How do Live Artists see, think, listen, respond and create? The Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town dives into this question via long-form interviews with South African artists and curators who perform or curate Live Art. Join us on site and in studio as we explore ground-breaking performances, public interventions and participatory installations – and the fascinating minds that bring them into being.
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Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview African artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works. Our sixth and final episode of this season features an interview with Mbongeni Mtshali, performance artist, director and head of the Centre for Theatre Dance and Performance Studies at UCT. In the conversation…
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Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview African artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works. Our fifth episode features an interview with Aika Swai about her performance lecture titled Uncharted Dialog, which she presented at the ICA Scholars showcase last year. In presenting this work she speaks abou…
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Season 4: Episode 4 - Nelisiwe Xaba & Mocke Jansen Van Veuren
24:15
24:15
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Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works. In our fourth episode of the season, artists Nelisiwe Xaba and Mocke Jansen Van Veuren speak about their work creating FAKE N.E.W.S, a multidisciplinary project integrating performance and digital art. The work explor…
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![Artwork](/static/images/128pixel.png)
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Season 4: Episode 3 - Bernard Akoi-Jackson
29:32
29:32
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Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works. Our third episode features an interview with artist Bernard Akoi-Jackson who speaks about his site-specific work, DESTINATIONS - With Anthem for The Union (…and where, from birth, would they have berthed, should a dea…
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Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works. Our second episode features an interview with internationally renowned artist Gabrielle Goliath provides rare and compelling insight into the research and creation of her monumental and acclaimed work Elegy, which had…
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Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works. Our first episode features multi-disciplinary artist Kenza Berrada about her work "Boujloud" (the man of skins) which was performed at the Live Art Network Africa Gathering at UCT’s Hiddingh Campus in February of 2023…
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“And that title, Reclaiming the Poetics of Indigenous Horns was basically just trying to bring together this art form I so much adore with these instruments I also have so much respect and love for, and also using those two mediums to like, redefine and re-elevate what these instruments were, are and can still be.” Multi-instrumentalist and creativ…
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“There's a school of thought that says indigenous knowledges need to be protected. And what that often means or implies is that it has to be concealed, and not shared in any way with anyone. And I'm not sure I completely agree with that. I see and I totally understand and appreciate the need to conceal. But [I] also understand that one of the ways …
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“How I came about that title [ukuNqula kukuThandaza] was, I was really very much interested in the phenomenon of recitation and prayer, within an indigenous ecology of knowing, that really focuses on sound as a medium and a technology to activate energy of umoya, but to activate energy in whatever sense… Then it was centralising that activation of …
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"Ingoduko yamaNkazana, for me, became a conversation with myself and my ancestry. Because I wanted them to explain to me as to, when my body is brought home to its final resting place, whenever that day comes, how will the family and the friends and the rest of the world begin the conversation of speaking about this person's death? Who’s going to…
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“We are everywhere is a performative explication of some of the theoretical concepts and how they found themselves as public interventions through last year. It was public interventions, not interventions in school. So it was important to be like, my practice is in the public and a public that goes beyond the institution. And it's also a practice o…
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"At the time, when people were talking about the land issue in South Africa, yes, I was for it. But it's only when it hits you personally, that you’re like, okay, how do we then talk about this? And how do I resolve this in my own personal space?... So that's always been an issue. And this investigation in this performance was an investigation of l…
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"I saw this thing that was growing literally on gravel; this flower that had popped on gravel. It was the most gorgeous thing… And I use that metaphor, or that image of that seed growing on rugged [land], arid sometimes, but specifically concrete, and I kept on thinking about that. And I'm like, well, isn't this what we're doing as queer people and…
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Welcome to Season 3 of The ICA Podcast! In this Season – hosted by writer Nkgopoleng Moloi – each episode explores a performance featured at the 2022 ICA Live Art Festival. Join us over the next 7 episodes as each artist brings their performance to life, and reflects along the way on how their upbringing has shaped their practice. We'll be diving i…
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“The body remembers more than through the head. Nerve and vessel, artery and synapse, all carry information from point to point, suffusing muscle, bone and cell with a plethora of image and sound, a flicker of light, a scream or a touch. Sometimes we wish that a delete button might annihilate some of this information. But the body instead stores re…
