 Okay, so we'll just start very briefly, very slowly as well as we have people joining us. I can see people are arriving, so that's good. I just wanted to say welcome to everybody from the SOA Center of African Studies that I'm representing here, I'm the manager of the SOA Center of African Studies, my name is Angelica Baskera. And I've been working on bringing to SOA the collaboration with the Victorian Alvin Museum around the artist talk series that we are showing to you today. The series has been very important to us at SOA and my colleague as that court, we see she will tell more about the series, how it came about, and to welcome all of you today to the, we are still a little bit confused if it's the third or the fourth event in the series because the series has been so popular that other events have been sort of pop up around which is my topic, because the more the better. And so it's been extremely successful so far. And we are very, very pleased that today we actually have artists from Kenya joining us online and it's really great to be able to have this reach with Silvia Kiambi today with us and Don Handa as well. And as that court, my colleague will introduce them in more detail so that's why I'm not saying too much about them, but as that will very shortly as soon as most of our attendees have joined us. She will then speak in more detail. So we have quite a lot of attendees as I said thank you so much for all for coming. I just wanted to say a few things the event is recorded. It's going to be available on the SOA's YouTube channel in the next few days. And also when it comes to the Q&A we're going to have presentation today. And then we're going to have a Q&A session at the end of the seminar. And please put your question in the Q&A chart that you can see at the bottom of the screen. And we will aim to answer as many questions as we can, given the time. But if you just write them in there, the panelists will be able to see them. And now without further ado, I think we have quite a lot of people in, and I'm sure more will join us. But I will now pass on to my colleague Elspeth, who will tell you more about the series and more about the SOA Kiambi, our artist today and Don Handa as well, our discussant. You're welcome. And thank you so much everybody. Thank you. Thank you, Angelica. Let me say, Karibuni Wote, we're sharing this session from Nairobi. It's the only one of the events which is actually taking place on the African continent, which makes me very happy to be the chair of this session. We've been organizing it for over a year. I'll get into that for a minute. The series is a collaboration between SOA's and the Victoria and Albert Museum. I wanted to just say that it's a very special exhibition for the Victoria and Albert Museum. It's known, or is the leading museum for art, design, and performance in Great Britain, perhaps the largest in Europe that perhaps debatable. And recently that there's been this emphasis on African material, and this particular exhibition Africa fashion has the central showing space in the museum. And in a way is a COVID miracle, because the curators for the exhibition devised it and pulls together during during the COVID period. And it was shed for the the V&A in terms of the exhibition itself, and also I think the procedure by which the exhibition that was devised and carried out which was largely online because again it was during during COVID. It's a very interesting exhibition to me because it deals with the generations of the independence era in throughout Africa over a number of years, and also textile traditions, and it compares that generation with the current creatives, which is the center of attention in generating the exhibition that is very positive approach. It's celebratory because it is this watershed, and it's celebratory, also in honoring the creatives who are on the sort of second story of the exhibition. Now, in contrast, so has has been teaching African art since the early 1980s, a specialism in art history. We've been having artists talks since the early 90s, and some rather fabulous collaborations. And again, this is a particularly outstanding collaboration, because of my interest in textiles and Angelica and I saw the call out we said, we really like to enter into a collaboration with the V&A on this to expand the topic of fashion and its let's see what we can do. And we were received well by Christine Krzynska, the lead curator and and her team. Last January when I was in Nairobi, I spoke with Sia Wea. In my mind, I thought that her practice would fit so well with the idea of expanding the topic of of textile costume personal adornment and fashion with her practice and what she showed me certainly fit with that and it's the piece which she's going to show us in just a minute, or two. Just feel I felt perfectly later in the year that piece went on or that project went on to be featured in the V&A at Venice and the Kenya Pavilion, which is which is really quite fantastic. Sia Wea also visited the exhibition when she was in England in October. So all of that she will be showing you are we will be presenting her presentation. She's probably one of the most well known Kenyan conceptual and performance artists list is long in terms of her achievements. And this is all really quite wonderful to be to be sharing her work with you. Her work will be discussed by Don Handa was wearing the bright yellow shirt. Last year I didn't see him in Nairobi because he was off in Kampala. And then he moved his job from being a manager of the Circle Art Agency, which is a commercial outfit to the Nairobi contemporary Art Institute, which is a nonprofit Institute and visual space to promote and preserve can East African actually more than Kenyan visual arts. And it was established by Michael Hormitage in 2019. And don will serve as our discussant. So after Syria's presentation, the screen will be split with Don in Syria will have his comments, their discussion, and then the Q&A. So that would that's what we expect to happen this evening. We welcome you again. And we move on now to see we as a presentation. Thank you very much for joining us this evening. Focus in my practice a lot to do with British history and German history and East African history. This is evident of this verflechtung. This fabric, even though it was my mother's shirt also looks a little bit like burlap. And for me, this was an important point in 2009 and 2010 in Kenya. There was a lot of conversations happening steered by the government to do with like a national identity. And for me, the Haitian cloth or the burlap cloth is a cloth that transcends class. I think everybody's kind of interacted with it in one way or another, because it's a material that's used for transportation. It's used in construction sites. It's used in agriculture. So it's one of those boundary less materials. And then, of course, what's repeated in my process and my thought process, particularly this is infiniteness, the kind of meshing or blurring of things that horizons we don't know about yet can be imagined or reimagined. I'll speak more about that later. Before I go into details of the four works I've kind of selected to