Bioart + Design Africa
VIAD
Imminent and Eminent Ecologies
Stacy Hardy
Stacy Hardy is a writer, researcher, and editor whose work explores the intersections of embodiment, the individual, and society. Her writing has appeared in various anthologies and journals, including the New Orleans Review, New Contrast, The Evergreen Review, Black Sun Lit, and more. She is the author of the short fiction collections Because the Night (Pocko, 2015) and An Archaeology of Holes (Rot-Bo-Krik, Paris 2022; Bridge Books, Chicago, 2023). Her critically acclaimed plays and award-winning librettos have been performed globally at venues and festivals such as the Aix-en-Provence Festival in France and the Royal Opera House in London.
Hardy is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Wits University, an editor at the Pan-African platform Chimurenga, a visiting fellow at the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago, a partner in the African creative writing teaching initiative Saseni, and a founder of Ukuthula, a project that develops new writing from and against gender-based violence. She has hosted interdisciplinary workshops and writing intensives in numerous locations including Dakar, Kigali, Cairo, Tombwa (Angola), Nairobi, Lagos, Berlin, New York, and online. Additionally, she has facilitated graduate seminars and writing workshops worldwide.
General Artist Statement
Does the sick or compromised body create a compromised text? What does a sensorial or physically compromised text look like – and how does it infect and affect the reader? Additionally, who writes when I write? Is it truly ‘me’– the ‘I’ that I believe myself to be? Am I the isolated, contained individual proposed by colonialism and capitalism? Or am I necessarily composed of the multiple other lifeforms that share my physical body – the bacteria and viruses, the spirits of ancestors and the ghosts of those deaths I am implicated in, the animals, gods, and disembodied voices of other writers and artists who came before me? Is my writing the chance inheritor of an invasive, exterior parasite – a parasite that calls itself ‘language’?
In South Africa, the lines between life and death are always contested. It is a country haunted by the atrocities of its history, alive with the spirits of ancestors and ghosts. Life is precarious here; often, it borders on death, a spectral life that operates in the border zones of existence. But this also designates a continuing subsistence, or insistence, at the very heart of death and absence. Something that has died, something that is in the past, nonetheless refuses to go away. In Joyce Mansour’s words: “Your breath in my mouth.” How do we write these border zones? How do we create something defiantly and beautifully alive out of so much death and dying? To know oneself to be monstrous and yet seek to make something from that monstrosity, something with life and vision, and yes, shared breath?