Dr. Christine Vogt William, Dr. Epifania Amoo-Adare and Ann-Marie Ellmann on knowledge-making
Media records
Abstract
- Abstract
- In this episode of the Cluster Conversations, host Dr. Christine Vogt-William sits down with the Cluster's artist fellows Dr. Epifania Amoo-Adare and Ann-Marie Ellmann for a thought-provoking exchange on knowledge-making, creative research practices, and navigating the spaces between disciplines. Together, they explore how intellectual curiosity, personal experience, and collaborative inquiry shape their work within the Cluster – and beyond. Tune in for an inspiring conversation that blends reflection, insight, and a touch of scholarly playfulness.
People & roles
Origins & context
- Title
- Dr. Christine Vogt William, Dr. Epifania Amoo-Adare and Ann-Marie Ellmann on knowledge-making
- Language
- English
- Podcast series
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Cluster Conversations
- Date
- November 14, 2025
Rights & access
- Extent
- 59 minutes, 12 seconds
Identifiers & sources
Further details
- Episode number
- 33
Full text
- Transcript
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[music]
Speaker 1: Cluster Conversations, a podcast by Africa Multiple.
Speaker 1: Well, welcome everybody to our cluster podcast. And today we have the lovely sort of plan to have a conversation with two artist fellows who are part of the Tandem Artist Fellowship here for the cluster. This is a pioneer event, the very first tandem program. And I have the great honour of hosting Annemarie Elman from South Africa and Epifania Amuadari from Ghana and the UK. These two particular artist fellows have been working here at the University of Bayreuth for the past three months on their particular artist project entitled Who Is Lucy Woman Native Other. And they work with a particular central question and that is what is Africa to you? Now, we will just sort of jump right in. We had the exhibition opening on Wednesday, 23 July 2025, and it was quite the experience. I'd just like to sort of ask our two artist fellows, how do you feel after setting up that amazing piece of work in no less amazing space, which is the FZA building here at the University of Bayreuth campus? Who would like to begin? Annemarie, Epifania, are you ready?
Speaker 2: Yeah, ready for the next one. I'll say how I feel. And just loving the opportunity that has been given to us to do this piece of work together, but not only with ourselves and the ideas that we have about life and the texts that we love to read and the films we love to watch, but also with others within the Bayreuth community, not only within the FZR building, but also with Igalewa House folk and even beyond that with the school, right, with the Gymnasium Christian Ernestinum School and some students studying art there. So yeah, it's just been wonderful really, is what I will have to say. Annemarie, do you have anything to add to that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, we had a moment just before we walked up saying we haven't congratulated one another actually. And yeah, it's actually quite wonderful. I think I was so in the thick of it and how I felt in the moment of the opening was do, let's do and finalize. And I think taking a break and now being able to talk about it and reflect, it's quite a bit of magic that arose over the last...
Speaker 1: I'd like to observe actually that magic that the two of you have effected here in the course of this preparation for this exhibition was also to sort of actually not only envision a cluster community, but you actually sort of brought cluster members together in some imagination of a community through your interviews and your focus group discussions. I was struck by this multimedia sensitivity in your working practice. So can you say a little bit about how you were creating art, theorising as well as engaging with singular people bringing them together in this practice of community building?
Speaker 2: That's a big question.
Speaker 1: Yes, a lovely, wonderful question.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, as you're speaking, what it reminded me of is the struggle that I think I've had with art. So I've had a struggle with art in terms of art as exhibit. And in my mind, art was really or should be part of everydayness, ordinariness. It should be in some ways about the mundane, but there is also something sacred about the mundane. I mean, the fact that we three are sitting here, this material moment in time is magic, right? But many times we might just take it as a given. And so having said that then, the question was if one wanted to do art, how...
Speaker 1: Oh, if I wanted to participate in art, how would I like to participate in it? And I know one of the things I said to Annemarie after the opening was that I never want to do a solo exhibition because I think there's something that doesn't work in that for me. And so if I didn't want to do a solo exhibition, then who am I doing an exhibition with? And of course you need friends, you know, even incongruous ones, and we'll talk about what that means at some point. But you need friends to do that, but not just the friends, right? And then with a question like this, who is African, is a big question. It's not something that we alone should even have the hubris to imagine that we want to try and interrogate, never mind answer, right? And maybe I'll stop there a little bit and if you have anything to add and then I can say some more.