speak about in more depth today. I wanted to share with you a few works that are connected to our conversation to do with costumes and clothing. Just take this opportunity to quickly go over them. This first one is called counteraction. And the costume I created is inspired by like a 90s kind of futuristic outfit with shoulder puffs and this high collar. And the work was really an attempt to meditate, to use meditation as a tool to transcend kind of the violence we experience. The second one I wanted to briefly touch upon is between us, which is a trilogy. It's a work I started in 20, well presented in 2014, but really started earlier than that. And the co-undersuit and the businesswoman kind of outfit and this cleaner's outfit were the three main images that I referred back to in the installation that are also connected to other works that you'll see. But the co-undersuit specifically was of superb interest to me. And this is kind of the first body of work where the co-undersuit appears. In the trilogy, you have three chapters and in the first chapter the co-undersuit as an observer is constantly watching. And the female character in the business suit is kind of at a loss walking into walls, not quite managing. And the costume with the cleaning uniform, which is often used for people who work in employment in kind of cleaning people's homes in Kenya, particularly. She's always cleaning and repairing in all of the three chapters of the work, whereas the other two characters go through a transformation. One, the co-undersuit is kind of the male characters ultimately broken down. And the female character starts from a point of breakage and goes into a place of repair. This image is just to describe for you that there is also the use of double-sided mirrors in the work. And there's a lot of voyeurism and a lot of kind of, you don't know who's watching which part when and who sees what when, how. And there's a cross-observation that's constantly happening in this particular body of work. And the last one I wanted to share before I go into in-depth works is 1964 to 2018, particularly references the co-undersuits again. And basically, there's an interesting point, so co-undersuits came about in the 70s and 80s as this post-independence business suit that was worn across the African continent, kind of in the liberation moment of like we can be businessmen, but also we're in Africa and we don't need a tie and a long sleeve. But what's interesting for me is that this uniform moved from a place of power to a place of employment. So nowadays this uniform is worn in the service industry. And I was interested in this transition of power that's happened between 1964 to 2018. Here I'll go into more depth about this work. The image that you see at the top is me in my studio back in 2011 when I first created the work. And it uses a sisal costume, several elements like five projections in total, ceramic works that are actually non-fired. And all the photographs are images that I took and it's a very linear installation and performance. Maybe just to share a little bit in the image of me in my studio, you can see tiny little orange vessels out of the pots and little crosses I was making and the costume in the back. My studio is currently like four meters by five meters and the installation is maximum size is 14 meters by eight meters. So I'm never able to fully create what's in my mind. I have to work in small stages and then when I'm in the spaces that I work in, I have the chance to actually see what the work in its entirety looks like. Here you have the example of the costume that I created, which is kind of for an entity that was representing colonial time in the performative element of the installation. It's made from a weaving process that comes from Kambani, which is my dad's heritage and part of my heritage. We're known for basket weaving and it's the same methodology that's used except instead of creating a circular shape, I created like a long, I don't know how you call it, like a trail. And then the cotton element was dipped in tea and coffee. And there's references of small carry shells, which is a reference to like currency pre-colonial time and beads, which was also part of an exchange pre-colonial time trading systems that existed. I had a hard time figuring out the costume for this first part of the performative action where I destroy several vessels and I needed to create something that would reference that time. I didn't feel comfortable wearing like traditional skins. And obviously in my research in the photographic element, you're only seeing images from colonial time. There's really no references, visual references from pre-colonial time. So this was my kind of solution for that. I included this image to kind of give you an overview of the entirety of the piece. In the far left side, you've got photographs on the wall and this like headdress that's on the floor, which I actually wear in the performance. The headdress was important for me because I had to kind of cover myself in order to be a little less human because the act is so violent. And on the far right, you have a projection of the actual performance, which is situated inside of the installation. The images, the white images behind the ceramic vessels, I don't know if you'll find the connection, but it's basically those photographs I took in 2009 in Mexico that I shared with you at the beginning of this presentation. And the photographs on the floor consist of two different sets. One are me in the sisal costume twirling round and round and the others are black and white photographs of clouds that are made into a video. And the last images next to the dressing table or behind the dressing table are images of the second character in the work called Rose. It's her memories of her home. And the work is really about Rose coming from a rural space and moving to the city and not quite managing the transition. This slide is just to give you a more detailed view of that particular section. At the end of the performance is basically the two costumes suspended. The contemporary woman Rose, she's suspended in the past, hung above the moving images of the entity costume that's on the floor. And the entity is hung suspended between the mirror and above the black and white clouds sort of in a void. Here are some images of the performative elements in the work. This set has to do with the first part of that performance where this characters, which I'm calling more of an entity, kind of hands out these metal crosses and also puts them on the costume that I'm wearing. And walks through the space and eventually goes to the platform with the ceramic vessels. Here's an overview of the performance and fields that took place in 2015. And you have this moment of destruction. The vessels for me are representative of individuals and also like communities that were destroyed from the colonial era. That's why the action of putting these crosses is an important part which happens in the beginning to reference to the missionary movements that took place in Kenya. This work I've particularly deals with Kenyan history and it's supposed to be shown in Kenya. I'm yet to show it in Kenya and