My current ongoing artistic research practice is about composting colonial histories, taking root and finding home. It sparks from the desire for and difficulty of how we could relate to each other and the world outside of Colonial, Eurocentric and human-centred frameworks and how we can find and share rituals of transformation to start trying.
It is called the Unreliable Archives.
The Unreliable Archives are archives with unruly tendencies, much as colonial histories have. I am interested in ideas of slippage between words and meanings, histories and how they are (un)documented. I zoom in on Apartheid and post-Apartheid South Africa. My aim is to use Saidiya Hartmans method of critical Fabulation as a method of engaging with the Archive. I am attempting to write polyphonic conversations based on interviews with people from a variety of backgrounds. These conversations are taken out of context, and meant to be read aloud by whoever is passing through, in the hope that new conversations will ensue. This is an attempt at de-composition, at composting both personal and colonial histories.
The Unreliable Archives, as an ongoing artistic research-practice seems as if it will never stop transforming, developing and finding form. This process orientated practice will have no final definitive version. However, there will be a series of public moments where you can join me in The Unreliable Archives. You will be able to listen and read unreliable memories: my own and those of the people I have interviewed mixed together in polyphonic texts. Maybe you might want to add some of your own. This artistic research-practice is developing in conversation with Enrica Camporesi, Charlotte Peys, Kopano Morago, Sanne Van Rijn, Ruth Benschop, Bart Van den Eynde, Steven Brys, Hans Roels & the people and more-than-human entities I encounter in The Unreliable Archives. The Unreliable Archives is supported by Toneelacademie Maastricht the Arts Council of the Flemish Government.
In the coming months i will be doing three different residencties. I am very excited about this and thought I might share a regular update about the process with images and sounds.
From 19-30 April I will be with Mestizo Arts Platform in Rataplan in Borgerhout, Antwerp together with Enrica Camporesi. We are experimenting with a proximity research residency. We will work on our own projects (Rona: The unrelibale Archives, Enrica: Oertaal:Oefening) and we will share a proximity room to map and question and inspire each other. we will meet there every day, invite people to have visual, verbal an gestural conversations with us and our growing atlas of images and ideas. It will be called: STANZA: on proximity. (Stanza is both a verse and a room in Italian).
From 7 june-3 july I will be in CAMPO in Gent working with performer Célia Fechas and scenographers Saskia Louwaard and Katrijn Baeten to prototype a portable archive-object-space-place-installation.
From 20 september-to 3 October I will be with Workspace Brussels in Kaaitheater putting finishing touches on the installation-performance and inviting people to come and visit the Unreliable Archives.
After this I will continue to work in and on the Unreliable Archives as an artistic research-practice for as long as it continues to transform me and the people and entities I encounter.