Speaker 2: What we often had a conversation with in these three months is art and what is art. And I reflect on, as I was born, I had this surge of creativity that I could not switch off and it stemmed from somewhere else. And I tried, I tried to switch it off and tried to learn other things and obviously grabbing some skills. So art theory and practice as you're referring to, it starts with the ability to be creative where art is merely the outcome and the resultant of your labor. It's the fruit of your labor. But the creativity is the origin of it. And I think we all are creative and it was wonderful to reflect on how multimedia has made people return to youthful exchanges in this exhibition where I feel like a child again by creating. And we spoke to somebody else that said art is often seen as the aesthetic, but it is the fruit of your labor. If you go to an artist's studio, you see ninety percent of it thrown away and broken on the floor and ten percent of it is the magic that is created from all the trying and the failing. So theorising with us is that we've internalised theorising as independent scholars or scholars and then independent scholars and then being able to say okay, how do we creatively work with it? And that's where the practice is like where we pull up our sleeves and work with it and then being able to interview people in a focus group where the art making as a research method has become an exchange.
Speaker 1: And then even beyond that, one of the things which is quite interesting because when I met Annemarie, in fact, to be honest, part of the reason because when I was young, I was good at art, but I didn't, well, one, I didn't learn the discipline, but I had this challenge that what was in my mind, I couldn't manifest it. And so this for me was very frustrating and I let it go. And so then it meant really for me, arts at that time was really about the object, the exhibit. And when I met Annemarie, one of the things that struck me about the way she worked was art was the process. And so in coming here, part of it for us has been that really the whole process of trying to find people to interview, finding out that okay, nobody is ready to be interviewed because who are you really? And going through that, doing the focus group, the postcards for the future, having people make collages, interrogating the question, re-interrogating it based on what people were saying to us, which was changing our ideas of what it meant, but also our relationships with our own thinking, our relationships with each other, with the texts. I mean, this really then was the art, really, right? The process of art. And the exhibit was really what I was thinking of now as a culmination of this work. But now we are realising they might just be the beginning of some more work. But yes, but it also, if I'm taking it maybe more concretely to this notion of Africa or roots, it made me think of what art, at least within my ethnic group, the Ashanti, was, that art was everyday. So it was in the fabric, it was in the frieze at the bottom of the building, it was in the jewelry people wore, it was in the symbology that was used in the telling of proverbs or even in the textiles, right? The using of symbology and so on.
Speaker 2: Cooking.
Speaker 1: Yes. So art was something that had to some extent function, but also deep meaning at the same time because we seem to think that function does not equate deep meaning. And for me then comes this idea of the mundane having the sacred element to it as well.
Speaker 2: And when I grew up, art was...
Speaker 1: Was seen as as not the ex the the fruits of your labor but rather the the role of the artist is the reflective intellectual, the philosopher first before the aesthetic comes afterwards. And so the intellectual that informs society, hang on, look a little bit here, look a bit there. And I think to some extent now that we're sitting here maybe we've fragmented so that we have the activist. But art and activism is very much entwined, particularly in South Africa obviously of our legacy. Art was the way of getting the messages out, being able to protest in a creative way, in a way that it would not cause harm or death immediately. And it could reach the world and the expression of what is occurring because somebody needs to express what a community has experienced.
Speaker 2: Speaking of community and experiencing, I'd like to just come back to this idea of your central question, who is African or rather what is Africa to you, which was the main question that sort of started off your conversations with members of the cluster. I'd just like to also come back to this idea of multiplicity that you very cogently sort of read and set out in your application for the fellowship, which basically got me ruminating on how you understand the cluster principles of multiplicity, reflexivity and relationality, and how you brought in your own particular artistic slash academic readings of multiplicity. And you say here, through our collaborative art project, we wish to acknowledge all of our African differences, including the incongruences and the abstractions and yet acknowledge the political expediency of having to create certain strategic essentialisms, with the proviso that we must also drop them once they have served their purpose of highlighting and reinforcing our value in a pluriversal world of multiple entangled becoming. I find that a very, very powerful sort of compression of all these three cluster principles of that form of reflexivity, the way relationships are built up and how multiple trajectories of being of similarities and differences as regards what is Africa to you. May I just sort of ask you to sort of dwell on that a little bit in your own, you know, artist-academic personas as intellectuals and philosophers who have brought these reflections to this idea of multiplicity in African differences, African similarities. You know, how did that work for you while setting up this concept, especially knowing that you're going to be working in Africa Multiple Cluster in Bayreuth?
