WORLD-BUILDING THROUGH CREATIVE PRACTICE

The Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD) is an intersectional platform dedicated to critical exchange and research around world-building through radical creative practice and critical theory. Through the production of insights and perspectives that arise from, and pertain to African and African-Diasporic contexts, VIAD provides a critical space wherein visual representation becomes a means to prompt social, economic, environmental and political transformation though decolonial practice. Research conducted under VIAD’s auspices explores how the work of the radical imagination, as realised through contemporary and historical African and African-Diasporic art, design and other forms of creative practices, allows for re-conceptions, embodiments and performances that contribute to a re-imagining and possible formation of a ‘New Real’.

VIAD brings together a community of South African and international practice-led creative practitioners, scholars, curators, cultural producers, and critical publics to envision and realise world-building from African and African-Diasporic viewpoints. It is an ever-emergent, generative space; a space of intellect and creativity, in which play and imagination, experimentation and inventiveness, are harnessed to produce radically new forms of making and thinking.

VIAD’s primary modus operandi is practice-led research (PLR). With its commitment to PLR in the visual domain, and its purposeful interlinking of textual and practical outputs, VIAD takes the creative output itself − the exhibition, installation, artefact – as a starting point to develop complex inter-relationships between creative, curatorial, and textual research practices. This rhizomatic process is generated through creative production and curatorial practices around which interactive discursive engagements are held, followed by publications that deal with concerns that arise from, or are tangential to, the creative work and engagements with it. Under this rubric, VIAD’s thematics, projects and outputs are designed to work in conjunction with, and in support of each other, setting up a non-linear process of knowledge production and dissemination that foregrounds the inter-relationship between practice and theory, intellect and creativity.

Established in 2007, VIAD is housed within the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, at the University of Johannesburg’s (UJ). Its initial core thematic positioned visual representation as an arena through which shifting notions of identity are articulated, negotiated, and produced in relation to temporal, geographic, socio-economic, and political contexts.

Over the 18 years of VIAD’s existence, the Centre’s overarching thematic and its focus areas, were refined, becoming increasingly centred on specific aspects of contemporary African and African-Diasporic forms of representation. While not excluding the multiple possible explorations into the construction of visual identities that fall under its initial core thematic, these revisions were structured around issues of creative agency and forms of political resistance in the context of current global and national debates around decoloniality.

From 2014-2017, VIAD’s focus area shifted to look at South African identities in relation to their positioning as part of the African continent and the global South. This shift was prompted by calls for institutional, governmental, and cultural transformation (2015-) and the increasing urgency and relevance of the decolonial project, set against the backdrop of the student uprisings of 2015-2016. It was also a response to UJ’s reworking of its original Strategic Goals for 2014-2020, towards a wider positioning of the University as “The Pan-African Centre for Critical Intellectual Inquiry, with the primary goal of achieving global excellence and stature.” [iii]

Against this backdrop, VIAD’s emphasis on South African identity formations in representation was extended into broader debates around the construction of identity in representation across the African continent; in relation to the African Diaspora; and more broadly, across the global South. Particular attention was paid to VIAD’s location within the urban metropolis of Johannesburg – one of the economic capitals of Africa [iv] – and by extension, Johannesburg’s positioning as part of the African continent and the global South. From 2014 onwards, research conducted in VIAD reflects UJ’s engagement with the dynamic and vibrant cosmopolitanism of Johannesburg as a metropolis, and its active nurturing of cultural and social diversity as an institutional strength. VIAD’s physical and conceptual positioning in Johannesburg is significant because it allows for the development of work that connects and foregrounds the global South in relation to the global North/West and highlights a form of decolonial theorising that is rooted in the South African context. Disrupting the geopolitics of the art world, in which discourse around African and African-Diasporic contemporary art generally circulates within the global North, VIAD produces research that emanates from the South, and specifically from Africa. Such South-orientated work challenges the dominance of decolonial theorising within the context of the global North, which, while relevant, is not necessarily applicable in a South African context.

VIAD’s current two research strands, each with their set of discreet, yet interrelated, focus areas and programme of critical engagements put forward decolonial ways of thinking about what it means to be human, promote forms of world-building through creative practice and critical theory, and explore the potential for multiple forms of humanities and trans-species alliances based on diversity, complexity and hybridisation. Creative practice and critical theory are deployed to affect social, political and environmental change to address urgent social, political and environmental concerns.

