarchal violence, but to reaffirm the fullness, beauty and insistence of black, brown, femme and queer lives.

In an economy of differentially valued life, Elegy asserts conditions of hope and avowal, memorialising (as loveable and grievable) the lives of individuals lost to the physical, ontological and structural violence of rape culture and femicide in South Africa. For each performance, a eulogistic text is shared, scripted by a family member or friend of the individual commemorated. In the cases of Louisa van de Caab (d. 1786) and Cornelia van Piloane (d.~1766) – two women enslaved and murdered in the Cape Colony – speculative texts of remembrance and care were written by historian Dr Saarah Jappie. Accounting for an historically informed present of anti-black, anti-femme violence, Elegy calls for solidarity and relation in and across difference.

Refusing spectacle and the regular objectification of traumatized black, brown, femme and queer bodies, Goliath turns to ritual, sound and a praxis of relationality, offering in Elegy a space for transformative empathic encounters. Here, grief collapses representation and loss becomes an alternative site for community and imagination. In the paralinguistic flow of this sonic lament, she abandons melody, narrative and codified legibility, drawing participants into a more visceral, resonant aesthetic experience. And in the liminal space of this irresolution (rather than closure or catharsis) she asks us to collectively perform a political work of mourning.

- - -

A selection of documented Elegy performances are shown as an immersive 10-channel video & sound installation, commemorating Camron Britz, Hannah Cornelius, Eunice Ntombifuthi Dube, Kagiso Maema, Lerato ‘Tambai’ Moloi, Sizakele Sigasa & Salome Masooa, Noluvo Swelindawo, Joan Thabeng, Louisa van de Caab, and Cornelia van Piloane. 

Elegy- Noluvo Swelindawo (2018), is a photographic series of 7 portraits, invoking the absent presence of Noluvo Swelindawo, who was abducted from her home and murdered by Sigcine Mdani on the 3rd of December 2016.