I think when I do, I won't be performing it again. Here you have like the second phase of this performance. This is where Rose really comes to life. She's kind of starts with cleaning. First of all, it's right after I've come out of being the entity. And she tries to get ready for work. And she does this in front of this mirror and makeup stand and behind her are images that I created that represent her mother's home or kind of where she comes from. She comes from a rural space, but she's moved to the city and she doesn't quite manage to greet people in the audience. She keeps falling down and towards the end, she comes across this destruction that happened in the past and she tries to kind of rearrange these vessels and attempt to fix some of them. And there's a process of acknowledgement. And finally the work finishes with, you know, I transform from her rose into myself. The artist kind of in a me as the artist in public. And I hang these costumes and the suspending of the costumes is important for me. It's also repetitive action that happens in my practice. And you have rose in the past situated on the far left side and the entity kind of in this void and the evidence of this process remaining. The second work I'd like to get into is called I've heard many things about you. These are just some initial sketches I felt I wanted to share. Again, I can never fully work in correct scale for myself. So it's always in parts and a lot of planning and sketching and model making. Just wanted to give you a little bit of background of this project before I go into the kind of details of the work. I was commissioned by the status a gallery in Bremen. They were having an exhibition to do with mobility and migration and particularly contemporary African works. And the curator in Bremen is running a space that is funded by, you know, taxpayers money. It's a state gallery. And he had a challenge because he had to verify or kind of validate why having a Jeffrey African exhibition is important in this in the city like Bremen. And he'd seen my work at the National Museum. This was something I produced back in 2008, which was dealing with archives and Kenya's national history. And the exhibition was touring. It started in Zimbabwe and then Uganda and then in Bremen. It was kind of part of one of the turn fund applications of like group exhibitions. And he asked me if I'd be interested in working with the topic of Bremen and the city of Bremen and its connection to Namibia and the German history and the genocide that took place at the Germans committed in Namibia. I walked through the city of Bremen, Germany for four and a half hours, wearing a Herrero dress, which is used today to commemorate the genocide the Germans committed in Namibia between 1904 and 1908. Bremen is a city where out of Lüteritz was born. You can see a photograph of the now abandoned Lüteritz town Namibia taken by Mohammed Amin in the 80s. Lüteritz was responsible for the extraction of materials from Namibia during colonial rule. The fabric I carry is stitched together consisting of images taken by photojournalist Mohammed Amin in Namibia during the 80s. And accepts of letters written by Henry Whitboy to the German and British government. Whitboy is an Amibian chief who was persecuted due to his resistance to colonial rule. This is the report I used in my research. It is thought of that this genocide was precursor or the testing ground for the Holocaust. Both Britain and Germany were involved in controlling the region in the 1900s. The accept is written by British government, kind of as a document against the Germans. For the walk I embraced the energy of Whitboy's daughter, Margaret. She was murdered by a German general. They were kind of hunting for Whitboy because obviously killing Whitboy would show their power both British and German generals were doing this. And Whitboy was constantly escaping and she was caught in the midst of this. And there's a quote that I found which I found very powerful and that kind of felt like I could utilize her energy for the performative element of the work. Let me just read the quote for you. I've heard that you've come from overseas in ship in order to make war on my father. Today the victory is on your side, but luck is changeable. And if you will take my advice you will return to your own homes, because before long, my father will come down on you like a lion and take his revenge. Just to give a little bit of context. The estimation of her age was between 16 and 17 years old. So I was just I thought it was so powerful for a teenager in that time who hadn't come across gunpowder weaponry to kind of also stand up to this general. I just found it incredibly powerful. I walked from the ethnographic museum past the train station through part of the city built using the resources provided for by colonization. Stopping by a church passing Bismarck monument and leading to the contemporary gallery in Bremen called the status gallery Bremen. I use a golden string to highlight the different parts of the text element in the work, things like the year. 1904 like Henry Whitbury's name accepts from his letter. Kind of like a highlighter. And the installation itself consists of like rope, which is tied using the hangman's noose attached to weighing scales kind of the weighing scales you use in a market a long time ago to weigh vegetables or meat products. And the costume that I wear that commemorates the genocide, which is worn today is suspended on a clothes hanger. And I don't perform the performance in different cities. It's only for Bremen. And the installation then can travel along with a video of the performance as a final output. The side underneath is created by patching different pieces of fabric together. This work Caspala's playground. I think there are some interesting elements we could discuss to do with puppetry and tools used to intervene inside of difficult spaces. It's part of a larger body of work. Caspala is a character I created that is a tool for intervention started in the late 2018 and is kind of still ongoing. I'll be having a solo exhibition with the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute. And this is just one of the works that will be present. But I wanted to include it because the costume, one of them is connected to Kondasuits made by Mosquito netting. And also the tool of the puppet and just the general history I think is important to share. Nyaya House was built in 1983 and is the Office of Immigration in Kenya. This is where you get your passport and immigration papers. I can't perform or film in this area so created a puppet for my character called Caspala, which is a character I've created that is a trickster character who deals with things that are hard to hear or hard to talk about. For 24 years during the second presidents of Kenya's rule, Daniel Arab Moi, the basement of Nyaya House was used as a torture chamber. Caspala's playground on packs this time period and commemorates the mother's protests of 1992. The mothers were fighting for the release of their sons who were in captivity in Nyaya House. During this protest, the mother stripped naked as a last resort on the 10th day of