Speaker 1: Well, it's interesting because it's making me think of so many different things. But I guess one of the things I was thinking of is, you know, they're saying in well, they say in a period of seven years, you're not the same being, right? Because at a cellular level, there are these changes that are going on in your body. So that even just myself as this unitary object, subject, both, you know, is not even what I think I am, right? In the sense of what I'm made up of. And the fact that they even additionally add on that, that actually ninety percent of a human being is actually bacteria. So this other question about, you know, are we even human really? What makes up our humanity? So I start with that to say what I'm thinking of this notion of the fluidity and dynamism of being a living organism. And this, I believe, is something that every human being on the planet experiences. And in relationship to that is not only the biology as a consequence, there's also then the cultural aspects of our lives, the social aspects of our lives that I also think have these elements of fluidity, dynamism and changeability, even uncertainty to some extent. But what's happened, I think, is that, so then as human beings, we are always in the process of...
Speaker 1: for want of a better word, some kind of evolution, right? But and and this is happening everywhere. But but with the African experiences because of a particular encounter, the colonial encounter, there has been this idea of our humanness being less than other kinds of humanness. And so as a consequence of that, we have had to make us a stand to say, no, it's not. And in making that stand, we've also then been forced to almost fix who we are and say, because this is what we are. And we are this only. And this this has become in some ways, I think, a tension for us. In the sense that it's as if we it's as if we are we are not then evolving. So so in two ways, you know, one would argue the colonial gaze has fixed us in the past, you know, in an anachronistic time. But in some ways we do it also to ourselves, even if it's in contemporary time, because we then say, so then this is what it means to be African or this is what it means to be Ghanaian and and and you cannot be anything other than than than this thing. And now I'd like to insist that no, we are always other than that thing. And so this is the multiplicity maybe, I would say for me just as a starting point that we are layers of of of ourselves even.
Speaker 2: Multiple entangled beings.
Speaker 1: Yes, something like that. But yeah. How do you see that?
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, it's I think it's one of our first bits of engagement with one another where we say, who am I and then who am I in relation to you and then who am I and we can't answer those questions if we don't know the broader environment that we are identifying ourselves in. And it's the inside and the outside. So who's an African is, I think it's a question that both of us grappled with individually and feeling of belonging and not belonging and being outsider insiders. Knowing that we are multiple identities, woman, scholar, independent scholar, and then we drop them and then we move on to something else. I think both of us have a wonderful way of saying we we wanna do something and then we do it and then we say okay, I've tasted it and now maybe I like it, I want more of it or I'm gonna move on and I'm gonna find something else that I wanna taste, tasting as in experience career-wise or or in relationships things. So the fact that in every moment, and I think this is where we reflected on the sacred is that we in every moment emotions would rise, the body would would ache, the belonging would be and then the environment would dictate, but you should be this or you've been raised that that way, the protocol is this. But then what if something else happens, your knee gives in or you are experiencing a nervous surge that you don't even know where the brain comes from, your neuroplasticity just, your epigenetics says now is the time that you're gonna be depressed or how do you then become that identity through the protocol of it? It's almost and that's where the multiplicity comes in where you say, can we allow one another to be actually just human? And bringing us back to who's Lucy, who's African? And the answers were sometimes being human, how do we treat one another?
Speaker 1: I'm glad you brought in Lucy just now because I went downstairs to the exhibition and I was looking at the two, what do you call, slide presentations again and a set of images, the animated images suddenly sort of jumped out at me and I was hoping that that both of you could say something about this. You know, there's a couple of videos, I think there's there's a mixture of videos of of some someone, a person traveling through, in a vehicle, traveling through some sort of Africanized landscape. And then there is an animated cartoon type of pencil drawing set of images. And what was interesting is that there was a superimposed MRI images of bones. I i i i i'm just thinking here in in the framework of the question, who is Lucy? Lucy is the name given to this African woman whose remains had been archaeologically discovered sometime back, I forget which year. And of course, the very incongruous naming of this of the remains of this unknown woman with the name of Lucy, which I heard was supposed to refer to Lucy in the sky with diamonds.
Speaker 1: by the Beatles, which was the song that the archaeologists had been listening to while they dug her up. So how does how does this set of reflections around this animation here, the the traveling video, the the animated cartoon video and the superimposed MRI images of bones, which to all intents and purposes could be read as Lucy's bones. So how how do you see this entire sort of conglomeration of what you talked about, the sacred emotions, the body environment, the epigenetics of it all. How do you see this sort of being part of the conversation around our multiple relations, memories, perceptions, prejudices even as concerns Africa?
