It’s a bit tangential. I studied Social Sciences at the University of Cape Town and then transferred to architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand and ended up spending a lot of time in downtown Johannesburg and the scene around Drill Hall and Keleketla! Library. I started collaborating through those networks on different art projects, thinking about Johannesburg spatially as an architecture student, but understanding space through the lens of deep histories and social echoes. What I was making became more and more art and less architectural. I did a big project with the Market Photo Workshop about South African land, where I met Molemo Moiloa. There was an energy connecting projects, preoccupations, and people that welcomed me into art practice. I was invited to have a solo exhibition at the Goodman Gallery in 2016, and after this exhibition, I won the FNB Johannesburg Art Fair Prize. I didn’t even really think of myself as an artist, then. Around this time I started a collaboration with Bogosi Sekhukhuni and Tabita Rezaire called NTU. It was a journey of working collectively and applying architectural or spatial thinking to socio-historical phenomena. After I won the FNB Art Fair Prize, it got very complicated, so I decided to go back to school. It felt like cheating a little bit—to leave without leaving. I applied to a few schools and I got accepted at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] and spent two years there, figuring out what it means to me to be an artist. I’m sometimes a bit surprised to think of myself as an artist …[*laughs*] It wasn’t the plan.

I finished in 2018. I spent six months after I graduated in the US on the West Coast, and then I came back in 2019.

When I was in architecture school I got a sense that the conventions for thinking and talking about space either miss a lot—like there isn’t sensitivity to what is happening in the world—or, those conventions actively erase things that are happening in the world, for the world to be coherent from a Western point of view. So that’s kind of where it started … Being somebody who grew up in Johannesburg and then studying in Johannesburg, I realized that the things that I take for granted—ways of understanding how space operates—were treated like something exotic in the discipline.

In architecture, you do a lot of “site analyses” to produce an architectural account of what’s happening in space. I felt we privileged fixed and immovable things in our account of infrastructure, assuming that only these things structured lived space. But as somebody who lives in that space, it was clear that space is structured in other ways. I felt a need to find language for things the discipline was unable, or unwilling, to consider. The more I hit my head against this wall, the more I felt there was something sinister about how things were being overlooked—in the sense that only certain agencies are perceptible, like planning is an agency of power. And so, if you only learn to see things that are planned in space, you only see a reflection of power, and in South Africa, that power is white, and globally—in general—that power is white. So if you only learn to look for those things, you participate in an erasure.

That’s where it really started—trying not to participate in that erasure and then trying to expand the language to talk about life as we experience it. The further down that path I went, the more metaphysical questions about space and time, objects and events, began to emerge. To put it simply, spatial disciplines and Western thinking tend to prioritize objects over interactions, and this is not helpful. In our way of thinking, we could almost say, objects are primarily expressions of interactions, that we emerge from a network of being and becoming, that space is about relations and transformations. So we need to think about events and interactions, and relations in time and space rather than things or discrete objects.

I am trying to get to this point about events and relations because objects exist, at least within certain paradigms. In a Cartesian one, objects exist in space, and you can locate them. They’re discrete, they have coordinates which you can map. Events, though, have much more complex notations; it’s like choreography. It’s about bodies moving through space, and once you introduce movement, then you are talking about the relationship between more than one thing and the transformation of relationships over time, so this is where time comes into it.

When thinking about transformation over time and colonial, postcolonial, and post-apartheid scenarios, the idea of linearity is not so useful because often, part of what we are trying to do is recover relations which are partly located in the past. That is, to move counter to the flow of colonial transformations. There’s a relationship to time which is about a return or periodically moving backwards through time in order to bring something forward, a circular movement.

This is maybe a bit metaphysical, but it’s important not to take time and space for granted—not to assume that events have ended and that you can move past them. That somehow we’re caught in, maybe, multiple relations of time: one which is linear like the time that we live and that we understand intuitively; then there’s like cyclical time; and then there’s a more complicated time which is maybe the time of eruption. We can think a little bit about what happened during the #FeesMustFall protests—when suddenly language from 20-30 years ago emerged. How to think about those presences in real space; these are things that happened to change the way that Wits functioned in this complicated relationship of time. It’s a bit convoluted, but space is not about a relationship of objects, but an inter-relation of actions, actors, and agencies. Those agencies perform in time or play themselves out in time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are moving forward, for lack of a better word, in time. They’re moving in much more complex and confusing, and powerful ways.