protests. This is when the police walked away, steamed as a curse to see your mother naked. The work has two projections and Caspala as a character, which is an animal, human, male, female, enters the space and looks for Nyaya House in order to disassemble Nyaya House. The puppet is used to help Caspala break down Nyaya House and in the course of that gets broken and Caspala fixes the puppet. There's a lot of breakage and repair and repair and breakage that takes place in my practice. Caspala then finds themselves in midst of this protest and the character Caspala transforms and becomes, I guess, myself, protesting in remembrance or in honourance of the mother's protest. I wash the remnants of Caspala's red ochre from my body at the very end using the Kenyan flag and the remnants of the performance are left in the form of an installation with a puppet hanging in the shadows and projections, with the costume of Caspala and the costume that I wear that commemorates the mother's protest. And lastly, I want to share origins. This is also part of Caspala. What it teaches us to do with Caspala's origins, kind of the most recent output of this ongoing four-year-long project. And the fabrics, I think, well, I'm trying to share a few process shots with you because it's printed on flag material, which means you can see through both sides. It has sound inside of it, and it's an immersive installation. And the thought process towards origins was that I had lots of different conversations about this building of space, which is a landscape. It's also an imagined space. It's inspired by mine groves. It's got kaleidoscopic references. Mine groves is kind of a space I decided Caspala comes from because it's this in-between space. It's a magical space in a sense. Trees living in water, the seed survives in both fresh water and salt water, travels for a year before it actually settles. And there's lots of other layers to do with imagined landscapes, which we can get into a discussion. But I just wanted to share a little bit about the making process before I go into the work. On the left side is one of the prints. There's actually 36 of these in the entirety of the work. Each print is 370 centimeters by 145 centimeters, and there are digital collages of mine groves made to become kaleidoscopic. And the image of the right is just there to give you kind of a scale of the work. And it's a space you can walk inside of and around and through. There are two different entries and exits, and the audio sound is positioned on the inside of the work. So you kind of feel in here this breath that happens when you walk past the fabric also can move. And you've also got like this natural sound of birds in nature. Here you can see the installation from one entry point. It's pretty hard to document, so I'll share a couple of detail shots as well. The drawings are of Kasbala's ancestors. The space is really kind of like a shrine, even though Kasbala themselves are not present in the work. This is to do with their origins and space where they gain their power. These ancestors are drawn with oil pastels on silk screen printing blush. So they have a sculptural element as well. They're quite firm, but they're also translucent so you can see them from both sides. Again, what's present in this work that was also present in Kasbala's playground is the element of shadow work. So in terms of the flag material, you can actually see through from one side to the other, even though it's kind of double layered. Again, there's a, you know, with the drawings, you're seeing the front and the back with the prints, you're seeing the front and the back. So there's a lot of play with depth in that sense. There's also just a detail of kind of the bottom half of some of these ancestors. They're like quite light and I don't know how you say like, I want to say floofy, but it's not floofy. It's like feathery whereas the top is quite heavy. The head is quite heavy and the body is kind of floaty. In this last image I wanted to share just for the sake of conversation. I love this image. I found this banana in a supermarket in Kenya. And DZ2 is just, it says basically banana, you know, but these bananas come from Kampala from Uganda. And, you know, the border, they can't, if you have a split banana, can't cross the border. But I just love the fact that a banana fiber was used and stitched to seal this kind of split that was happening with the banana in order for the export to take place. And I just think it's a lovely, a lovely action and it's also a lovely action in terms of how we are dealing with the importation and exportation of food and the expectations around that. But again, also, I'm just totally in love with the stitching. So I wanted to share that. Thanks for your time. Hi, good evening Syria. Good evening everyone. Thank you very much for that presentation. Thank you for walking us through the content and thinking behind these works which are striking at key moments in your practice. And I think it's a good sort of overview and perhaps an introduction for some of our viewers to your practice. Because that's obviously very useful in the research, but it's also really attentive to the context of the history and the lives of objects and the lives of materials. I think it's also a good starting point for our conversation. You are doing like us to get into perhaps a different ways costing the textiles feature in your work, but also about the kind of transformation that happened. Right at the beginning of your presentation, you talk about this idea of interwoven, connected friends. And just before we go into the specific of the work, maybe you could be a little bit to this idea of interwovenness as something that's part of your practice. It's also kind of a big part of how you're moving through the world as an artist and creating work and also working and thinking with other people. Yeah. Hi, hi everybody. Thanks Don. Yeah, it's, oh God, okay. So like the life and art for me are very like entangled and they're not separate at all. And I think like the threat, the thing is for me, if you know my practice really well then you can start to see threads from one into the other from very early days like 1999, all the way to now. So there's a layeredness that happens in the past reference that keeps happening. What I didn't mention in the presentation is like the work infinity flashes of the past which is at the National Museum was also like an archival work that ended up parts of that ended up in fracture in the photographic bit on the left side. And it was also like the instigator for I've heard many things about you. So there's these long threads and I think in my life work like I'm also developing a space called untethered magic which is like co-founder keeper, one gunu and it's also a space for process and exchange and exchange and conversation around practice has always been super key for me and building bridges and not being a gatekeeper mentality which happens quite often in Kenya, because I think this is sadly a notion that there's not enough for everybody to go around I think that's kind of been tarnished by the NGO system we have or the donor funding system that exists I think