An Accumulation of Uncertainties utilises speculative and historical fabulation to think with and on the weather. Interrogating what Kristen Simmons (2017) terms “settler atmospherics of power” the project broaches the imbricated entanglements between bodies and atmospheres, historical and contemporaneous relations between humans and non-human forces, emotions and sensations that shape and are shaped by various understandings of weather beyond its meteorological associations. Bringing seemingly disparate colonial narratives in affective proximity with each other, the project attempts to stage a speculative inquiry on the relationship between bodies, the environment and affect.
The project sees practitioners working across disciplines with an emphasis on collaboration, experimentation and reciprocity. Including existing and newly commissioned works, the project and its associated public programme can be accessed both online and/or in resonant sites across Johannesburg.
This project is realised collaboratively by NGO – NOTHING GETS ORGANISED and POOL and forms part of the WORLD WEATHER NETWORK, a global coalition of 28 arts agencies around the world formed in response to the climate crisis.
Operating in downtown Johannesburg for the past six years, Nothing Gets Organised (NGO) has attempted to administer an alternative to the current structures, practitioners work within in the context of Johannesburg. Noting the contingent nature of our present, our programming attempts to be a dialogical encounter between now and another time. Understanding the future as plural and disparate encounters with both a past not yet passed, and the present as it reveals itself and/or remains hidden, NGO embraces the future unknown as a premise that might yield another possibility. The platform was founded in 2016 by Dineo Seshee Bopape, Gabi Ngcobo and Sinethemba Twalo. NGO is interested in un/conventional processes of self-organising – those that do not imply structure, tangibility, context or form. It is a space for (NON)SENSE where (NON)SENSE can profoundly gesticulate towards, dislodge, embrace, disavow, or exist as nothing! Research is ongoing, malleable and open ended. NGO pursues that which becomes publicly visible, as always already processes in motion – to which we confer context, name and identity.
POOL is a Johannesburg based not-for-profit art organisation that supports practitioners through collaboration, commissioning, and the presentation of new work. POOL champions contemporary experimental and interdisciplinary artist and curator-led practice and research, working to develop projects that connect practitioners, organisations and publics across a constellation of creative practices, scales and sites. Emerging from an investigation into the role, forms, and organising systems of art institutions, POOL considers, from the perspective of artistic and curatorial practice, what it might mean to institute in ways that are dynamic, responsive and generative. To that end, POOL experiments and plays with instituent forms, exhibitions, public programming and publications as spatial and discursive practices. POOL was founded in 2015 by Mika Conradie and Amy Watson and is currently directed by Watson.
Nina Barnett and Jeremy Bolen have been collaborating since 2015. With a focus on forms of visibility and knowledge production, their work and research spans a wide array of phenomena, from neutrinos to dust storms, and often incorporates researchers and practitioners from fields outside of art including physics, anthropology, mathematics and architecture. With an emphasis on modes of sensing and sensory archives, they employ filmmaking and installation strategies that create immersive and interactive experiences for participants. Their collaborative work has been exhibited widely with recent exhibitions and screenings in Johannesburg, Lima, Mexico City, Bilbao and Chicago.
black earth study club is a collaborative program for learning to land, together. Gathering in the shadow of earth science, ancestral practice and black liberation theory, black earth study club builds collective exercises for cultivating dis/organised intimacy, recreational survival strategies and other relations to the planet beyond the horizon of recognition. black earth study club is a conceptual proposition and a research methodology. This means that through the structure and program of a study club we would like to develop and research ways of relating to this planet through the transformational logic and critical sociality of black liberation theory. Unitary in its references black earth study club is named after the planetary agglomerations of fertile soil, colloquially called ‘black earth’, and forms of collective thinking known as ‘Black study’, thus exploring the planet as a spiritual-material-social entity.
Shane Cooper is a bassist, composer and producer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is part of the new wave of South African Jazz artists pushing the music forward, and is also known for his work in the electronic/dance music world, as well as commissioned works for films and theatre. Current projects Cooper is leading include 6 piece Afro-jazz band Shane Cooper & MABUTA, a cinematic 5-piece the Dinaledi Chamber Ensemble, and Card On Spokes. As a sideman you can find him in the Stogie T live band, Radio Sechaba, Thandi Ntuli’s live band, the Kyle Shepherd Trio, and Skyjack. In the past he has also performed and/or recorded with artists like Zim Ngqawana, Lionel Loueke, Shabaka Hutchings, Ndabo Zulu’s Umgidi Ensemble, amongst others. As a composer for film, Shane’s most recent projects have been: Container by Meghna Singh and Simon Wood (2021) and Sifiso Khanyile’s A New Country (2020). His most recent work in composition for theatre was in 2019 for SAMSON by Brett Bailey, a touring production which won two awards at Woordtrofees (Woordfees awards) for Best Technical Performance and Best Musical Theatre Production, as well as Best Music Production in Theatre at the Kyknet Fiestas. Cooper was part of the curatorial team for the international jazz festival in Bern, Switzerland, Jazzwerkstatt Bern. He also writes and performs electronic dance music under the name Card on Spokes, and has shared the stage with Little Dragon, Daedelus, Young Fathers, and performed live on Boiler Room.
