by Vusumzi Nkomo
The Resilience & circles
1
You can’t ignore the circles in Bra Dave’s work. Curator Bra Thembinkosi Goniwe says these circles appear quite later in Bra Dave’s work. You see, they feature quite prominently in this project. It’s resilience, you see.
2
Questions: how is resistance linked to/with resilience? What is the ‘nature’ of the dialectical relationship between despair & resilience? What are the political potentialities of resilience in an epoch of despair? When violence is so routinised repetitive, how do you remain resilient?
3
The resilience of and in circles
You could read the circles, think of them, as the hold, a hole. Moten permits you to think this way: to be held in the hold is to be contained, inside. But the thing contained resists, ricochets, but he is interested in the ‘air’ that ‘escapes’ the containment. Some of Bra Dave’s circles are not ‘closed’. He opened them up, allowed them to breath. To let air out. Black upheaval is linked with this idea or movement rather, of escape, of flight (if you permit me to think in the pejorative sense).
3.5
Etymology of resilience
?
4
Circles & vertigo
The circles could be indicative of a life of and in vertigo. and objective vertigo. Listen to Bra Frank:
a life constituted by disorientation rather than a life interrupted by disorientation . . . the sensation that one is not simply spinning in an otherwise stable environment, that one’s environment is perpetually unhinged stems from a relationship to violence that cannot be analogized.
(to be continued
Vusumzi Nkomo is.
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