After All Is Said and Done: On Fluid Solidarity and Survival

Abstract

There is no doubt, given seemingly permanent social, environmental, and economic crises, that transnational solidarity is fundamental in the renewal and survival of art institutions. In the last couple of years, there have been several online discursive platforms—panels, symposia, colloquia—featuring artists, cultural critics, and academics to reflect on the consequences of global disasters such as the coronavirus pandemic on the livelihood of art practitioners and the sustainability of organizations and institutions based in the African continent, most of which are dependent on and competing for shrinking funding resources. In response to the precarity and desolation precipitated by crisis, there is revived urgency in solidarity through the ethics of care, healing, self-preservation, and other contingent strategies of survival.Alternatives such as online exhibitions, interventions, and forums seem to offer new prospects for how modes of practice and working relations across the African continent can be refashioned and large-scale transnational support networks can be formulated. Most significant is that a structurally altered art ecosystem modelled on generosity and collective empathy seems palpable. It is now possible, for example, to imagine the repositioning of institutions like museums as “spaces of care” and habituate therapeutic activities—sometimes ritualized and mysticized—in various initiatives, programs, events, and discursive platforms. The focus on recuperation and repair from psychosocial woundedness, ecocide, social injustice, and compounded trauma has enlivened the quest for slowing down to be in communion and to feel with others.Yet with the translocation of the hard work in affective labor from live to virtual spaces, there is also dilution of otherwise pivotal concepts and strategies demanded by solidarity.In very general terms, affective labor—already deeply entrenched in creative practice—is catalyzed and made visible. The disorienting simulation of social contact online, steamrolled by commercial traffic, trivializes the practice of “care,” leaving class polarization intact and impeding meaningful solidarity. One is reminded of the questions that the artist Naadira Patel so pointedly asks in the text included in her art work the future of work (2020): “how do we imagine a sustainable, more generous, more caring, more kind, unbiased, and more calm world of work?” and then “how radical is your self-care if you don't post about it? […] try the self-care app of the year? [.] how high is your social justice barometer?”Solidarity—civic, social, cultural, or political—among institutions, organizations, and art practitioners in the African continent is vital but it is predicated on volatile, uneven, constrained, and neocolonially bound societies. Take, for example, one of the rich historical intellectual legacies of cultural solidarity on the African continent: Pan-Africanism. Although bold in its ideals, Pan-Africanism is also criticized for being a “rhetoric-laden,” androcentric, and elitist “passive concept” that is “represented in pan-African institutions such as the African Union (AU) and the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD)” (Nzewi 2013). The grand narrative of Pan-Africanism conspicuously redacts women's creative, political, and intellectual work in actuating the pan-African vision (Abbas and Mama 2014).1 For this reason, a transnational feminist position (Mohanty 2003: 7) is paramount given its emphasis on accountability and oppositionality in assembling the collective voice across the gender spectrum. To address the need for transnational solidarity across socioeconomic classes, concepts such as “trans-Africanism” (Okereke 2021) and “critical pan-Africanism,” which “mobilize the values of solidarity and cultural exchange to effect a situation that has political ramifications,” have become generative.In the reflections that follow—structured according to acts of solidarity such as gathering, assembling, caring, working, and devising strategies for survival—are preliminary notes on solidarity, particularly fluid solidarity, and the bonds that art practitioners are molding. Fluid solidarity—the organic organizing of civil society—recognizes ever-changing meanings in the bases upon which different kinds of solidarity are formed. Mohammed Bamyeh (2009: 39) defines it as “frames of affiliation and agendas that are not coterminous with state ideologies.” He distinguishes it from solid solidarity, which defines hierarchical and state-led notions of collectivity. Solidarity, he argues, is “essentially fluid in nature” (Bamyeh 2009: 39) with the transmutation of one form of solidarity to another. The question is: what does solidarity demand of art institutions and practitioners in the current context?In 2020, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (Zeitz MOCAA) hosted the Radical Solidarity Summit—a platform that brought together artists, scholars, and writers working across disciplines to gather and collectively formulate ideas on various modes of solidarity such as collaboration, knowledge sharing, and transnational mobilities and to reflect on the intellectual legacies of Pan-Africanism. Its overarching message