Speaker 2: Um, so the we took on the videos as individual projects, but it was in Congress, we spoke about what we were going to do with them. And it came very much from gut response of doing the work with the in-depth interviews, the focus groups speaking with one another, with you. And so the story of the animated video is the way of how ideology can infect and affect the body and how it starts inside and then how we interact. So if you look in the first images, it's just a body with emotions. So it's a scientist's work that have done how emotions are looked at in the body. So I've referenced his paper. It's a link there on in the exhibition. And then I created it that when they interact with one another, they start changing one another's emotions and things and how we are beings that arise first as embodiment, but then how ideology can make us do different things and where we can almost like cattle being gridded up and down in particular ways and same directions. So there is that image of that animation comes in. So and then the chaos of the chant at that particular point is that the bones are scattered. It's all over the place and it's really and then there's a warning skull that flashes and then the ideology that is very beautifully shaped as an origami bird, but the bird can't take flight. And then we engage with the origami bird that can't take flight and we make a beautiful pattern and it dances around, but it just can't take flight. And then we try again as an individual, as four or as a collective and we try and and then that's where the video comes in. We're driving to Africa. Let's go back into the countryside. Let's go to our roots. What is soul? And so that is representation of one of the in-depth conversations where we said returning to self is returning to home, which is rural, which is nature, which is origin. And so once we there, we can explore and you will see the bones change and the bones become almost easy to look at. And it's the bones of us as ancestors. When we were interrogating about throwing the bones because it's a very popular thing in South Africa. Casting the bones. Casting the bones. It seems scary, but it's actually just asking who the animal or the spirit of the bones to say, can you guide me through what is going to happen next? So it's a gentle way of tapping to the ancestry of that animal and saying thank you. So if we have excavated Lucy, if we see her bones, can we say okay, we've desecrated your grave. What can we, how can we say thanks to this and honour you by throwing the bones and saying what is it, what do we do next, where do we go? And then you'll see that the video, before that it was excavating Lucy, but then how the animations changed a little bit to being a little bit more creative, a little bit more nature related and playing with that towards the end. The drawing of the animation is its exchange of money and time for you'll see that they say thank you and then wisdom come in and the birth of self. It's a little bit of more nuance and I don't want to bore anyone about identity.
Speaker 1: But just thinking about what Annemarie was saying, this idea of seeking guidance from the ancestors, because I'm thinking amongst, at least with that kind, this idea that the cycle of life is not only about the living, there's those who have gone before us and there's the living and there's the yet to be born. And in many ways, this interesting enough, maybe I'll link it back to the question you mentioned about the need for essentialism but to forget about it. But in many ways, this bond or this cycle, this cycle whether it's metaphysical or physical, we are actually all made of the same muchness, right? We're breathing the air that others have breathed before us, they're drinking the water that others have drunk before us and we don't even know how much of them is in this water. But even beside that, I think the science is also saying that when we are born, bits of my grandmother, actually my mother, they come onto me and bits of me come onto my sibling or whoever is born after me. And so this question of what are we and this multiplicity question is a big one. But as I mentioned earlier, the fact that because of a particular encounter, in some ways Africans in quotation marks have had this fixity, that it is also important that sometimes that there is this essentialized African that is then described as being as human as anyone else becomes a necessity to present that and to push for an understanding of that. So we talked, I think in the texts in the video about not just loving black culture and music and so on, but also the person themselves. But then this is why it's important, I guess, to essentialize it, but to then, once the point has been made, to drop that again. Because otherwise then I think we fall into third, what is sometimes described as third world fundamentalisms, right? And so on. But yeah, and I'll just stop there.
Speaker 2: And I think that's a very important point because sometimes that will lead to patronising ways of relating to one another and then relating is in only through identity. So if we can then drop that, but and then remind ourselves that we are human and what is it that we would need in order to engage with somebody else and therefore honour and respect them, that that's what they would need too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in that sense, it would basically be a conversation, a necessary conversation from those who have been fixed into what it means to be African by others perhaps, right? And how that fixation, how to be African, I am African, how that may have been internalised. Maybe that conversation that we are having right now is necessary in the sense of having to reconceptualise and reclaim humanity for bodies that have been declared unhuman or which have been dehumanised through the colonial encounter, for example, right? So in that sense, this conversation definitely needs to be sort of also understood in your larger context here where you talk about African woman native other, right? Native in the sense of indigenous. And that's where I see valuable points of engagement between your work as in this exhibition with that of Sylvia Wynter's work where she identifies the quintessential human being, right? She talks about man and then she goes into man one and man two and we can start another philosophical discussion about that, but that'll exceed our time frames. But I'm just putting it out there. What I'm trying to say is how much more food for thought your exhibition here has basically brought out into the world. I just also want to come back to your origami birds ideology as origami birds that cannot take flight. What was interesting was that when I saw those origami birds, I immediately thought of what Audre Lorde said in her book My Name Is Zami, where she talks about the bird without wings who is in constant flight. And that was one of her symbols for the African diaspora. We talk about belonging and unbelonging, homing and unhoming. And how, for me, when I saw those origami birds doing that stylised dance, but at the same time, as you said, not taking flight, not attaining perhaps other levels of awareness, other levels of knowledge, other levels of richness, what have you, right? But I was just thinking about how you would read the African diasporic sort of ways of being and belonging or unbelonging in this context of...
