Shifting Spaces Tilting Time: Performance, Public Spheres, Embodiment and Decolonial Practice in Contemporary South Africa.

Workshop with Jay Pather (Cape Town)

June 22nd, 2022, 2-4.30pm, Großer Seminarraum (AW E0101)

 


 

Key Terms

Interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary approaches…involve the application of insights and perspectives from more than one conventional discipline to the understanding of social phenomena. The scholars responsible for coining this concept all shared the thought that the scientific enterprise had become less effective due to disciplinary fragmentation and that a countermovement for the unification of knowledge was the proper response. However, not all interdisciplinarians believe that the unification of existing knowledge is the answer. (Miller, R. C. (2018). International political economy: Contrasting world views (2nd ed., p. 17). London, UK: Routledge.)

 

Decoloniality: Decoloniality is a way for us to re-learn the knowledge that has been pushed aside, forgotten, buried or discredited by the forces of modernity, settler-colonialism, and racial capitalism. Decoloniality refers to the logic, metaphysics, ontology and matrix of power created by the massive processes and aftermath of colonization and settler-colonialism. This matrix and its lasting effects and structures is called "coloniality." (William and Mary Decolonizing Humanities Project).

 

Publics: In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. The sociological concept of the Öffentlichkeit or public sphere is defined by communication scholar Gerard A. Hauser as "a discursive space in which individuals and groups associate to discuss matters of mutual interest and, where possible, to reach a common judgment about them.” (Wikipedia).

 

Coloniality: Coloniality…refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. (On the coloniality of being)

 

Rupture/Rapture: breach or disturb (a harmonious feeling or situation) / a feeling of intense pleasure or joy. (Oxford Languages).


 


 

Jay Pather is a choreographer, curator, and academic. Based in Cape Town, he is an Associate Professor and directs the Institute for Creative Arts at UCT. He curates Infecting the City Public Art Festival and the ICA Live Art Festival. He also curates for Afrovibes in the Netherlands and the Biennale of Body, Image Movement in Madrid, and is a curatorial adviser for Season Africa 2020 in France. He co-curated for Spielart in Munich and was Adjunct Curator for Performance at the Zeitz MOCAA. Recent addresses include Festival of the Future City (UK), Independent Curators International (New York), and the Haus der Kunst (Munich). He recently published Transgressions, Live Art in South Africa with Catherine Boulle. Recent articles appear in Changing Metropolis ll, Rogue Urbanism, Performing Cities, and Where Strangers Meet. He was recently appointed Fellow at the University of London and was recently made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government.