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“When my grandmother died, I thought about all the stories that she took with her in the ground, and I thought a lot about how, in Romania, you have so many people having such interesting memories and interesting pasts that are not archived… And I started to record things because I talk a lot with people – I think that's what makes me happiest, you…
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“Post 1994, it felt like you were being made part of a body national, and there was something slightly and softly violent about it... Utopia, balloons, zebras, multi colours – all of those things, for me, were used to be a very dark critique of the utopia that we thought we built in South Africa for ourselves. The one that we burn people for.” Perf…
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“I just knew that I wanted the audience to be the catalyst, or driver, of the action. I don't know if it's from a particular type of training in theatre, but there's always so much pressure to do, and to fill the space with actions and sounds and whatever. And we find the audience doing the complete opposite. They're just like, sitting there quite …
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“In the beginning, I began to think: ‘Okay, how can I save the world?' Now, I'm more like: ‘What kind of world do I want to live in?’ And how can my expressions become a language that begins these worlds. As a proposition of another kind – I think what Fred Moten calls ‘another kind of presencing’; another way of presencing yourself. I'm proposing …
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“Associating Jesus with whiteness, associating Jesus with the upper class, the way that this person gets utilised sociopolitically – it's completely antithetical to everything that he was, and everything that he ministered. And so, I guess, I just needed to re-script that, and the way that I could re-script that was by projecting or taking my biogr…
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“I didn't want to become trapped in this cycle of only speaking about violence when speaking of marginalised bodies’ experiences. I wanted to know, also, how we heal, how do we stay afloat? How do we survive? How do we begin to change the narrative, to own the narrative in different ways?” Visual artist Donna Kukama invites us into her immersive 20…
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Welcome to Season 2 of The ICA Podcast! Featuring: Donna Kukama, Gavin Krastin, Nomcebisi Moyikwa, Kopano Maroga, Jay Pather, Athi-Patra Ruga and nomi blum. We’re doing things a bit differently this Season – offering each episode not as a broad overview of a body of work, but as a deep dive into a single performance. Over the course of the next 7 e…
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“When I think of Cape Town, I don't think of the Indian or Atlantic Ocean, or Table Mountain. I think of borders, boundaries, dividing lines which mark territory, and I think of personhood. And the harder, more devastating question, as novelist Madeleine Thien says, of who, here, is allowed to be a person?” In this bonus episode, our Season 1 final…
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“Around grade 10, there was this whole drama in the school because of what I felt was different treatment – that when the white girls coloured their hair, so they'd come in one day, their hair’s blonde, next week hair’s red, week three the hair’s black, and nobody says anything…So I coloured my hair ginger. My parents were called in, I was suspende…
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“My stories, my way of expressing always comes in these very strong images. And then I always think of, what would it make the other person feel? More than think, what would it make the other person feel? Is it a kind of precarity? Is it nostalgia? Is it missing?... What it means to not be in a place you're so familiar with which is home – I think …
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“It's almost like you become an intercessor of particular stories, where your responsibility is to illuminate certain histories. But also, one of the things that I've learned with this form of working is to do with how one is named, really. My name is Sikhumbuzo Sizwe Makandula. My two names ‘Sikhumbuzo Sizwe’ speaks to: be the one who reminds the …
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“If there’s anything that I’m trying to decode in my work, it’s power. And my understanding of power as it relates to my body, as it relates to my intersections of power, and oppression – and how they work together to create this context in which I live.” We trace the trajectory of Dean Hutton’s artistic practice from their early career as a photoj…
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“I feel and think and know and have encountered that, for as long as I can remember, we've been negotiating ways of dying. We have been told that like, you know, you're here, you're born to work so that you can die. You can't leave anything behind. Colonialism, apartheid robbed us of all our legacies…And when somebody does that, it’s them saying to…
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“For me, the process of research doesn’t stop because I’m performing. I am still that whirlwind. My pores are still wide open for information.” In today's episode, we accompany artist and activist Chuma Sopotela to the venue where her 2018 work Untitled was first performed, and then to the recording studio to discuss the influences and inspirations…
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"And what I'm referencing is this idea of perceived or created masculinities. You are creating an individual. I've always thought that fashion is that. It's a conveyor belt of looks, of ideas of how you are going to see yourself in the future." Fashion designer and artist Lesiba Mabitsela discusses three of his performative works, as well as his ea…
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Jay Pather, Director of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA), reflects on the first performance to ever make an impression on him, and we introduce you to the artists and curators featured over the course of this season. The ICA Podcast is a creation of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town. Produced and edited by Ca…
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