emphasized “practicing togetherness,” in the words of Koyo Kouoh, the museum's executive director and chief curator.2 In her opening address to the Summit, Kouoh argued that solidarity is a “fundamental dimension of life.” Conceptualizing this event, the Zeitz team asked: “What can we do for ourselves, what can we do for others, what can we do together?”One of the aims Kouoh took up after being appointed in 2019 was to “bring a certain degree of institutional humility.” This would be a necessary shift, given the aloofness of the museum in its initial year under the first director, Mark Coetzee.3 Following its launch in 2017, Zeitz MOCAA faced criticism for lack of transparency, abuses of power, and failure to engage local art professionals and establishments (Blackman 2015), the domination of White males, and inequity (Sargent 2017, Suarez 2017), among other things. Yet it was also touted as the “first Contemporary African Art Museum on the continent” and “the Tate of Africa” (Guardian, 2017).Located at the obscenely opulent Victoria and Albert Waterfront, Cape Town, in the context of abysmal racial economic inequality, Zeitz MOCAA has had to work hard to shake off what Kouoh accurately defines as “institutional arrogance.” Cape Town, colloquially called the “Europe of Africa,” has long been labelled as one of South Africa most racist cities (McDonald 2008). It is a brand that impedes social solidarity, even at a local national level. Not only does Zeitz MOCAA face these extreme polarities and the Whiteness of Cape Town, but it also faces the added challenge of being located in a country plagued by class- and race-based Afrophobia—a phenomenon of scapegoating Black Africans who are deemed not “native” to South Africa. These obstacles encumber the expediency of pan-African solidarity beyond the discursive platforms that are, in general, frequented by mostly middle-class participants. Considering this, the position that museums should be “community-and artist-led” adopted by Zeitz MOCAA is progressive but necessitates cautious navigation of a context that is beleaguered by confounding and often inhospitable internal relations.Kouoh's remark about the museum's civic role, “its responsibility to rebuild citizenship and political engagement,” is pertinent when one considers how state-owned institutions fare when compared to privately owned ones in fostering debates about citizenship. In the context of faltering democracies, a term that Stuart Hall (2002: 21) sees as “so proliferated [that] it is virtually useless,” the parameters of citizenship and associated rights seem anchored in the racial economies of private property and private philanthropy. Generally, state-owned museums, which should center the objective of rebuilding citizenship, are not always well resourced for projects at a transnational scale, while privately (often White) owned museums in South Africa are not always driven by sincere social justice objectives. Arguably, the private-sector-led revival of democracy vitiates the claim that democracy is about elected forms of public representation. As a not-for-profit museum, termed public but privately owned, Zeitz MOCAA provokes well-timed questions about these imbalances, specifically the implications for how solidarity is conceived and projected in public and private institutions.In addition to these complexities, Zeitz MOCAA has also had to reestablish its relations with institutions, organizations, and practitioners beyond South Africa, positioning itself as the first museum that “sets out to present, collect, and engage with the artistic and intellectual production in a pan-African and Afro-diasporic scale” and placing emphasis on “mutuality and plurality.” Kouoh defined the inclusion of the entire continent as well as its diaspora as an “urgent necessity” but one with an older trajectory. She pointed out thatThis homage to earlier forms of solidarity codifies the bases for contemporary pan-African solidarity. It points to an era dedicated to the anticolonial gathering of critical thought and social organizing when the formation of independent nation-state sovereignties was hinged on international solidarity.As mentioned, this glowing legacy of Pan-Africanism has eclipsed the contributions of women art practitioners. Africa-based Black women and queer writers, art historians, cultural thinkers, and artists who were practicing in the Independence decades are seldom lauded to a fair extent as their male counterparts. Hakima Abbas and Amina Mama (2014: 4) question “the hegemonic androcentric narratives of pan-Africanist history that erase women's participation” and ask, “How should feminist movements challenge the yawning gap between the pan-African vision for Africa in the millennium and grim material, social, and political realities?” Pan-Africanism is not comprehensive if it does not heed the repertoires of feminist pan-Africanism in forging solidarity.Contemporary examples of impactful Africa-based women-led extrainstitutional forms of solidarity can be traced in initiatives such as Bisi Silva's Àsìkò, held in Nigeria (2010, 2012), Ghana (2013, 2017), Senegal (2014), Mozambique (2015), Ethiopia (2016), and Cape Verde (2018). It often coincided with major events such as Dak'Art in Senegal and in 2017 with