What could the curriculum be – if it was designed by the people who dropped out of school so that they could breathe? The latest issue of Chimurenga provides alternatives to prevailing educational pedagogy. Through fiction, essays, interviews, poetry, photography and art, contributors examine and redefine rigid notions of essential knowledge.
Presented in the form of a textbook, Chimurenga 15 simultaneously mimics the structure while gutting it. All entries are regrouped under subjects such as body parts, language, grace, worship and news (from the other side), numbers, parents, police and many more. Through a classification system that is both linear and thematic, the textbook offers multiple entry points into a curriculum that focuses on the un-teachable and values un-learning as much as it’s opposite.
Inside: Amiri Baraka waxes poetic on the theoretics of Be-Bop; Coco Fusco flips the CIA’s teaching manual for female torturers; Karen Press and Steve Coleman instruct in folk-dancing; Dambudzo Marechera proposes a “guide to the earth”; Dominique Malaquais designs the museum we won’t build; through self-portraits Phillip Tabane and Johnny Dyani offer method to the Skanga (black music family); and Winston Mankunku refuses to teach.
Other contributors include Binyavanga Wainaina, Akin Adesokan, Isoje Chou, Sean O’Toole, Pradid Krishen, E.C. Osundu, Salim Washington, Sefi Atta, Ed Pavlic, Neo Muyanga, Henri-Michel Yere, Medu Arts Ensemble, Aryan Kaganof, Khulile Nxumalo and Walter Mosley amongst others. Cover by Johnny “Mbizo” Dyani.
How do we sit with the violence of erasure? What do our personal biographies tell us about what has been erased? What alternative histories and narratives emerge when we gather and when we are in community?
A Gathering is an publication by 2024 ARAK Curatorial Fellow Bulelwa Kunene which brings together the work of 13 African artists, each grappling with the complexities of their identities and histories in the postcolonial context; a landscape that is at once generative and silencing, where erasures persist in the shadows of the production of new forms of knowledge. A place to contend with absence.
Without the impulse towards filling silences, mitigating erasures and bridging gaps, A Gathering is an opportunity to sit with the discomfort of a potentially unfinished and multivocal past, present and future.
A Gathering features artworks by Ade Adesina, Bougaard, Christine Nyatho, Donald Makola, Isheanesu Dondo, Lemek Sompoika, Lynette Musukubili, Odirile Khune Motsiri, Samuel Oyebode, Tahir Carl Karmali, Tuli Mekondjo, Zenaéca Singh and Zizicelo Sifumba.