Afr(indi)an fiction: A sonic dialogue conceptualised by Kinsmen

South Africa // Zimbabwe

Afr(indi)an fiction is a south-south sonic dialogue that seeks to open new territories for discourse, culture and meaning in an imaginary place where borders do not exist and the medium for discourse is sonic.  

The collaboration brings together SAMA nominated South African indo-jazz band Kinsmen (Dhruv Sodha, sitar; Shailesh Pillay, tabla; Muhammad Dawjee, saxophones) and the prolific Zimbabwean ethnomusicologist, percussionist and instrument builder Othnell Mangoma Moyo to probe at the intersection of Indian / African / X identities and creative practices by exploring the limits of the fictional and the radical. Initiated as a response to the rapid shutting of national borders during the COVID-19 pandemic and global cries for returns to ‘normalcy’, Kinsmen creatively asserts here that indeed we as a people have never been or known any form of ‘normal’, and we need desperately to reckon with our belonging on this continent.  

Kinsmen explain:

Through a series of exchange protocols that transact digitally across space, place and time – we ask: What if a picture, becomes a story, a moment, was a place, a sound, a journey and song? What are the territories of our shared landscapes and how do we share? What stories do have to tell each other? How are things at home?  By deprioritising live synchronous performance as an output we celebrate the asynchronous as a form of hyper-delayed call-and-response not bound to a single moment but working across time and geography.  

Afr(indi)an fiction runs from September to December 2020 and lives ultimately as an online archive (currently under construction) that traces and documents the exchange and spectral territories.