the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) meeting in Ghana, where the Àsìkò book was launched. This transnational mobile knowledge-I realsharing alternative art education platform addressed a gap in art education systems across the continent and current demands in “critical theory, art history, research methodologies, and conceptual strategies that underpin artistic and curatorial practice today” (Silva 2017). Kouoh's Raw Material Company, based in Dakar, has long facilitated groundbreaking intellectual platforms for art critical thought through the Condition Report 1–4 Symposia, RAW Académie, publications, and residencies. These are just a few examples.Other transnational modes of gathering resources and sharing knowledge include the Pan-African Circle of Artists (PACA) that was initiated by Kryds Ikwuemesi in 1991; the Exit Tour spearheaded by Goddy Leye in 2006; and Invisible Borders, founded in 2009 and led by Emeka Okereke. Invisible Borders advocates for Trans-Africanism: “trans-African interaction between artists and art practitioners in the many countries that make up the continent.”4This approach recognizes class struggle and the distancing of “arts” from “the layman.”5So what are the civil and micro foundations of solidarity? It was pointed out at the Radical Solidarity Summit that the current crisis, as well as protest and civil unrest, has “intensified the general call for care and for humility.” Radical, Kouoh remarks, needs not only to be “loud and extreme” but can also be “silent, subtle, and steady defiance of any given state of affairs.” Solidarity implies “the condition of living under a constant drive for care, consciousness, and sensitivity to the matters that surround us.” These strategies and approaches to solidarity through care and humility are rooted in feminist praxis. The resounding call to gather and share provides a basis for understanding shifting meanings in the political thrust of contemporary modes of solidarity on the continent.At an individual level, (fluid) solidarity may refer to very personal bonds. The artist Lungiswa Gqunta homes in on intergenerational solidarity between women in her family. This shows that micro- and macrosolidarities are interwoven, even if at first in small-scale solidarity of those who might not have formed part of movements but together worked to defy the indignity of oppressive systems. This scale of solidarity is also far reaching. Take, for example, Gqunta's Riotous Assembly (2019), an installation named after South Africa's Riotous Assemblies Act of 1956, which prohibited gatherings of twelve or more people and was used to target and hyperpolice Black people. In the Act, “assemblies,” or people gathering, is “conduct engendering feelings of hostility” and might endanger “public peace.”6 Gqunta's Riotous Assembly (2019) is defined as a celebration of “Black revolt, collective healing, and resistance focusing on the often-overlooked importance of women within these narratives.”7Gqunta points out the absurdity of this legislation in that, given its size, her family alone would constitute “an illegal gathering.”8 In some ways, the criminalization of gathering shows the political potency of coming together and, significantly, that solidarity is a spatial practice. Whether it defines allyship across national borders or across shifting conceptualizations of “public,” “private,” or virtual spaces, it demands reclaiming space to organize and communalize. Gqunta explains that she “wanted to create a space where various knowledges from different women would exist in the space and that would be the way in which we share between each other.” Riotous Assembly (2019) is designed as a space in which everyday tasks are shared, tasks that strengthen sisterhood (hooks 1986; Lugones and Rosezelle 1995). These are bonds that are not formed on the basis of “shared victimization”; rather they are formed on “the basis of shared strengths and resources” (hooks 1986: 128). They do not forego “doing the ‘dirty work’,” which hooks (1986: 128) defines as “the struggle and confrontation necessary to build political awareness as well as the many tedious tasks to be accomplished in day to day organizing that is necessary in the development of radical political consciousness.” Gqunta explains that it is while performing these tasks that women share their stories. In her artist statement, she says,She notes that “the way in which people fold sheets together, the movement of the bodies is also quite a very special thing because it's not even choreographed but there's a syncness in the language that the bodies move closer together, far apart. So, it's like a meditative dance.” The act of working together in Riotous Assembly catalyzes “intergenerational knowledge exchange.”The sound aspect of the installation is Winston Mankunku Ngozi's Yakhal'Inkomo, sung by Qhawekazi Giyose. It was released in 1968, eight years after the tragic Sharpeville massacre when Black people who gathered at the police station to protest Pass Laws were shot and killed. Percy Mabandu points out that by the time the song was released, “organized political resistance had been decimated, [but] Black Consciousness was formally inaugurated in December, after Yakhal'lnkomo appeared.”9 Gqunta includes chalk drawings, or “mindmaps on gathering,” in