June - September — Performance Art

 

Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja is a performer, educator and writer with practice and research interests in embodied and spatial archives in movement formation. Mushaandja is also a PhD artist at the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies and the Archives and Public Culture Initiative at the University of Cape Town, researching Oudano Praxis.

Mushaandja’s residency is titled Towards a post-Muafangejo Movement – a performance research project of queering the archive. His process at Basler Bibliographien will include archival research and development of the performance project.

PERFORMANCE PROJECT

Ondaanisa yo Pomudhime (odalate naiteke opo kegonga kuye oshigongoti)

The Dance of the Rubber Tree is a ritual of movement between embodied, spatial and institutional archives. I devise an intimate and immersive queer dance imagined at a Rubber Tree but performed in a concrete archive, the museum theatre. I play a sonic repertoire of silence, noise, love and struggle songs from Southern Africa as a form of resisting the systemic erasure/exclusion/othering of knowledges present on the margins and in the cracks of colonial-nationalist archives. Omudhime (Rubber Tree) is indigenously used in cleansing and memorial moments of border crossing. I suggest Odalate Naiteke! (the fence must break), a slogan used by Namibian protesting contract laborers nationwide in 1971. Fire, salt, spears and marula-seed stones are used to reflect on land dispossession and returning the land to itself. There cannot be peace, healing and reconciliation if there is no redistribution and restorative justice.

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