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.
Besides Puleng; dontsa-ring and roving preoccupations by Simnikiwe Buhlungu (Chisenhale Gallery, Kunstinstituut Melly and Mousse Publishing)
In her most expansive publication to date, Simnikiwe Buhlungu takes the site of the ubiquitous water puddle as her starting point. With contributions from musicians, artists, curators, and scientists from around the world, the publication draws upon research related to hygrosummons (iter.01)—commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London and Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam—and gathers an intertextual conversation around the literal and metaphorical possibilities of the water cycle. The artist’s original writing uses the footnote as an editorial style to trace personal anecdotes and literary references that have informed her commission. Situated amongst original drawings, texts, song lyrics, posters and correspondences, a series of research images reveal geographical sites and experimental processes that have shaped the development of a new body of work.
Delving into puddle microbiology amongst disciplines of art, science, geography, and history, Buhlungu questions the language of standardized scientific expression. Her ongoing inquiries into sensing instruments and invisible systems of knowledge, positions the puddle as a body of water with agency, exploring how knowledge is created, by who, and the ways in which it is encountered. With these ideas woven into the publication’s design and materials, the book acts as an index to concepts within Buhlungu’s practice, whilst continuing her experimentation with how conversations are disseminated in exhibition and publishing-form.
Edited by Olivia Aherne, Amy Jones, Rachel Be-Yun .Wang, Zoé Whitley
Texts by Alunamda Buhlungu, Simnikiwe Buhlungu, El Colegio Desextinction, Khwezi Gule, Taylor Le Melle, George Mahashe, Gabi Ngcobo, Saïd Rosales, Norbert C.A. de Ruijter, The Brother Moves On, Zoé Whitley, Riet Wijnen
Designed by Rose Nordin