WRITING
HOT POETS: One of my highlights of 2021, was being invited to be part of Hot Poets, a project by Liv Torc and Tongue Fu, in which 12 poets in the UK & SA, partnered with organisations working around cilmate change, to write poems that would inspire hope, action and agency. I had the joy of working with The Beach Co-Op, in Cape Town. They use creative community engagement and citizen science to rebuild people's relationships to the ocean, while doing monthly beach clean-ups. Their aim is to eliminate, reduce, reuse and redesign single-use plastics and so prevent them from ending up in our oceans. Click the image above to watch the poem about their work.
In 2020, I took the project online, to create listening space for people to share their experiences of the pandemic.
In 2018, poet Rebecca Tantony, commissioned me to write a poem for her project Singing My Mother's Song, which brought her to South Africa as she researched her mother's mixed ancestral lineages.
Krotoa-Eva's Suite – a cape jazz poem in three movements, is an unpublished poetry collection, written for my masters dissertation in 2015. The work re-imagines the story of the 17th century Khoe woman, Krotoa, who was sent to live and work in Jan Van Riebeeck's household as a child. Fluent in Khoena, Dutch and Portugeuse, she later she worked as a translator between the Dutch colonisers and the Khoe, especially during the Cattle Wars. In 2016, I collaborated with filmmaker Kurt Orderson, to turn an excerpt of the work into this audio-visual installation, for the exhibition Re(as)sisting Narratives, curated by Chandra Frank for Framer Framed Gallery in Amsterdam. The exhibition showed in Amsterdam and Cape Town in 2016.
COLLABORATIONS
FUTURE FOR THE PAST: a project by Sites of Memory, featuring artists from South Africa and The Netherlands, creating site-specific performance tours, in Amsterdam, Utrecht and Cape Town that explore, question & re-write our countries' shared colonial and slave pasts.
Jennifer Tosch and Katy Streek, of Sites of Memory, collaborated with South African artists Jarrett Erasmus, Luke de Kock, Toni Giselle Stuart and Dutch artists Jörgen Gario, Jomecia Oosterwolde, Raul Balai, Alejita Silva
forgetting. and memory
A collaboration with poet vangile gantsho and filmmaker Vusumzi Ngxande, exploring inter-generational memory and forgetting, through the elements of earth, fire water and air.
The work is an interactive film and poetry meditation, and was created for the Virtual National Arts Festival 2020, with support from the NAF.
Inheritance I and II
A visual art and augmented reality collaboration with Athi Musoke as part of the Giving Poetry Wings 3 project, by The Radioactive Blog. Click image to view the full exhibition and see the AR videos. Artwork by Athi Musoke
Poetry, Paramedics & Film
This project is a collaboration with filmmaker and public health researcher, Leanne Brady.
Her documentary Red Zone Paramedics, gives us an intimate and personal look at the paramedics who work in areas with a high risk of violent attacks. I interviewed three paramedics and turned their stories into poems. After the Night is poetry film featuring two of the paramedics and their stories.
REDEFINITION COLLAB – a collaboration with movement artist SEEFLeHX the ART1ST and photographer Earl Abrahams. This dance, poetry/soundscape was created in response to Earl's photo triptychRedefinition, which showed as part of Habitat Online at BKHZ Gallery in 2020.
PERFORMANCE
I Come To My Body As A Question
A poetry and dance work created in collboration with dancer/choreographer Yinka Esi Graves, and UK flamenco dance company, dotdotdot dance. The piece was conceptualised, devised and choreographed by Graves.
It explores the flamenco style guajira, particularly the lyrics of the older songs, from the colonial era in Cuba, and how they view and perceive the "mulatto" or mixed woman. It features three original poems written specifically for the show, which question, speak back to and interrogate the voice of the cantor (flamenco singer) and his gaze. Initially created with support from Sadler's Wells Theatre and Arts Council England.
The work first showed at the Lilian Baylis Studio as part of the Sadler's Wells WildCard dance series in 2016.
In 2017, it featured at Sampled festival at Sadler's Wells, London and The Lowry, Manchester. In 2019, it toured Sweden.
Papyllon
Papyllon is an intimate, haunting piece created in partnership with dancer/choreographer Ella Mesma. The work features Mesma on aerial silks, and explores identity, ancestry, the relationships between mothers and daughters, and, where and how these individual questions meet the world. It showed at the ICA Live Art Festival and Open Book Festival, in Cape Town 2018. IMAGE: Lindsey Appolis