A Sacred Story At The Tree Of Life

About

A SACRED STORY AT THE TREE OF LIFE takes the form of an ephemeral installation centered on the inscription and significance of landscapes and spaces through memory and ceremony. The shade of the baobab, the sacred tree, becomes the gathering place where we commune with poets, rioters, storytellers, vocalists, players of instruments, and DJs. Over a period of six weeks the gallery transforms into a portal for the platform, Listening at Pungwe.

Pungwe is an occasion where sound system culture is approached as a ritual space; a mo(nu)ment for auditory, corporeal and sociocultural frequencies. Tracing spatiality and a complex web of cultural practices, politics, philosophies, and movements, that are often embodied and transferred through sound.

Listening at Pungwe, a collaborative project of Memory Biwa and Robert Machiri, pivots on circulatory aural imaginings and practices in southern Africa to produce publics and alternative spaces of sociality. It is aimed at expanding listening from a merely celebratory approach in order to counter spatial hegemony by way of active listening.

In the spirit of Pungwe all are invited to this communion. An invitation to voice and plot together over meals, listening and movement.

Memory Biwa is a historian, and artist. Her work addresses memorial and reparative processes in Namibia, which encompasses a wider discourse on restitution and reparations. Biwa’s focus on oral narratives and performance informs notions of subjectivity and the re-centering of alternative epistemologies and imaginaries.

Robert Machiri is a sound artist and hoarder of sound-related objects. Machiri’s work exists at the juncture of two streams of practice; curatorial concepts founded through the notion of conviviality and art as pedagogy. Biwa and Robert Machiri form the duo, Listening at Pungwe.

* The title echoes Sanusi Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa’s The Sacred Story of the Tree of Life, from Indaba, My Children (1964) – Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa