Jennifer Biddle √ and Tess Lea √

Introduction to Making not Taking Culture

This panel (9-papers, 2-days) is on new arts engaged platforms and cultural formations taking shape exploring radical practice and sensory methodologies. Bringing together key practitioners and community projects in the field, the panel considers what uniquely collective, community based, embodied forms of practice do in post-documentary forms of truth telling, participation and survival. Such instigations figure ways of doing and being and making that materialise sedimentation and generate value beyond the neoliberal and market driven, from understories to overstories, ‘low’ tech video to machine-based interfaces, VR hyperreals to place-based performance; language and archival activations, curatorial architecture and infrastructural interventions. Taking shape against increasing commodified versions of experience or what Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu calls the ‘take-away’ of extractivist logics, our panel is interested in complex and vital capacities of somatic and aesthetic labour, scale and pace, post-growth and counter-policies, environmental and public sites, including writing and speculative ethnography in the work of practice to mobilise force, effect and collectivise agency. Against an assumption of a singular audience, body individual or unilineal media trajectory, the focus in this forum is on inequity, divergence and the parallax in thinking with practice, purpose and politics.

Cheryl L’Hirondelle √

ēmihkwānisak ohci (for the spoons)

We form attachments to our belongings. They become transactive memory devices. Select ‘belongings’ from within nēhiyaw-itāpisinowin (Cree ontology) are part of our ‘bundles’ that travel through life with us and play an important role as they ‘keep’ memories, and thus, they perform animate functions. However, not every ‘thing’ is a ‘belonging’ or part of a ‘bundle’; some may be referred more appropriately to as apacihcikana (useful devices) or, in the common vernacular, known as objects or things.

ēmihkwānisak ohci (for the spoons) is a recent family-engaged project that manifests as an Augmented Reality (AR) 3D object, accompanied by binaural audio stories from myself and three other first cousins (plus other younger relatives as listeners). The ‘belonging’ depicted is imbued with important historical provenance, and the contemporary stories help to both frame the multigenerational, multidimensional realities of Indigeneity within my family and as examples of the memories the belonging is keeping.
Keywords: transactive, belongings, intergenerational, bundles

Sudiipta Dowsett √ and Millina Terblanche aka aMillz the First √

Cypher as method: collective rap sessions as embodied co-reflective aesthetic practice beyond analysis

This paper explores rap as embodied practice, moving beyond the predominant focus on its end product to examine the ethics and transformative potential of Hip Hop-as-arts-based research methods. Drawing on collaborative sessions with South African Hip Hop artists, we argue that rap collaboration within research contexts fosters a participatory framework, where knowledge is jointly produced and ethically negotiated with a potential to shift power dynamics and produce a particular type of embodied solidarity. This paper presents findings from a co-designed project using the Hip Hop cypher-as-method to collectively explore the political capacities of Hip Hop for women artists in the isiXhosa-speaking township of Khayelitsha, South Africa. An expanded notion of the cypher (Spady et al 2006) as collectively producing Hip Hop-based knowledge is explored as a method for building solidarity and safe spaces for women within a male-dominated culture. The paper provides background on the development of Rebel Sistah Cypher, including sexism in the local Hip Hop scene and in activist collectives, before describing the uses of the cypher as an activist tool and as an arts- based method. The presentation includes a song produced by the project called Imbokodo Rise which represents what Imani Kai Johnson (2014) terms “badass femininity”.

Key Words: Embodied methods; Hip Hop; Gender; South Africa