it's also been affected by how gallery spaces came up and who was running them in the 80s 90s and early 2000s. So there's always a desire to connect with many people and then again obviously with my mixed heritage comes in another thread of connectivity or understanding two very different cultures the German culture in the Kenyan culture. In, in, yeah, I have kind of perspectives in that so everything is constantly overlapping. And my practice is also overlapping as well in its layeredness in the process in the practice. Again, I'm also invited often in science kind of science and academic forums, social sociologists and anthropologists. Quite often I work with the welcome collection. I've done some work with museums who are dealing with provenance issues. So then I'm kind of the loner the lone artist present. And again, I'm like overlapping and weaving and bringing in other perspectives constantly. So that's just, yeah, it's an entanglement. Yeah, and I like the word I came across it last week I didn't know about it. It's yeah because it has more than the weaving it has this ambiguity around or and you can attach the word to meshness as well. Whereas weaving is quite organized and sometimes it's not so organized sometimes these threads aren't so clear. So, I'm, I'm, I'm liking that word at the moment. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Working from around the work. Now, to carry on with that question of like you said meshness. And this things that kind of occur in the work, perhaps you could talk a little bit about particular costumes. I think the way the costumes appear in the work. I mean, what's between us in what's just fracture. I think they were signal certain social positions and they're connected to class they're connected to politics economics to commerce. And maybe you could think a little bit about how you maybe, how do you arrived at this point of his costumers and means to enable these transformations within your work. Okay. I don't know the answer to that. I think this, I guess it's a tool to change from myself performatively into the story, which is sometimes connected very much in an autobiographical sense. So let me, let me go back a bit. There's a kind of an important work I did in 207 and until 2009 called woman for a line down to the me, which was extremely personal and the performative element wasn't for public viewing. Because it wasn't about an audience interaction. And the installation element was available for like the public to engage with but I had to do with my family history and particularly with my father and my sisters. I needed to do that body of work in order to move into works like fracture in between us and I've heard many things about you where the autobiographical reference isn't so close, but it's present but not completely. It's not completely an autobiographical work. And then the transition. I think it's a tool for me to transition from me as the artist in public, which can be made as an artist in my studio is different or an artist like in my life is different but when I'm in a public facing sphere. There's a moment of the transition that happens in the installation in order to tell the story. That's probably where the the need for these costumes and building characters came about, even though it's not coming from a theater or a theatrical place. And maybe what's important to mention is like, when I was like 1314 I was interested in theater, but never quite good enough maybe. And then in my early college years I was also still like playing around with theater and there's a lot of kind of theatrical imagery in my practice that keeps cropping up and kind of the staging and this like lighting. And that's done, you see it particularly in fracture in the way that the setup for roses dressing table is done. And you see it also in origins and the way that the pieces are lit and the shadows. So there's been like this idea of theater coming into play and I think it's the costumes and the characters are stemming from there but still quite removed because I don't come from that backdrop I actually come from like a visual art backdrop. And the, the, the pieces are sculptural at the main I'm working as a sculptor as well. So I'm like people think I'm a performance artist but then I'm actually yeah well, it's just a tool that's being used inside of my installations, and the fabric is actually quite sculptural. I've gone round in a large loop. We've returned to the subject. Let me share real quick like more recently at the end of last year I was invited to do a theater based piece with customers playground. And I told them, I'm not a, like, I don't do like theater and they're like yeah yeah we know. Let's just try it out and I was like okay I wouldn't mind like testing because it's always been a question, this theater element. And I did and it was great and it was like, yeah the first one was an awful, awful. It was for performances in Amsterdam and Utrecht and I think the first performance was probably my worst performance in my career. Because I had to like really understand that theater is very very different from performing inside of a museum space and or inside of a public space. It was a great like then I fixed some stuff and, you know, chop things up because time is so different in a theatrical setting, and the next nights were great and the work is great but I noticed that a I needed to test it out to know that that's not the direction that I really want to want to keep running in because people kept approaching me with the theatrical question. But be I really discovered that the performative act is really an act of an attempt of repair. And that can't be timed. I need to be able to go down like rabbit holes and for time for it to go as long as it needs to go is an important element and I kind of learned that from that modus. Yeah. I like was also not speaking about kind of encounter that you're also creating that performative action that space that you're creating the objects in there is spoken about them as culture, talking about them as also objects that are made intentionally to function in a certain way in a certain space. And I'd be curious if you could tell us a little bit more when you're speaking about fracture you spoke, he spoke about kind of thinking behind the costume that you put on to become the entity. And I wonder if maybe you could extend that a little bit and tell us about the other also sort of costumes that appear in this work, particularly the headdress that you put on which I think there's a conversation he had where you mentioned also thinking about traditional weaving baskets and how also certain objects transformed kind of from the original use. And I guess really what I'm asking is perhaps reference to sculpture but more broadly could you tell us a little bit about how the development of these costumes happen. Is it how do you begin and how do you stop or change as a work shift. Yeah, yeah. So fundamentally intuition is always like a primary knowledge source for me. That served me super well, even though academics have a hard time defining how to measure that. But I think with the. There's a lot of thoughts that came into my mind sorry. So