Speaker 1: What is Africa to you? And this fixity that has been imposed on what Africa means to different people, both to those people from the continent and to those people in the diaspora and those who are from the outside who ostensibly based on their phenotypical appearances do not belong to the continent. So how do we negotiate these ideas of belonging and unbelonging? How do we converse with the bird without legs who cannot land, but at the same time the bird who cannot fly?
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, interestingly, in my mind, I was thinking in many ways, it's almost, I think it's just trial and error, right? It's just in doing it. Because interesting enough, one of the things I had been thinking about is that nowadays we are actually in the diaspora whilst deeply ensconced in our homelands, right? And I'm thinking of like one of the interviews that we had where he was talking about the incongruity because he's a scholar in terms of an African philosophy, but is also Catholic. And so being asked, how can you be these two things at the same time? And for me, the argument in many ways is that but peoples, African peoples specifically have always been more than one thing at the same time. I think, you know, we talk about it even in the exhibit as being the original trickster, right? So being here but also there, in but also out, you know, now also then, dead also alive. So you think of all the trickster characters that are talked about, Anansi, Kwaku Anansi, the signifying monkey in the diaspora, but also within the, of course, the Yoruba tradition, right? In Haiti, Papa Legba is Elegua, I believe in Cuba is Eshu, in Brazil. But it's the same idea. And if it is true, and I suppose it is scientifically saying it's true that we're all genetically linked to the continent, then in many ways, in a strange way, we are all African, but we also are not, you know. And for us, I think it was really trying to create a space where you could hold contradictory ideas and not explode. Because I think what's happened especially with a very sort of Cartesian approach to think about life is very binary. You're either with me or you're against me. You're either this side or on that side. But sometimes you can be both. And it's why I love, well, she African, well, someone like Gloria Anzaldua, right, who talks about adhering to many different identities but belonging to none at the same time, right? And recognizing it. And of course, for many people, then you might be considered questionable, right? So where do you sit? But I think the politics maybe then is love, right? The politics is love and trying to get us all, trying to have us all cross over, but together, right? And appreciating each other as well and the value of every single one of us and not just just a few of us.
Speaker 3: And to add to your question and answer about who's African, the idea that essentialising is important to say that when it rises, it's important to claim an identity of African because there was imposing of this is what is a good standard as a human being from a colonial idea of this is the glorified being. And how African is imposed as a term on people of the continent where it could not be negotiated. Being able to ask the question, who is an African, is a fresh question in an old context where in the past African was determined in a particular way, but does it still serve us today? And I think that's where the origami bird is not taking flight, but it used to maybe. We've been travelling, there's diasporic, there's a rise of identity of claiming something because it needs to, we need to say who are valued again, the lesser than or the valuable beings around. So my point is that the colonial imposing has now become almost a capitalist imposing, that it is now about modification and exchange, it's about how I exchange with you. It's a...
Speaker 1: It's almost it cannot take flight and it cannot breed, cannot, and therefore we have to engage with it again. We turn to something else. And I think this is where that question of who is African, let's renegotiate it. And one of the persons interviewed says can we renegotiate it? Otherwise we're stuck in a presumption, an assumption from the past.
Speaker 2: Can I just also come back to what you said Eppie about politics that requires love? When I hear this idea of love and Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni has actually also talked about this in one of his Covid nineteen articles about this idea of love coming from a politics of conviviality and so on and so forth. This idea of love that you brought up basically brings me to the video that was part of your autobiographical presentation where you talk about the value of black lives and you talk about states of stratification which cannot be saved by intersectionality, right? And how do you see love being part of this necessary politics as regards the value of black lives? And how does this idea of the value of black lives also factor into your understanding of what is Africa to you?
Speaker 2: I'm asking this because very often also in these multiple moves to reclaim a type of more agential humanity for those who identify as African, what is interesting is that the question of blackness is sometimes disavowed. Yeah? So how do you see this assertion of the value of black lives as part of the politics of love in your view?
