Sessions eKapa 2005 took place at the Cape Town International Convention Centre on 4-6 December 2005.
"Mzantsi: (Re)Locating Contemporary African Art"
Mzantsi : South.
Look for Mzantsi Afrika (South Africa) on the map. X marks the spot. Ten + years after democracy, this country is no longer the "new South Africa", but a mixture of stasis and change. Mzantsi Afrika: at least we are beginning to use our own words to describe ourselves.
In South African youth culture texts "Mzantsi" (as in "Mzantsi style", "Mzantsi hip hop", or just Mzantsi Afrika) has become a signifier not of the nation, or even the new nation, but of the newness of the nation. To preface something with "Mzantsi" makes it ours, and it makes it now: it makes it ours because it is of the now. "Mzantsi" marks a modernity, a contemporaneity, that is not expressed in anyone else's language but our own.
But Mzantsi is not only South as in South Africa; it is simply "south". And South is not simply a cartographic relationship, a hemisphere, a counterpart to North. South is a direction, a programme for global change, a counter-modernity.
By using a South African word for this idea of South, we wish to begin setting our own standards for that which is of the moment, now, new. Contemporary African art? Who's conning who? And with all our experiences of forced removals, both global and local, of the flows of colonialism and creolisation, why should we 'relocate' anything? Because perhaps, even in the face of globalisation and the international art circuit, we can reorient the gaze, relocate our selves, without moving from where we are.
SESSIONS eKAPA 2005
From Fela's sessions at Kalakuta to the montuno sessions of old Havana, the jam session has come to mean a state of orchestrated chaos, of resolved untidiness. Jamming, we can sing out of tune, out of time, and bring it back together. ItĦs a matter of timing. In the session, "contemporary" is not a marker of exclusion, but an open-ended moment. We sing in and out of tune, united only by this very temporary moment of co-existence.
Speaking of time: SESSIONS eKAPA 2005 comes at a crucial junction. It follows a series of major exhibitions and conferences of contemporary African art at venues across the world, and precedes CAPEĦs first art manifestation, set to take place in Cape Town in 2006. As such, we ask: where have we come from, what moment are we in, and in what direction should we proceed?
SESSIONS eKAPA 2005 therefore offers not only a vital and urgent African forum for thought and discussion about art practice on the continent, but the opportunity to develop new models for art practice and large scale manifestation.
Under the theme "Mzantsi: (re)locating contemporary African art practice" the forum explores African art practices, and interrogates their location in terms of medium, geography, their production through economic relations and practices of curation, and their relation to the everyday, the social, and the political.
This is an open platform, a jam session. It is a space for YOU to show the way forward.
CAPE TOWN 2005
Why Cape Town, now?
Cape Town is a place of change and crisis, chaos and control.
Cape Town is born of creolisation, a place for the carnivalesque, a space where contemporary culture is spoken of in the same breath as 'coon-ification', 'cultural tourism' and the 'creative economy'.
Is Cape Town a-part from Africa?
Is Cape Town still colonised?
Is Cape Town a cultural mecca?
Is Cape Town a creative city?
Is Cape Town Kaapstad?
Is Cape Town the mother city?
Is Cape Town part of the motherland?
Does Cape Town matter?
Cape Town challenges our cartographic senses, and our cultural imaginaries. By gathering in Cape Town, we ask whether the imperative of contemporary African culture is to re-connect, re-mix, re-locate our selves.
CAPE
SESSIONS eKAPA 2005 is the first public event of the CAPE project, which sets out to establish a biennial African art event that is not another biennale.
Cape Town has always been a port city; it is now a port of call for emigrants, refugees and visitors from the rest of the continent. CAPE wishes to find in Cape Town the African city, in all its contradictions.
CAPE stands for Cape Africa Platform. It works with the potentialities of the fraught relationship between Cape Town and Africa.
CAPE is an open platform. The route is yet to be navigated.