If we are not afraid to adopt a revolutionary stance − if, indeed, we wish to be radical in our quest for change … then we must get to the root of our oppression. [v]

RADICAL I OTHERS is a research stream that is dedicated to revealing, reframing and disrupting systems of othering through, with, and in African and African-Diasporic creative practice and critical theory. The term ‘radical’ is used to refer to the kind of self-reflexive unearthing that T. J. Demos calls disrupting “the foundational conditions of reality; a transformative agency of futurity itself”. [vi] RADICAL I OTHERS challenges identitarian definitions as essentialising: the visual pause between ‘radical’ and ‘others’ prompts consideration of ‘radical otherness’ as a queering of the notion of otherness, to reach beyond subversion-as-resistance towards building a world where difference nourishes creativity and creativity is part of a network of possible livable worlds.

While the concept of radical otherness points to the binary constructs of self and other, its resignification in positive terms challenges dominant, westernised, heteronormative and colonial narratives of difference. The resignification of the term ‘other’ is used to frame historical and political hope, in which the flows and ruptures of the black radical imagination can play out as an active, dynamic force towards building new futures for black livability. Central to this research stream is the concept of world-building through creative practice, both of which are considered as active making-processes. Work done under the auspices of this research stream recognises History’s propensity to repeat itself, and necessitates anti-colonial thought and decolonial practice. By acknowledging the historical marginalisation of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour, it provides a space to explore how new processes of thinking and making – and world-building – can provide opportunities for rethinking and reclaiming concepts such as life, humanness, freedom, imagination, sovereignty, and strategies for living ‘otherwise’.

VIAD’s Bioart + Design Africa (BA+DA) research stream was launched in 2023 with the completion of its microbiology laboratory dedicated to creative practice located in the interstices of art, design, the life-sciences and biotechnology. It was accompanied by a curated group exhibition that explored how microbes and plants might function as agents of decolonial practice. Since then, its specialist focus on microbiology has expanded into a broader, more generous programme that introduces new methods, processes, materials and ways of thinking to reimagine our current and future ecologies from Africanised perspectives. BA + DA is based on the conviction that bioart and -design, when used as an agent of decolonial practice, holds enormous potential to generate new insights, perspectives, scholarly and indigenous knowledges that arise from, and pertain to, an African context.

Work produced under this strand can loosely be located under the umbrella terms ‘bioart’ and ‘bio-design’. Bioart involves creative practices that deal with the application of biotechnologies in which ‘life’ – meaning living and non/living matter – is used as raw material and subject for artistic production, using (and abusing) scientific practices and protocols. However, our use of the term bioart and design extends beyond ‘wet biological practices’ to incorporate the diversity of the life-sciences as they are manifest in creative praxis and visual representation. Our use of the term ‘bioart and -design’ is broad and generous: we consider biomatter at individual, community, geographic, cultural, economic and planetary levels. While incorporating forms of bioart and design that involve the use of living and non/living organisms as media, work produced in BA + DA also includes other ecologically oriented forms of creative practice that are not bound by a specific medium or artistic methodology.

Bringing bioart and design together with decolonisation holds enormous potential to generate insights and perspectives that challenge established binaries and hierarchies of knowledge, imagination and justice. By charting practices that blur the boundaries between practitioner and medium, author and collaborator, creative practitioners enact the interspecies entanglements put forward by post-humanist, post-anthropocentric and New Feminist Materialist theorists who propose a decentering of the white, heterosexual male and Eurocentric notions of speciesism.

BA + DA is founded on the conviction that combining innovative ways of working with existing biomaterials and producing new ones; introducing speculative methods of working with living and non/living matter that allow for risk and experimentation; and using interdisciplinary approaches with indigenous forms of knowledge that foreground ecocentrism, can lead to a robust platform from which to address socio-political, historical and environmental urgencies.

SOURCES CITED

[i] https://www.uj.ac.za/about/ethics/

[ii] Bogues, A. 2012. And what about the human? Freedom, emancipation, and the radical imagination. Boundary 2. 39(3). Fall:29-46:41, 45.

[iii] https://www/uj/ac/za/about/

[iv] ‘African/Africa’ is understood as being both scholarly and cultural orientation as well as geographic location.

[v] Davis, AY. 1984. Women, Culture and Politics. New York: Vintage Books: 14.

[vi] Demos, TJ. 2023. Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.