Speaker 1: That's an interesting question. Well, first, I mean, to link back a little bit to the other question, 'cause one of the things you had me think about is that actually this question of who is African is a red herring. Really the question is who is not just human but humane. Or amongst like there's a term nipampa which means almost like a true human being. And in that sense it's really a person who has empathy and who has respect for living organisms but also the environment within which they're in and so on and so forth. And so the idea for me of love, because I think often when we think of love we think of it as being something that is soft and fuzzy. But actually if you ask me, love is one of the hardest things to do. And it's one of the hardest ways to become, right? And especially if you're thinking about unconditional love. And I think because love requires a kind of disciplining as well. I mean, love requires the truth and reconciliation processes. Love might require reparations. You know, love requires honesty. It might require punishment in some cases, right? And in the sense of speaking about Black Lives That Matter, I would also say it's because even if you were to take the Christian tradition, right, this idea of being aware of the needs of the least among us. And unfortunately Africans in inverted commas have become the least among us. I mean, otherwise why would Fanon write about the wretched of the earth, right? And so for this reason, this group becomes important. But it's not saying it's the only group that's important. And that's why for me someone like Audre Lorde when she talks about there are no hierarchies of oppression becomes also important. And for many of us, and what's interesting for me is I felt like in the eighties and nineties there was a real recognition around coalition building, around solidarities and so on. And it seems to have disappeared over time. I'm not quite sure why, but I think it ties back to what you were saying Anne-Marie about capitalism and the market, right? Everything has become commodified. So whether it's feminism, commodified, you know, at the point where, you know, let me not go there, to the left, to the left anyway. But certain kinds of acts are then seen as freedom, sites of freedom. And you ask yourself then what does freedom actually mean, right? But yes, this commodification of selves and lives and even purpose and so on. And I think at this point I'm rambling because I've taken myself away from the answer to your question too.
Speaker 2: No, actually I don't think that was so much of rambling because it sort of already relates to this idea of these multiple states of stratification that many of us who are gendered and racialized and classed find ourselves at these intersectional crossroads of how...
Speaker 1: power exerts its malevolent aspects on certain bodies, how those bodies as spaces have trouble in the spatial area of these intersections, how they can actually move through space even, right? So basically you've touched on several interesting points here as regards this commodification of lives and purposes right now, which is significantly departed from what you rightly observed about the spirit of coalition and solidarity amongst racialized peoples during the eighties and the nineties. And this was a very, very strong sort of move especially in the feminist context, right? Amongst non-white formerly colonized peoples coming together in diasporic settings or in their own continental and subcontinental settings, for example, and having those conversations and addressing common suffering, for example, right? Common modes of discrimination, common modes of exclusion, of disenfranchisement, of dehumanization, right? So the question of coalition building, the question of alliance, there's something that's very important especially right now in order to set up counter narratives to this idea of commodification of life and purpose. Because if you don't have that commodificative value, if you don't generate profit, what is the point of your life? What is the purpose of your life? What is the purpose of your body being around in the first place, right? So that's what's been suggested to us, yeah? So I think you have actually, that isn't a ramble for me. That is definitely something that opens up a whole new set of conversations. And one of the charming things about having these particular conversations is that we are basically mobilising Stuart Hall's model of the unfinished conversation. Because this is something that's very, very important to me, especially in higher education landscapes where there's always this push to find the solution, set up the methodology par excellence and have that sort of propagated as the final solution, one size fits all. But what's interesting is that if we do not come to this point where we have to find a final solution, we still open up avenues of further conversation. Now, I'm in danger of rambling myself, excuse me. But yeah, I just wanted to sort of also move on to this idea of love again. I find that extremely important because that discourse around love is being mobilised at the moment, especially I think in left thinking circles, liberal thinking circles, those who are in privileged positions, who can be identified as white positioned, now saying, you know, we're doing so much, why don't you love us, right? We are making space for you in the institution, why don't you love us? So this idea of love as possible site of a solution can also be, to my mind at least, dangerously mobilised by those in power and those in privilege to sort of silence and sort of whitewash, paper over the existing colonialities, which were built on historical colonialities. So how do you sort of navigate that as artists, intellectuals, philosophers, educators? Because that also sort of gives us that sort of grist for the decolonial mill. How do we work with that? How do we work with the types of expectations from whiteness as regards the mobilisation of love? Yeah, because there are expectations like, oh, we've moved on, you need to forget that. But yet at the same time, in order to decolonize, all of us need to work together, come again in that community of practice framework to actually see that there are tough love aspects, as you pointed out earlier. Putting the finger on the pain, staying with the trouble, recognising the coloniality of being, coloniality of race, coloniality of gender, the coloniality of power, right? How do we then navigate these dominant expectations as decolonial scholars who are invested in rethinking?
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, it's interesting. Well, you made me think of several things. I mean, one...