which she repeats counting lines that evoke crowds gathering as in protest, a census of people being counted and being crossed out. Coming together counteracts divisive, individualizing biopolitical systems of control. The floor in the installation is covered in soil, something that Gqunta says is aimed at slowing down one's walking, disrupting, as assemblies do, commodified time.Gqunta is a member of Iqhiya, an all-women art collective established in 2015. Its members—Buhlebezwe Siwani, Bonolo Kavula, Thuli Gamedze, Bronwyn Katz, Asemahle Ntlonti, Pinky Mayeng, Sisipho Ngodwana, Thandiwe Msebenzi, Sethembile Msezane, and Tlhogie Kelapile—have worked collectively and individually. It was formed in response to shared experiences of racism, sexism, and epistemic violence in the arts, especially its institutions. For one of their collective works, The Portrait (2016), they stood in assembly on coke bottles in red crates holding Molotov cocktails, with pieces of sheets soaked in petrol, recalling the communing of women in Gqunta's family, and generally the communing of Black women.Solidarity in the collective work of Iqhiya can be seen in terms of reflective solidarity. In Feminism Without Borders, Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003: 7) defines solidarity “in terms of mutuality, accountability, and the recognition of common interests as the basis for relationships among diverse communities.” Mohanty draws from Jodi Dean's concept of reflective solidarity, which frames solidarity as “a result of active struggle to construct the universal on the basis particulars/ differences.” It presents three positions formulated as: “I ask you to stand by me over and against a third” (Dean, cited in Mohanty 2003: 7). Reflective solidarity sharpens the understanding of the kinds of relationships necessary for solidarity in clarifying the questions: solidarity with whom and against whom or what?Solidarity is hard work. It differs from extracted, exploited, undervalued, abused labor under capitalist conditions. One's physical and cognitive labor determines social standing and, to a certain extent, the communities one becomes part of. As decommodified affective labor, solidarity entails working on the building of relationships, whether among individuals, communities, institutions, etc. This elemental aspect of solidarity becomes elusive in the context of online organizing and abstract political communities. People may sign up in solidarity to support a cause with a community of people they do not know and may never be part of, at least in meaningful ways other than an electronic petition signature, and to be seen to be participating politically.This shift in conceptualization of solidarity work is satirically reflected in Naadira Patel's the future of work (2020; see https://vimeo.com/432653844). Patel replays familiar online navigation between vacuous images posted on social media and apocalyptic news headlines ranging from public health crises; environmental, natural, and economic disasters; to exercise and weight-loss videos. Patel shows how solidarity and other related forms of online campaigning have fallen victim to commercial, liberal vanity projects geared toward leisure products. Nothing is as it seems. Words like “solidarity,” “(self) care,” or “decoloniality” are emptied out and appropriated.With searching subtlety, Patel registers the obscurantism of the internet and the obfuscation of solidarity affective labor where participation in so-called e-democracies is an app away. She asks:The illusion of online solidarity emerges as questions are raised about the possibilities for those who are left behind because of no or partial access to constant internet, and for those who are not able to work remotely, those whose work is essential but undervalued and with no possibilities to create “mini utopias” or participate in the promise of “digital dreams.” In many ways, Patel's work draws attention to the cooption of affective labor and, significantly, the inequality and class struggle that solidarity is mired in.In thinking about affective labor, I am also reminded of a video artwork by Bonolo Kavula, You Must Be Exhausted (2014). It is a simple yet poignant looped shot of a cup of tea being made (Fig. 5). As the teabag is placed in the cup, water, milk, and sugar are poured, and the tea is stirred, the artists repeats the monologue:Each time, Kavula uses a different accent, cynically mocking the apartheid-era White middle class in South Africa. The words were taken from a 1992 film, Sarafina. The scene referenced by Kavula is when the main character, Sarafina, visits her mother, who works for a White family as a live-in domestic worker. Sarafina role-plays the “White madam” while performing the monologue, showing her frustration in losing her father in his service to the political struggle, “losing” her mother in the futile service of White households, and in the ongoing police violence in Black townships.The act of making tea—a gesture of hospitality—is cast as an obnoxious ritual that dehumanizes the servant. The intergenerational dialogue between mother and daughter emphasizes the engineered differentiation of racialized publics and the differential ways in which “being in service of” and “caring for” often involves violence