Walking in Plastic

Cape Town
Choreographer / performer: Mduduzi Nyembe
Poet / voice: Bandile Gumbi
Artist / director: Kai Lossgott
2009

Performance artist Mduduzi Nyembe presents a memory of a wounded woman, a dream for an absent father, and a dance in a street market for survival. They are ritual stories of the heartache of the slums – substance abuse, violence, gender inequalities, chronic unemployment, families’ incapacity to provide for and protect their children. Each of Nyembe’s characters, taken from his daily interactions in the township, is left, in the words of poet Bandile Gumbi, "a constant wanderer / always at the beginning of complete circles", trapped in the existential cycle of poverty.

CURATOR'S BRIEF

The basis for City Breath will consist of a collection of around 20 short video 'breaths' or 'gasps', conceptual pieces and brief emotional encounters with places that can not be expressed in the dominant mode of narrative cinema or television. These breaths or essences seek to interrogate the official understandings of our cities given to us in television, film and other mass media.

A selection of these will then enter into active dialogue with the people of Cape Town in May 2009, when they will be presented as site-specific video installations in urban spaces as part of the Cape 09 Biennale. A DVD and video website will be produced to accompany the event, as well as regular movie theatre screenings of the entire collection.

City Breath insists on cultivating private dreams and mythologies in public places. It goes in search of the unspeakable. It makes a point of creating and collecting that which is rejected by mass media, simply because it is personal, because it engages beneath the surface, because it does not fit pre-defined categories, because it might take patience, because it might be raw and difficult, because it might not be popular, because it is not for sale. The project goes against the concept of the 'mass', an illusory category created by the field of marketing, and goes in search of deeply individual encounters, which might evoke strong reactions and stimulate debate.

Interrogating, breaking and manipulating tired historical forms, City Breath seeks new forms, new film making strategies and approaches, new sound and image technologies, new aims and intentions in the tradition of the international avant-garde. It relates strongly the new short attention span cinema of the digital age and the skillfully produced low or no budget film. To this end, City Breath is facilitating and encouraging new collaborations between South African poets, performance artists, dancers, alternative filmmakers, experimental animators, sound and video artists, as well as curating submissions from established artists. The emphasis will be on the emergent genres of the video poem, the screen dance / performance and experimental animation. We will be looking for conceptual pieces that can hold the viewer's attention.

"If Johannesburg is a virus, I was infected a long time ago, and negotiating and challenging the virus is what interests me, and therein lies the intimacy." (Stephen Hobbs) City Breath invites performers, poets and filmmakers to approach their urban spaces and their identity not merely as spectators, but also as actors, intervening in tired representations and unquestioned systems, rituals and places. It opens up opportunities for "aimless wandering, ludic nomadism, shadowing strangers, co-opting the streetwise strategies of direct action, cutting across the grooves of commuterdom - by turns playful and dangerous, such 'senseless acts of great beauty' bear witness to the great Situationist slogan 'Sous la pave, la plage' - under the pavement, the beach." [Ilona Blazwick, 2001. Century City : Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis. London : Tate Publishing.]

The early deadline is 30 January 2009. The final deadline is 30 March 2009. The Cape 09 Biennale will be held in May 2009. The maximum length for each film is 4 minutes.

Please do not hesitate to contact me for further questions.

Kai Lossgott
info@kailossgott.com
0721198300

Kai Lossgott. Melissa Butler. parentheses. video poem. 2008.

A video poem about Cape Town by the South African video artist Kai Lossgott and the American poet Melissa Butler, created to kickstart the City Breath project.

Revelations

by Kai Lossgott

what ails me
what grieves me
bereave me the place where once a person stood

I saw Jesus and
the summer child light up
on every street corner in Seapoint
a legion of mute sentinels extinguished at dawn
calling from invisible phone booths
their farewell into the passing cars
a number not too high and not too low

just a second ago past my window
in the guise of a boy with a beard
standing too steadily on that corner
like the trees who know of too many
boys for sale ago, and the ones
who don't come back, and how much that cost
Jesus at sixteen with dreadlocks
how many leaves would you trade
to let strangers
touch you in that way
to play saviour to the night
all done up like a wise man
a wild man, a saint searching for saviours
Tomorrow in the day
you will be gone, and what has taken root within you
communing with the dark and silence underground

And you with your stockings ripped and torn
the crown of the witness
platinum blonde upon your head
like the may maiden the christians burnt
or the christians who were made holy
burnt by others
Saint of these latter days
with your cheeks of blood
you too facing the street
blunt and arms dangling by your side
dandelion gushing white and reverent
I don't recognise you here
guarding the block
You have no curfew. Noone knows
your tiny feet stand guard here tonight
tomorrow in the second aisle by the cashier
heavy with my tinned food and frozen fish
I won't recognise you,
or wonder how it is you live