Speaker 1: One, I do feel sometimes we have to meet people where they are and then find spaces to remind other, you know, other moments to remind over and over again, to try and yeah, keep keep the issues on the table. And sometimes I think that that also, that why don't you love us, I think also comes from misunderstanding of love as this warm and fuzzy feeling, right? And it's not always because I, and for me, that's why this idea of being able to hold contradictory ideas at the same time is a really important tool. I don't know, I really don't know how we can teach it because one should be able to also say that okay, this person is holding me to account, but it doesn't mean that they don't love me. So so so that person also has to understand that. But but I also feel as if uh, oh as we were talking, one of the things that made me maybe realize, but I don't know if it's a statement of fact, but I started thinking that I'm beginning to suspect that the the debates and around sexualities especially, and the commodification of that has, I think, I've almost feel like it's been used intentionally to fragment us further. And so this is what is undermining notions of solidarity because everybody is having to defend, you know, like it's how, you know, like the opposite to metadata, right, is now giving us subsubsub like other kinds of data because even when you look at those sexuality debates, they don't necessarily send, they don't center women in them. So in terms of who who who is getting the benefit and benefits of those debates and and so on and so forth. And and and I feel somehow sometimes these are like kind of kind of switching bait, right? So we're all focused on on how we as individuals are named or not named and not focused on how we collectively, irrelevant of how we are named, can change things for all of us in a sense. But I've moved away from your question about, you know, immediate question. But but I, oh, but the other thing it made me realize, and we were talking about this, is that time matters. Time is a consequence because one of the things we realize is trust is a huge necessity for community building. And time is what, you know, time is a factor in that showing up, people seeing you, engaging with people at different levels and different arenas for different things and and and people seeing that yes, I might not agree with you, but but I know where your heart is and it's not too far from where mine is, even though I still don't agree on how you want us to go about it, you know, this becomes important, but yeah.
Speaker 2: It speaks to us as using the lens of friendship, if we had to theorize this, that in in the idea and ideologies of colonial thinking of identities and whiteness and blackness and we should not be friends. We should not be sitting in the same room and doing anything together. And so, love asks of us different things. It asks us to to think differently, to own the skin we're in, the perpetrator or or the marginalized or because we cannot take it off or the ally. We can't take it off. We can't and we have to be able to say, okay, what do we do now once we've identified and this is where we pick it up, we say this is identity, now what do we do with it? And then then we we ask what is next? And love almost unconditional love, not, I think unconditional love is a love because sometimes it requires different things like dismantling and unlearning and it's painful. Like, why don't you love us? Well, let's dismantle this connection and this codependency of you having to look shiny and brand new and and maybe I don't want to love you right now, but it doesn't mean that I don't unconditionally love you.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, it also means you are expecting me to love you, but have you been extending love to me? Have you seen me and my humanity? Yes. I may not look like you. I'm different from you. Fine. But have you extended the very same love, that unconditional love that you're expecting from me, have you extended it to me? Have you extended it to those who look like me? Have you extended it to those who do not look like you?
Speaker 2: Yeah. But this is a, but I but I realize in many ways, this is the challenge and this is why in some ways I admired, or admire I should say, people like Martin Luther King, right, the Reverend Martin Luther King, because, and and not only him, I think some might argue Black people in general in the diaspora or even in South Africa, because because I think to myself that if it was not for that kind of unconditional love that does not make sense, there would be bloodbaths. But there haven't been bloodbaths, right? And and so then this becomes a question, right, that...
Speaker 1: Do we then think that okay, well they're not quite serious because if you really want what's due you, you must get it no matter what? Or is it that, you know, there's a recognition that there's something bigger than me, there's something bigger than my grievance. And so we have to find ways that take us, as you say, across the waters, but take us together even if we have to take some people kicking and screaming along the way. But yes, so this question. Because in honesty, I mean, you see Anne-Marie and I laughing all over the place, but we've had challenges. We've had times where we've had to know like okay, I've got to step back or I've got to push forward or okay, there was, you know, so it's not necessarily that we hold hands and sing kumbaya all through the process, right? We also are redefining ourselves and what does it mean and what does it mean to be me and oh, okay, awareness of, oh, I do this and okay, why did I do that? Because some of it is also about things we experienced so long ago that we don't even know ourselves. This is why I move in this way in the world and so on. So yeah, so it's an interesting kind of...
Speaker 2: And I wanna add to that, that equanimity is not always, doesn't mean that people want revenge. They just want, they just want equality.
Speaker 1: They want to be heard. That is what I am understanding. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And seen. And seen. So this is after the reflections is that the value of being able to sit and receive and be transformed. It's just invaluable. It cannot be explained. Every interview changed us.
