Dis]rupting, [mis]understanding, [un]learning and [re]membering—Lerato Shadi, Hamedine Kane and Euridice Zaituna Kala

Abstract

Ordinary activities, performed by billions of persons all over the globe every day in a myriad situations feature in live art interventions by Lerato Shadi, Hamedine Kane and Euridice Zaituna Kala, respectively South African, Mauritanian/Senegalese and Mozambican. The unobtrusive and intimate nature of their gestures may strike the reader as incommensurable with what is habitually understood by ‘knowledge production’ in institutionalized situations. Their gestures seem paradoxically counter-performative in the sense that they are not geared to ‘performance’ as understood in the neo-liberal corporate world, yet they are intimately pertinent to knowledge production as well as to contemporary art. This text suggests that critically positioned knowledge is acquired via bodily action as the artist’s body functions as a vehicle for memory, for perceiving by acting. Awareness of the body as a political entity brings awareness of the embodied specificity of knowledge and the egalitarian nature of intelligences. The processes of individuation set in motion are of particular interest to urgent Earth-wide concerns, namely the crucial need to [un]learn former thinking patterns preventing us from thinking outside of the colonial mind-set. Protesting the political circumstance of the processes determining the hegemonic standardization of knowledge is not an African prerogative, but, given the complex recent history of the continent, the political crystallizes here in particularly telling ways. In the three artist’s actions the everydayness of knowing or not knowing, the wisdom of [un]knowing and of misunderstanding is re-activated, re-cognized and re-membered in continual flux. They perform everyday resistance and disruption though commonplace gestures acted out in situations where collective ways of [un-]knowing may come about, as [un-]learning is discovered as a gesture of [re-]membering.