I don’t think I’m trying to present a vision of the world, which might be funny to say because the world is so present in my work. I’m more trying to present a kind of strategy for imagining, informed deeply by African traditions and African anti-colonial traditions. It’s got something to do with reading Chinua Achebe. There’s this really great quote from an interview where he says something like, “If you’re an African, the world is upside down.” That’s such a small throwaway line, but I take it extremely seriously because it’s such a strong, spatial image of world relations, it’s like a clue for thinking about what the world is and also how to change it. It’s also got something to do with what Aimé Césaire writes in A Return to the Native Land: “The only thing in the world worth beginning: the end of the world, of course.” I’m not trying to present a vision of the world but to think about strategies of transformation.

A lot of the works are exactly like that, they are kind of demonstrations. They’re often linked directly to a particular idea or a quote or a concept that comes out of what I think of as this big archive of liberation thinking, liberation practice.

That anxiety has more to do with a spatial relationship. One of the big questions is “how do you or how can you be both a part of something and not a part of it at the same time?” I think the history of Africa and “Africanness”—if you could call it that—or Blackness, is about somehow negotiating a very complicated relationship to participation and withdrawal. Being an active participant in the world, but at the same time conscious that that world is not actively welcoming you. So, something about needing to have a space—a safe environment—which is “outside of the world,” so to speak, but at the same time paradoxically needing to participate in the world. If classic utopia is the idea that you can remove yourself completely from the world and build a totally ideal society, I think the history of Africa is about navigating that impulse with the reality of being in a world that is so inescapable—that kind of chases you. That one way to imagine that relationship is as an anxiety of relation, both inside and outside yourself.

[*laughs*] I mean, I’m definitely not a scientist. I think if anything, my interest in scientific language is about language per se. It’s about trying to find a grammar to talk about the complexity of navigating a world that is actively trying to exclude you and actively trying to murder you. This scientific language is a language for ordering the world. It’s about categorizing, placing things to make sense of them differently. That function is what I’m interested in. Using this language for disordering and misplacing things, or for holding what is displaced by the colonial assumptions of knowledge and power. I’m not particularly interested in a scientific, rational project. What emerges from applying that kind of approach to questions, which are fundamentally human and social, and spiritual, is something I call extra-rational—beyond the rational. That’s what the diagrams are really useful for, and you find the same language of diagrams in spiritual practices; these two things are actually quite closely aligned. What diagrams are useful for is putting things into contact or into relation where the precise nature of those connections is unclear, and that’s what I’m interested in. How to hold what is necessary to carry, but there’s no apparent container for, no clear language, no clear grammar, no clear aesthetic system to make sense of—it’s kind of insensible. It’s more like a longing for whatever is beyond the scope of the system.

Sense-making systems tend to discard information all the time. What I’m trying to use this language for is to hold as much information as possible—to hold complexity, to not discard things in the interest of clarity or in the interest of some kind of aesthetic familiarity. It’s a language that can hold a lot of very different information without necessarily resolving it—it’s not an equation. There’s no equal sign at the end. It doesn’t add up to anything, but it’s important to hold it all.

Well, I don’t think there’s a simple definition, but I’ll give you an example of the land question in South Africa. It is such an important ongoing dialogue, and we tend to approach it as a real estate proposition. It’s about ownership and compensation. Like, what is the value of this area of land in real estate terms or in productive terms? It’s a farm, it must work, what is the value of it? And the assumption that we’re operating in is that land is reducible to a kind of financial model—which it’s not—but it absolutely structures the way we’re holding this conversation. The important thing is not to define what the hidden structures are, but to move beyond them. I think that is what my practice is trying to do: to look very closely at things that are happening and try to find ways—very minor ways, often—of going just one step beyond the enclosures that African life is forced to exist in.

I think of all these as instruments: scientific, spiritual, and cultural. What’s also important when it comes to these African artefacts, like the cowrie shells, is that their function is always plural. So, for example, cowrie shells are currency—not in the banal sense that we understand currency now—there is a spiritual function of exchange which reciprocates between human, animal, geological, living, and dead realms of being. These exchanges are forms of sharing knowledge and value, which is kind of inseparable from sharing material, sharing wealth, sharing culture. Putting these in dialogue with ‘scientific aesthetics’ allows us to think about how a scientific ordering of knowledge functions in the same way. That even those apparently rational forms of knowledge are cultural, spiritual, and part of a complex system of producing and sharing meaning. And we can use multiple systems of meaning in concert.

