Time is Away asks: if gardens are the answer, what is the question?
A Time is Away Herbal
I’m really interested in the shape shifting format of these shows and their experimental approach to archive. This episode.. ‘surfaces the entangled, often traumatic colonial and imperial histories of plants and gardens, while tending the green shoots of a more hopeful and collective future’.
Image: from Hermann Adolph Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen (Medicinal Plants), edited after his death by Gustav Pabst in 1887
‘In opposition to custom, Mbembe insists that the idea of ‘tradition’ never really existed and reminds us there is a pre-colonial African modernity that has not been taken into account in contemporary creativity. Boom!
African cultures tend to be syncretic. While all cultures bleed, borrow and adapt, generally it is those of the European tradition – the British are a key example — who are overly concerned with strict categorization and the illusion of maintaining a sense of cultural purity. Indeed, we see this attitude across the entire globe now, the result of nationalisms and rigid binary identities that did not exist in the pre-colonial African context.
In contrast to the myth of a fixed, unchanging traditional Africa, most African cultures were far more fluid and dynamic than their European counterparts. Let’s take something mistakenly understood as a fixed and foundational concept – ethnic identity. Before the 1884 Scramble for Africa and the following European annexation of the continent, ethnic identity would have been constructed in a very different way from what we imagine today. In The Invention of Tradition Terence Ranger states that, `far from there being a single “tribal” identity, most Africans moved in and out of multiple identities, defining themselves at one moment as subject to this chief, at another moment as a member of that cult at another moment as part of this clan, and at yet another moment as an initiate in that professional guild:’
As a result of this, belonging is understood less as ‘a matter of restrictive labelling, and more of choosing between various semantic classifications dependent on the particular contexts and identities involved’.’
– Emma Dabiri, Don’t Touch My Hair (2020)
Saleem Reshamwala: Far Flung Places
Saleem Reshamwala | Far Flung Places
An inspiring podcast that moves away from pre-existing narratives to talk about travel, people and places as multitudes. What’s interesting is how the show discusses the surprising and interesting arts made under this umbrella.
No. 6: Syncopation
Syncopation: this is not to be confused with the term’s musical association in ideas of harmonious fusion or amalgamation but an important space that leads to ways of looking and hearing that dismantle a linear trajectory. Instead revealing contradiction, fluctuation and uncertainty. This is a space where things get mirky and parameter lines are made faint. Where things can be turned down or muted but cannot be turned off. A messy space where things merge, grow, collide, complicate and evolve new relationships, uses and meanings. Exposing a thinking and understanding of movement, transformation and uncertainty as intrinsic part of life and culture.
–Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom
I have been drawn towards Mission … speakers for sometime and subsequently they have resurfaced within my work in several pieces. I was first introduced to them by artist Claudette Johnson who kindly gave me a pair of these speakers from a call out I made for a previous Sculpture. I have since grown to focus on their inherent domesticity and otherworldliness. I am interested in how a shelf speaker can sit alongside objects used to display worldliness within a home and how amplified music/sound from domestic speakers can be used to perform the same function.
‘The many hundreds of French words that flowed into Middle English suffered different fates. Some of them we re simply taken as they were, but many were assimilated into local dialects. Borrowed French and Latin words often coexisted with their English synonyms, instead of displacing one another or hybridizing. In the fifteenth century English developed a trilevel system of synonyms with different levels of prestige: common place English (” rise,” “ask”), literary French (“mount,” “question”), and learned Latin (“ascend,” ” interrogate”). As one historian puts it, this accumulation of synonyms al lowed “for a greater differentiation of styles – in both formal and informal usage …. Thus the native English vocabulary is more emotional and informal, whereas the imported French synonyms are more intellectual and formal. The warmth and force of the former contrasts with the cool ness and clarity of the latter. If a speaker can be intimate, blunt, and direct in basic English, he can also be discreet, polite, and courteously elegant in the diction of borrowed French.’
– Manuel DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997)
Manu Dibango
Discussing the late great Manu Dibango including his famous (originally B-side track) ‘Soul Makossa’ which made me think about movement in inanimate objects. Quietly existing and being drifted and blown into new places and new hands.