Abri de Swardt is an artist based in Johannesburg. His work concerns the interrelations between queerness, decoloniality and the more-than-human through an expanded notion of photography. De Swardt holds a Masters in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a graduate of the Market Photo Workshop and Stellenbosch University. He has held solo exhibitions at POOL, Johannesburg (2018); MOT International Projects, London (2013); and blank projects, Cape Town (2011), and is an upcoming artist-in-residence at Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen. De Swardt’s recent writings have been published by iwalewabooks, wherewithall, POOL and Adjective, and collaboratively with Thulile Gamedze on ArtThrob.
Thulile Gamedze is an independent cultural worker, operating as an artist, writer, curator and member of the art collective iQhiya, based in Johannesburg. Her master’s research around ‘impossible paradigms’ locates local histories of collective pedagogy and cultural work as clues towards creating time-space pockets that function out of reach of coloniality and its capitalist logic. She has published in local and international arts-based publications and catalogues as well as on a number of news platforms. Gamedze practice is concerned with education, collectivity and social life, and the potential of collaborative knowledge production to sustain forms of radical love and care.
Donna Kukama is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is informed by performance-based research processes. Through performance, video, sound, texts, and non-monuments, her work questions the way in which histories are narrated, as well as how value systems are constructed, often resisting established “ways of doing”. Kukama has exhibited and presented performances at several notable institutions and museums, including the Tate Modern in London; Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham; De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill On Sea; Arnolfini in Bristol; Padiglione de’Arte Contemporanea Milano in Milan; South African National Gallery in Cape Town; Museum of Modern Art in Antwerp; nGbK in Berlin; Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse in Toulouse and the New Museum in New York. She has participated in, among others, the 10th Berlin Biennale; the 57th Belgrade Biennale; 12th Lyon Biennale; the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; 32nd Bienal de São Paulo and 8th Berlin Biennale and the 55th Venice Biennale as part of the South African Pavilion. Kukama was the 2014 recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art, and the Wyss Scholarship, Sierre, Switzerland in 2008.
Neo Mahlasela is a musician and artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has produced music under the alias Hlasko since 2010. His practice embraces drawing, print and sound installation to unpack the elemental and subconscious through indeterminate and spontaneous creative processes. The style of music has been described as ambient, ethereal and informs the artist’s visual language as both employ abstract forms and personal themes to relate his perspective and disposition.
Bettina Malcomess is a writer and an artist based in Johannesburg. Lecturing at Wits School of Arts, and currently completing a PhD in Film Studies at King’s College London, on colonial cinema and the South African War. They co-authored ‘Not No Place: Johannesburg, Fragments of Spaces and Times’ (Jacana, 2013). Malcomess runs a platform for collaborative experimentation called the joining room. Working under the name Anne Historical, their artistic practice inhabits multivocality and density, embodied research and material investigation. Their ongoing work with analogue film and sound media inhabits the entanglement of memory, technology, race and history. A series of unfinished articulations in counterpoint voices.
Sanele Ngubane is an electronic musician and farmer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. His work involves programming and writing with synthesizers to produce compositions that are experimental and predominantly electronic. Recently he’s worked closely in collaboration with musician Desire Marea, multi-disciplinary artists Vanessa Lorenzo, Vulane Mthembu, Neo Mahlasela and curator Sinethemba Twalo. The artist draws influences from nature, life and the human condition. Genres ranging from jungle, techno and rave are explored in his work yet these are used to fabricate an original sound A solo debut is due for release in 2022 which features music produced over the past three years.
Natalie Paneng is a Johannesburg based new media artist who completed a Bachelor of Arts in Drama from the University of Witwatersrand in 2018. Paneng makes use of her self-taught digital skills and her theatre background to create multidisciplinary digital art. Paneng describes herself as a world builder and sees her growing practice as a way to navigate, share and archive imagined and alternative realities brought to life through her digital artistic process.
Tabita Rezaire is infinity incarnated into an agent of healing, who uses art as a means to unfold the soul. Her cross-dimensional practices envision network sciences – organic, electronic and spiritual – as healing technologies to serve the shift towards heart consciousness. Navigating digital, corporeal and ancestral memory as sites of resilience, she digs into scientific imaginaries to tackle the pervasive matrix of coloniality and the protocols of energetic misalignments that affect the songs of our body-mind-spirits. Inspired by quantum and cosmic mechanics, Tabita’s work is rooted in time-spaces where technology and spirituality intersect as fertile ground to nourish visions of connection and emancipation. Through screen interfaces and collective offerings, she reminds us to open our inner data centers to bypass western authority and download directly from source. Tabita is based in Cayenne, French Guyana and is a founding member of the artist group NTU, half of the duo Malaxa, and the mother of the energy house SENEB.