there's. Yeah, so that the entity costume for example I mean I think I explained it in the in the presentation. It's the I really wasn't comfortable to be like dressed in skins, particularly because I'm light skinned. And there's a whole bunch of other references that my body could potentially call upon that I didn't want to call upon in the work. My headdress is actually being used like in today's time as a lampshade. But traditionally they were used as fishing nets. So what also happens in my practice and process for several different. We are for works is that items are reused for other things but reference new things and old things at the same time. Past and the present are always kind of merging or being cross referenced simultaneously and to adopt a use for one thing and change it into another is another element that happens. And the headdress for me was it, I made the the woven elements that I attached to the lampshade slash fishing net were dipped in wax so they also make a noise when you turn your head is like. And I really didn't want to be so recognizable. In the footage you can't really tell but I'm quite horrible and nasty in that first bit. I'm a bit freaky and just an aura that I adopt a lot of people who know me quite well also say that when I perform they can't recognize me. Really because another energy is kind of entering into the space and into my body that I've, I allow and utilize. So it's quite an aggressive and I needed my head to be covered I just knew that as like a, that was an intuitive need because the the act of destroying the vessels is quite. It's raw and violent. So Rose's character. She's funny, you know she keeps coming. So fracture rose in fracture is also roses relocation in a different body of work photographic work I didn't share with you guys. And also in between us, the female character I feel like she's connected to rose in a sense and she's not rose but I don't actually have. I never found a name for her. I have a thread with rose somehow in that and I just haven't. Yeah, I haven't been pinned that down so she's kind of in between us in a sense, but I don't really want her to be I wanted it to be somebody else but if I'm honest with myself is probably rose. And then what happened to me the first time is that my luggage didn't arrive when I performed it in Finland. So the original roses costume was actually bought in Embu. And I was in a shop like a street bending place where they were selling a lot of women's business suits. And that was the original roses costume, which then got lost in luggage on the way to Finland. So I ended up in a second hand shop in Finland and kind of like finding what I would equate as a typical Kenyan woman from Embu that kind of aesthetic with this kind of the dresses is a little longer than the knee. And it's tight at the hips but it kind of flows out at the bottom and this this kind of definitely covering and closing at the top. And everything is kind of like secretarial I was basing it off of off of some Nairobi secretaries I've met and seen and yeah. So that was the inspiration and then this really fake jewelry plastic things that are supposed to look like pearls. And even in between us and in fracture there's a use of a floor mat which is actually a reference to marble floors, but people don't have money to reproduce marble floors or child floors. So you buy the plastic to emulate this more expensive living that you're not really living but you want to live. It's very present in in in fracture as well because she rose has this desire to to she has an idea of what it is to live in the city. But then the manageability of living in what is in her mind to live like isn't present isn't she's not able to do, and then the baggage of our history she hasn't unpacked. So there's a, you know, there's a double layered, not being able to deal with the past, and then also this pressure of an idea of how you should be. You know you should have two children, preferably a boy and then a girl, you should have a double storied house, you should have a two cars, preferably one should be a Prado. So the, an idea of what a standard of living a good standard of living should be like, and just to add, I mean in roses relocation, which is a work I didn't share it, you know she's stuck in in mess in France. So, the work was traveling just a backstory basically for touring for body talk which core core had curated. So I didn't have access to the costumes for a year. So when we were installing in France I just said oh I can take it now for a moment before I don't have contact anymore. I hired a photographer to photograph rose in the streets of mess. So she, she's super imposed with photographs of the memories of her home that are in fracture again the thread coming from one work into another. And again it's a, it's a story of not managing like this, you know, Exodus into Europe and this pressure of, of sending money back home, supporting people back home, and yet people don't realize that you're also struggling and alone in, in, in your new space. So, and this feeling of, of struggle and loneliness is also present in between us which is why I always feel like it's rose but it's not really rose. Yeah. I've also always wonder whether that's actually roses. Yeah, yeah. We'll see when she pops up again. It's nice to mention also the traces on the, on the costumes themselves. So each time I fracture the paint that I use in the ceramic vessels is on both costumes and then I don't wash them I kind of reuse them. So in the, in the entity piece you've got like three or four different kind of tones of red that are there and in the roses have hem on her sleeve and on the edges of her skirts you've got that on the bottom of her shoes you've still got the paint. So there's also that element that's kind of I find that interesting, even though I haven't really unpacked it, but I like it visually. I like how when you speak about rose, you know, the reference particular kind of dress that you, you think about my secretary, you're thinking about the jewelry will signal something about one's class one's position in society. You're talking about how the headdress in fracture also that needs to kind of separate yourself and end of this energy and that it's in that accidently that's where he's sort of different from you are as a person. Um, and I think that happens that transformation consistent even data on in hospital is the sort of customer's background is you acting as a customer but then there's also a moment and you kind of shed off a little character and you perform as yourself. And some of the rules are that that's what you also sort of shedding off a little part of the performance and you also protesting and you are naked. I wonder, is there is there something you could say there about this that in that relationship of moving between a state of dress or state of being you know in costume and that point of nakedness within the context of the work and performing and perhaps even how you think about the project that you're interested in the work. What kind of power is you know, does it give or is it what kind of power does the costume. Mm hmm. Yeah, this doesn't take away what kind