embedded in the mundane. As a servant, Sarafina's mother takes care of and services the White family even though she detests it. Sarafina takes care of her siblings and is involved in the youth anti-apartheid politics. Between mother and child, solidarity would mean sacrifice. For Sarafina to understand why her mother continues to work for White people that she sees as callous, uncaring, and ruthless, she would have to give up her political ideals. For her mother, work is sacrificing time to parent her own children but for the family to survive. For both, there is the affective labor required in political work but there is also the affective labor forced upon them by circumstance. One is also reminded of the disparate spaces both occupy, the mother in the White suburbs and the child in the Black township—this spatial division underlies Sarafina's disobedience and her own disrespect for the White household. In this way, affective labor not only includes care, love, and companionship, it encompasses antagonism among those who share political ideals.The recuperation of the care ethic by feminist decolonial social justice movements has generated a buzz in institutions, museums, and universities globally. It is also shaping alternative approaches for artists, curators, and art writers, encouraging the pursuit and retrieval local knowledge for healing and repair. For example, the Visual Arts Network of South Africa (VANSA) initiated Take Care—a toolkit and resource for art practitioners focussing on mental health. Take Care is a response to “the systems that upheld unhealthy ways of working and being.”10 The quest for slowing down and caring to rejuvenate dignifying social relations has revivified the struggle for social, epistemic, economic, and environmental justice in the arts. In the context of crude systemic violence, the practice of caring and care-work is not only ideal but necessary.Hi'ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese (2020: 1) emphasize that care is “fundamental to social movements.” They state,Yet, care may also spiral into fatigue and indifference. In her keynote at the 2021 African Feminisms conference, Peace Kiguwa pointed to “diminished capacity to empathize with other people's pain. We don't want to know anymore; we don't want to hear.” Kiguwa points out that there's the “destructive base of organizing” and the “disappointment of failed communities,” which cease to be spaces of care but become “the source of hurt.” She recalls what Audre Lorde referred to as “shed[ding] each other's psychic blood” and asks: “What does it mean to come together in our woundedness?”Kiguwa points to the psychopolitics of care which, she warns, focus on interiority and shifts attention away from the social and political conditions. It neutralizes and pathologizes trauma rather than politicizing it. Citing David Grossman, Kiguwa observes that perpetuated political conflict produces a “void between the individual and the violent world which we are confronted with,” which is “quickly filled up with apathy, cynicism, and above all, despair.”Drawing from Mmatshilo Motsei, Kiguwa foregrounds healing-centered care as opposed to trauma-centered care. She raises Motsei's argument thatKiguwa asks, “What can care look like under racialized capitalism, […] what are the freeing functionalities of care therein, [and] what are the oppressive functionalities of care therein?” These questions are instructive, especially considering the oft-cited statements by Lorde (1988), “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” and Angela Davis, who argues, “Radical Self-Care means we're able to bring our entire selves into the movement.” For Davis (2018), self-care would enable moving beyond trauma. Kiguwa's questions attend to the specificity required of the word “care” for it to account for contradictions and internal conflicts.Care, as an act of solidarity, can be redemptive, but it is not an end in itself. Care exists in the messy, convoluted, and volatile relationships forged within political communities. As such, one can talk of spiritual repatriation, but it is weakened and ineffectual in the absence of material repatriation. This reopens many questions about the ways in which care is fashioned in cultural institutions marred by a history of violence.What does solidarity demand of art institutions and practitioners in the current context? Exemplary strategies by art practitioners and institutions have shifted paradigms in enculturing transnational solidarity. Solidarity requires a sharpening of particularity in order to recognize the shifts, the fluidity, in the kinds of bases upon which it is formulated. Solidarity assumes we have clear ideas about who is in solidarity with whom; whose and which resources are brought into the struggle; our standpoint and political principles and what rewards (personal or professional) are at stake. In the neoliberal age of online social barbarism, concepts of community engagement, solidarity, care, and decolonization become politically altered and manicured, washed down, such that they are almost unrecognisable. The cooption of political strategies makes it harder to see beyond the haze of rhetoric and shorten the life of political movements and ideas. What survives? What happens in the aftermath?