Oooh, that’s a big question. I think there may be two or three things. The most important one is the question of transformation in a book like Black Skin, White Masks. This transformation from the way in which the world is conditioning you to be or not be a social being, but also transformation from within yourself. The way in which we can resist or transform our own subjectivity in spite of what the world is demanding of us. I was given a copy of The Wretched of the Earth when I was around twelve years old by my grandmother. It was part of a collection of books belonging to her and my grandfather. My relationship to Fanon is not only about Fanon as a theorist, but Fanon connects me to my grandmother; he connects me to this personal history, and it is through those connections that I came to understand and be interested in liberation theory. I don’t think my education comes from reading theory, it’s the result of relations to specific people. Like reading a bit of this book and calling my grandmother and being like, “What? What? What is going on here?” or “What does this mean?” or sharing it with my friends at that age and being like, “What do you think this means?”…

There are a few things to consider with regard to this work. The first is the multiple resonances of gardens as places of care, attention, and needing ongoing maintenance and upkeep, which is to say gardens are contrivances, particular arrangements of form, agency, and practice which reflects intention but also exceeds any intention. The work assembles ecological and counterlogical forces to revisit The Wretched of the Earth in a way that tries to bypass academically privileged, Western-centric institutional forms of reading and meaning-making that Fanon’s work tends to circulate through. In a very simple way, this work is a reading experiment asking: how else can we consume the text? What allies do we need to call on to digest this body of text? What relations need to be in place to “ground” our reading differently? In this instance, we ally with a community of Eisenia Fetida earthworms, a digital environment monitor, a set of garden protocols, and a choreography of care that anyone encountering the work can perform.

Ecologists talk about ecosystem service providers, which are agents that, through the processes of sustaining their own lives, create conditions for the viability of the whole system. Plants clean air through their respiration, bees pollinate flowers when extracting nectar, earthworms decompose the cellulose in the pages of The Wretched of the Earth and turn them into soil. We also have a role in these networks of care. garden for fanon also resonates with the spiritual poetics of two other gardening histories. The most immediate is Fanon’s use of gardening in treating psychiatric patients in Blida, Algeria. The other is the fall from the biblical garden of Eden, the fall into wretchedness (damnation) that Fanon uses to describe the “zone of non-being” in which colonized subjects find ourselves, which is also a place of radical possibility and transformation.

That work comes out of a reading of Toni Cade Bambara’s essay “On the issue of roles” and Dambudzo Marechera’s novel Black Sunlight, both of which touch on aspects of Black and African experimental writing. I am influenced by a lot of writers and musicians from the 20th century, particularly indigenous and diasporic African, Asian, and American (North and South) attempts at re-wiring the rules and logics of the colonial world toward their own emancipatory ends. It’s probably less about the “greats” and more about how their work indexes a mode of unmaking the world, which is a shared communal capacity.

I think games, chance, and randomness (always pseudo-randomness) are often misnamings or erasures of spiritual relations to coincidence. The implications of a coincidence, of two things aligning in unpredicted and imperceptible ways, have always been a site of meaningfulness. A good example is the mathematician Archimedes suddenly understanding the principle of volume displacement when getting into a bath (the prototypical eureka moment). It is a form of knowledge which is incidental to the action, not directly planned or plannable, but fully functional nonetheless. This kind of chance encounter is the product of a series of existing forms of knowledge and contextual factors that are present but not yet coinciding. To put it simply, we must be prepared, we must be open and if these elements align with us, we can make the connections that are already there apparent. It’s playful but absolutely necessary to producing relations beyond the horizon of power, which persists through enclosure and erasure.

I think of my work as demonstrations of procedure rather than the product of any particular process. Process is important insofar as its outcome is a practice rather than a product. I am interested in practical abstractions, which I sometimes call systems or models. These are terms that come from world-ordering practices of Western thought, but I am interested in their capacities for disordering Western thought and syncretization of indigenous world knowledge.

Maybe instead of fetishization, we can talk about commodification, which locates this in a history that includes the trans-Atlantic, trans-Saharan, and East African slave trade. Basically, the racialization of African and African descended people as commodities. We also have to consider the roots of modernism as partly based on the exploitation of African cultural-spiritual intellectual forms stripped of African history. For example, West African sculpture in the work of [Pablo] Picasso; Bamana divination in the binary mathematics of [Gottfried] Leibniz; African-American spiritual music in the Beatles; funk and disco in electronic music, etc. This is still ongoing. So we have this European (white) tradition of simultaneously denigrating and profiting from Black life.

My feeling about framing this question as a “fetishization” of Blackness is that it tends to leave us thinking about, responding and preoccupied with the handiwork of whiteness (as well as misaligning the African spiritual roots of “fetish” as a western pathology). A more pertinent question is how has this changed in the last 60 years since the first wave of decolonization in Africa, since the civil rights movement in the USA? What has changed in the last 30 years in South Africa? What, if anything, has changed after a few hundred years of resisting this ontological exploitation (“we are not commodities”)? Who controls the means of cultural production and distribution? Who controls the means of cultural definition? Who gets to decide what we are or are not?