of power does make it give you and what might you take away. Yeah, probably between the two. Okay, so there's so much there. This is the first time I performed as myself, when I'm stripping naked I'm actually not a character. And that's the first time I've done that in my practice for customers playground. It is a very strange transition from a customer into myself. Yeah, it's also the. Yeah, it is the first time. It's important to reference that Kasbal is costume is actually inspired by the calendar suit and that the origins of Kasbal. Oh gosh, we have to go a little bit back. So, I was invited by the mark museum for an exhibition they were doing with Amani which is a money was a research station built in Tanzania in 1902. And there was Sambara Mountains, and they had this. It's a mark museum as an ethnographic museum I think that's important to say. And they were having an exhibition about Amani in Germany's kind of reference point to that research station which became British owned, and then East African owned and now as Tanzanian owned, and the station itself is still in existence but it's abandoned but it's very well taken care of and still has like four offices that are working from there so it's not really abandoned, but they have like a library that looks like it's in use but it's not in use, or a lab that looks like it's in use but it's actually not in use and they're thinking in the future to use it as a university grounds but that hasn't happened yet. And they moved the research station into the bottom of the hill so the hill is like two hour motorbike ride downhill. And it's connected to a botanical garden. So the research was in medical, looking at ways of producing medicine. And the question I had at the time was also, you know, why did the Germans move up into this hill. And one of the answers could have been because of malaria and also because of having military oversight. Because costume is made out of mosquito netting, but I had just completed 1964 to 2018 so the kawanda suit was still very present in my mind's eye. And it's imitating a kawanda suit style in the costume itself and then the okra on the hands and feet. In the Mark Museum, I really didn't want to bring things from Tanzania into this space and into this exhibition. So I actually asked them for a residency in the Mark Museum as well, which they agreed to and understood that it's kind of a repetition of a violent act to just go to Tanzania and extract and then make for an ethnographic space in Germany. And Kasperla was kind of, I was playing in Tanzania and sketch performing and then in the Mark Museum they have this strange room which is a lecture room, which was used pre-university. So it was used for teaching ethnography where race classification was obviously also taught and it still uses a lecture room, but it existed before the universities were teaching. We were talking about like 115 years I think now. And I was playing in there and that's where and I was looking at my condom masks because I was interested in. I was in Tanzania asking lab technicians who were working in Amani in the 70s and 80s what they imagined 1902 would have been like but nobody could really give me an answer. People could refer to what they'd heard of or what they had experienced, but going further back into an imagination was kind of difficult. And then I asked the curator, you know, what kind of my condom sculptures do you have because I was thinking about my condom making pre-tourism infection, the infection of tourists changing the way we used to work with my condom sculptures which was more coming from a dream like state and being guided from from a dream state and asking permission from the tree to use the wood. And I was expecting to have what I knew of my condom mask which were these entangled kind of sculptural many figures. And actually they had a series of masks. And there was one mask I was particularly drawn to again intuition I didn't have a reason it was situate the label just had Tanzania Mozambique with the question mark on it. And I made Caspala's first mask inspired by that one. And Caspala has this animal human double seeing double hearing a golden mouth golden fingernails and this is trickster character that I've created to use as a tool to intervene inside of colonial spaces but also post independent spaces to basically talk about things that are hard to talk about or hard to hear. And the, yeah, so that it's, yeah, anyhow, I've lost my train of thought. Why were we talking about this. Oh, because the costume goes yeah so that's how the costume was like developed and built. And then afterwards the curator was embarrassed about not knowing more about the item which happens a lot in ethnographic spaces, and did her own research and found out that they're connected to medieval must which are actually used for transformation. So again, this intuitive knowledge was really like working. And that happens to me repeatedly. When I'm changing from Caspala into myself for the Caspala's playground. It's a reference that the mother's protest of 1992 was approached just maybe to give people some context. And then after doing the work for the Mark Museum, which was an intervention into the archive and we don't need to get into that because the works are not referenced. But after that I was kind of wanting to get away from this colonial reference in my practice for a moment to have a bit of a breather although it keeps coming back to me and chasing me. So that my birth year 1979 and I was looking at censorship and the self censorship that I experienced that I also think my generation experiences, and I pinned it back to. We kind of were born and raised in Moyes era Moyes the second president of Kenya, and Nyaya House is a building that is a government building, and is still used for your papers basically your passport your identification, your immigration and the basement was a torture chamber for 24 years. And the mother's protests happened at the same time as a Sabah Sabah movement which was a push for multi partyism in Kenya. And they were pushing to release their sons who were illegally or illegitimately captured and tortured in in Nyaya House, which hasn't been a site of commemorate official commemoration yet there's been discussions to make that into a commemorative space. But they were kind of halted, there was also an attempt to erase the evidence of the torture chambers which failed because it was embedded in the actual structural foundation of the building, because it's in the basement that they couldn't actually completely erase it and there's also, I don't know how true it is but apparently this 22nd or 21st floor is also sealed with concrete, but I don't know if that's accurate information. So there's been an attempt to hide this and President more the former president more he died in 2020 I believe, when I was actually making customers playground I was actually writing like what would, what would he think of this work as a question in the next day he was announced is dead. I was like, oh dear. Okay, maybe it's a little easier to make this work now, but maybe not I don't know with our current government it's hard to tell. And I was actually