This session explores the performative nature of the trace of de/colonial archives through artistic gestures. Bronwyn Lace and Bongile Gorata Lecoge-Zulu will share artistic research developed as a result of collaborations with French and German museum institutions. As part of Season 10 of the Centre for the Less Good Idea, they explored colonial archive images, particularly those of Dahomey taken in 1930 by Frédéric Gadmer and Father Francis Aupiais, through collective artistic experimentation. This work was developed around a Pepper’s Ghost, an illusionist technique from the late 19th century. These artistic proposals are coupled with a critical reflection on the colonial imaginary mobilised in a so-called decolonial institutional approach, and highlight the normative straitjacket that they sometimes prefigure.

Biographies

Anna Seiderer is a lecturer in the art department at the University of Paris 8/Vincennes, Saint-Denis, a researcher at the Arts des Images et art contemporain [AIAC/EPHA] laboratory, associated with the Laboratoire d’anthropologie des mondes contemporains [LAMC] and a member of the editorial board of the journal Esclavages & Post~esclavages. Her thesis in aesthetics, supported by the philosophy department of the University of Paris X-Nanterre, the Ecole Africaine du Patrimoine (EPA) and the Centre Africain des Hautes Etudes (CAHE), focuses on the concept of transmission at work in post-colonial museums in Benin. She has worked as a research assistant at the current Africa Museum, coordinating the European project Réseau international des musées d’ethnographie et des cultures du monde [RIME] and supporting artistic research in the museum’s colonial archives. She is co-curator (with Anne-Marie Bouttiaux) of the travelling exhibition Fetish modernity (2011), co-editor of the eponymous exhibition catalogue and of the book Une critique postcoloniale en acte. Les musées d’ethnographie contemporains sous le prisme des études postcoloniales (2014). As part of the research project Images animées, mémoires controversées [CINEMAF], she has developed, in collaboration with Didier Houénoudé (Abomey Calavi University) and Bronwyn Lace (Center For The Less Good Idea), the artistic research on colonial archive collections. Recent publications include: ‘Images fantômes. Colonial Anamnesis”, in Alessandro Gori, Fabio Viti, eds, Africa in the World, the World in Africa / L’Africa nel mondo, il mondo in Africa, Milano, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, 2022, pp. 217-235; “Aida. Prélude d’une conquête impériale”, Aida by Giuseppe Verdi, staging by Lotte de Beer, Programme de l’Opéra de Paris, Saison 2020/2021, pp. 49-53; Interview on Borderlands with Jo Ractliffe in A toi appartient le regard et (…) La liaison infinie entre les choses, Christine Barthe (ed.), Musée du quai Branly/Actes Sud, pp.38-45; “Animating collapse. Reframing colonial film archives”, with Alexander Schellow, in Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial, by Margareta von Oswald and Jonas Tinius. Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. 187-209; “Reflexivity at Work. Performativité du ” musée palais royal ” d’Abomey”, in “Museums and religious heritage: Post-colonialist and post-socialist perspectives”, Civilisations, vol.71, pp. 85-111; “Recaptioning Congo. African stories and colonial pictures”, interview with Sandrine Colard, L’Art Même (89), pp.68-70.

Espéra Donouvossi holds a master’s degree from the Department of Language and Communication Sciences at the University of Abomey-Calavi in Benin. Between 2007 and 2014, he lived and worked in South Africa before joining the Unesco Chair in Cultural Policy and Management at the Belgrade University of the Arts in Serbia. In 2018, he completed a joint master’s study programme in cultural project and institution management in cooperation with the Université Lumière, Lyon 2, in France. His Master’s thesis focuses on recommendations and advocacy and management strategies for the restitution of Beninese cultural heritage from French museums.
Espera is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana and the University of Hildesheim in Germany, where he is studying the design of structural and participatory policies to support sustainable systems of governance for Benin’s cultural heritage. With over 10 years’ experience in the African cultural sector, he has been deeply involved in the creation, development and coordination of several full-time cultural organisations and programmes in most African countries. He is passionate about Africa’s cultural and creative industries and his personal goal is to become an expert in cultural policy.

Bronwyn Lace is a visual artist who has collaborated with William Kentridge on the founding and establishing of The Centre for the Less Good Idea. For Botswana-born Lace, who currently works between Austria and South Africa, her artistic practice is concerned with the relationship between art and other fields such as physics, literature, philosophy, museum practice, education, and more. Site-specificity, responsiveness, and performativity are also central to her practice, and have informed a great deal of her early work. Similarly, a balance between an isolated, introspective studio process and a collaborative, communal process sees Lace embracing incidental discoveries underpinned by an informed pursuit of new ideas.
In early 2016, when Lace was living and working in Johannesburg’s Maboneng, she was contacted by Kentridge and asked to join him in a discussion on an idea for an experimental incubator space for the arts. Lace was to work alongside Kentridge and his team, helping to establish a space that would ultimately become The Centre for the Less Good Idea. For Lace, whose own work grapples with themes of transition, mortality, illuminating thresholds, and finding a physical form for collapse, The Centre holds a strong methodological and philosophical resonance. Working to hold the myriad and often intangible processes of artists, seeking out new ways of seeing and introducing disparate threads to their work is a role that she’s occupied since The Centre’s inception. Working alongside the production and technical teams, as well as the invited curators, choreographers, directors, composers and dramaturgs leading a process, and providing a space for encouragement and understanding is also central to Lace’s role at The Centre. At present, Lace’s position between South Africa and Austria also sees her working to establish relationships between The Centre and other collaborative, experimental arts spaces and institutions across the globe.

Bongile Gorata Lecoge-Zulu is an artist based in Johannesburg. She holds a Bachelor of Music and a Master of Arts (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg), as well as a Bachelor of Flute Performance (LRSM). Lecoge-Zulu has performed in ensembles, bands and theatres throughout southern Africa, and is a full-time member of the Drama for Life Playback Theatre Company. Lecoge-Zulu’s creative practice is deeply rooted in an interdisciplinary collaborative approach that often leads her to engage in experimental collective projects. Much of her research focuses on the possibilities generated by the fusion of music and sound with other art forms.
She works (and plays!) in and across contemporary performance, music, theatre, education, writing and curating – so her practice is deeply collaborative, collective and generative. The worlds of expression she frequently explores, discovers and creates with notions of translation beyond the text, in an ongoing effort to cross the boundaries between disciplines. Season 8 of the Centre for the Less Good Idea was curated by performer, musician, writer and educator Bongile Gorata Lecoge-Zulu, and used the provocations of Breath & Mythology to produce a programme of collaborative, experimental and interdisciplinary new works.
The performances that make up the season 8 programme of work feature music, the physical and the narrative, and are at once humorous, absurd and contemplative. A multimedia exhibition was also presented throughout the season. Entitled Thinking in Poetry and Cardboard, the exhibition serves as an archive for SO Academy’s Thinking in Cardboard mentorship programme and The Khala Series 2021 100 Poems project, curated by poet Upile Chisala.