Speaker 1: And people, and actually someone said changed them, right? How they saw themselves, how they thought about themselves. You know, a lot of taken-for-grantedness that we have. But anyway, well, we joke with stealth mode. Stealth mode. Yeah. And speaking of stealth mode, I mean, I'm very intrigued with the way you set up this question of how you have been negotiating and renegotiating your own places in positions in this collaboration, not as just as an artist collaboration, but also as a friendship circle, as a community of practice. But for me also, coming from a gender studies point of view, what I'm also hearing is that these are aspects of your feminist killjoy work as well. I'm finding this fascinating and which is why it's resonating with me in my own function as a diversity officer, but also as a scholar who is working in the areas of gender and decolonial studies. One last question. Do you think Lucy is a feminist killjoy?
Speaker 2: Oh, that's a good question. Well, I would say yes, because they discovered somebody who's older than Lucy now. So yes, in Morocco, right? So there's a finding of another mother, maybe potentially even an older mother, right? So in that sense, it's almost undermining the very ground that we've created from her bones, right? That this is who we are, this is where we started from and they're discovering that actually no, there's someone else, there's something more. And maybe that's just about, you know, Africa, the continent as it is right now, right? The fact that they even say there's more, is it biological or genetic diversity on the continent than there is amongst all the people outside, is proof that, you know, the trickster is still at work.
Speaker 1: Okay, how does that, that's an intriguing idea. How does that connect to the feminist killjoy idea, where, you know, there are certain assumptions of what kinds of change in thinking has taken place from dominant feminist narratives, but then you have another type of feminist coming in, a feminist of colour, a black feminist, a queer feminist coming in and saying, oh no, but that's not it. No, sorry, you need to stop your joy for a moment and think about these stratifications.
Speaker 2: Yes, because it's disrupting notions that we've taken for granted, right? So it's constantly shaking us, shaking the ground on which we walk and presumptions of who we are and where we came from. And also, I think also shaking ideas of authenticity and so on. 'Cause one of the things we were talking about earlier is, like for example, we have imagery of descendants and one of them is an image of Yaa Asantewaa. And I was seeing from a friend that actually there's contestation around that image in the sense that that image is being argued that that image is potentially not actually her, but because...
Speaker 1: She is so significant and there has been a lot of energy around the importance of this figure. It is now difficult to undermine it and I think I am just doing that right now by talking about her. But for me what it speaks to is this question about authenticity and ideology. So how things, how sometimes certain things are so important that this question of truth, right, what is truth, what is reality, is it as fixed as we think it is? And the answer in many ways, I would argue, is no because we're always negotiating because it is about questions of power and understanding and interpretation and so on. And so in that sense, I would argue that the idea of a feminist killjoy is really to have people constantly thinking about why, like, you know, who, what, why, how, you know, constantly. And that's even the feminist killjoy messenger herself or himself, right, that you're always looking at this question because reality is changing, it's constantly changing and it's not what we see, even though it is what we see.
Speaker 2: I'm thinking about your question and if I feel into it, I have to kind of imagine I'm embodying her because I have a DNA within me and if I feel I'm like she was a being and she lived alive in every moment and had some wonderful thoughts about her environment. And she would ask a question back at us, do you think I am proud of you? And yeah, I don't think the answer is clear because she would be surprised by what she finds we are doing.
Speaker 1: She'd be surprised at what use her bones are being put to.
Speaker 2: Yes, what we're doing and how we relate to one another in this vast scale of diversity that we have from her.
Speaker 1: Having said that, having heard your answers to this, I'm personally thinking, yes, that from Lucy's point of view possibly the feminist killjoy is somebody who causes epistemic and phenomenological earthquakes.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, we will have to end on that note with another open node of engagement. Thank you so much for this extremely insightful conversation. Thank you so much for being here, being part of the cluster community for these past three months, for bringing your intellectual rigour, your artistic endeavours, your creativity, your openness to the imperfections of life in general and actually bringing us a step or two forward in actually thinking about how Africa figures into our own ways of thinking. And also for opening up the space to actually embrace the idea that there is a little bit of Africa in all of us. And yeah, we might not have to belong in order to see what is Africa to you, to me, to them. Now thank you so much once again for this time, for this exhibition, for what you have left us in the way of legacy. And I would like to thank our listeners for their attention. This is a slightly longer podcast. This is also going to be the last one for this semester as regards the artist fellows. Yes, have a lovely summer afternoon and take care of yourselves. Go out and get that chocolate ice cream with your chocolate sauce. God bless you.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
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