preparing to perform this in a bar in wrong guy called legends bar because it's a very famous old bar and bars is also where all of our politics are kind of discussed and also we have spies and bars who eavesdrop and the bar is just a very interesting space so that was the original location for customers playground, but because of the pandemic I ended up being first a video edition and now I'm happy to be performing it at and Kai for my solo show with you. But this transition into the, the protest the protest was very important it was a 1010 days long, and the mothers went to their limits and actually stripped as a, as a form of protest which is seen as a curse in Kenya to see a mother naked. There's other references to women being stripped by force that have happened in the 60s and happened as as like early like late or how you want to say 2015. But the, and there's a lack of power with your body with that kind of stripping but there's also this, this stripping that's like a resilient in the last resort and that's actually when the police didn't moved away and and it actually got resolved apart from one person who wasn't released. So, yeah, it's the only time I've been myself and I'm kind of comfortable with it, and it is a strange transition in the work, because there's no kind of announcement but I do want to honor that protest. And a lot of people younger people don't know about Nyaya house in that sense of what happened there, and people from my generation or older have a memory of that so the work is also to to bring to the front. Information. It's a, we don't some information we don't get some stories we don't get and I think my practice is basically pushing for that. I'm conscious. Sorry. But I think he sort of also thinks. Yeah, but I wanted to following that and following now thinking about memory because it's a particular preference to play and I think it's also present in the work of many things about you. Obviously the sense of collective memory but also personal memory, the things that I remember in the ways in which they remember, and something conscious of is in the performance is particularly and I've heard many things about you also cast by there as well. There's an installation and then there's a performance that takes place to then installation and then after installation the these objects that are left up in the space. What you could say a little bit about, you know that act of hanging and that act of obviously, you know, I guess at a very basic level, you know, you're still leaving an interact an inspiration for someone to interact with. But I wonder whether that perhaps also that an idea of commemorating a particular moment of particular action that maybe even a sense of what haunting in the space of an event that's come even their event that you referenced. No, I mean, God, okay, that's the per I mean traces and remains are like. I guess they're a way for us to to unearth things right. And I like I said earlier, I think a lot of these histories that not only I contend with but I think we contend with on the continent. They haven't really been unearthed or uncovered fully. I was recently in a conference in Hamburg where they were discussing the potentialities of building sites memorial sites or sites or how to do them it was kind of like a Kickstarter question. It was really a question about how Germany can deal with its colonial heritage in particular Hamburg, and it's, it was very political and on on on. It felt semi unresolvable in one sense, because the narratives that have been put forward are not honest, completely honest and a lot of histories. We don't know or don't uncover that actually affect us directly. So something that does happen in my practice that I think is important to say is that the part the public and the private. So I'm always interested in how public decision makings affect one privately. And I think that's also part of what I'm interested in as versa to. Yeah, I think private decisions can can cause effects publicly. I think untatum magic would be an example of that. But I'm always interested in in how these, these things are interconnected, and to make the personal nuances visible. I think I spent some time with scientists who were working in the money. And I did a presentation for a group that's not art related at all and in it, like 15 minutes in I would felt like I was really losing them. And then, after like, in a little moment later, one of the scientists were like, Oh, I get it, you're like a history book. Perfect example now finally we're we're getting somewhere, you know, because I was like explaining and explaining and it was felt like I was losing them. And I think that's the point is that there when it's not a lot of information isn't in our education system. It's not a lot of conversations aren't being held publicly. The fact that youngsters don't know about Nyaya house for example is is evident of that. So I think that the purpose for my practice and for myself is to uncover those things and I uncover them for myself but I also hope to uncover them for others and and be that history book but in a visual format. Yeah, I hope I've answered you. I think we're both rampilas. Finally, the last question, I promise, because you're going to have two questions here. I get the sense that this is something that it's really, it feels almost necessary in your work. There's always at some point, some actions that speak to this work of attempting to repair or to resolve or to perhaps restore some form of order, some stability. And I'm curious about why you feel that work is necessary, but also how you think about which characters in the work are the ones to then engage in this work. In, in between us for example like you mentioned the two other characters kind of undergo transformations, but then this character who's dressed as a maid. What do you mean is this state of you know always be gone is cleaning up and taking up and then we have in fracture rose coming in and then trying to sort of tidy up or trying to repair these vessels and trying to you know, fix essentially what the entity has come in and even if cast pile as well as this, you know, this breaking down of the house but then there's also this kind of commemoration and honoring of particular actions in history that were kind of trying to address certain injustices. Yeah, why is that work necessary for you and how do you think about the characters. Yeah, I wish I knew. It's like, there's a really wonderful saying I read in one of Whit boy's letters with boy was. You know who he is I've done the presentation so he has a really nice sentence so he's I love him because he was documenting and writing a lot he wrote a lot of letters to German generals and British generals and other and there's actually a book that exists of his letters that you can find in Namibia. And there's the same he has carrying the sun on your back. And I really like that saying, because I wonder for myself whether it is like the body is strong enough to carry the sun, or if the sun is so hot it's a burden. And that's how I feel in my practice like I switch between those two, because I don't actually have the answer as to why I've. It's like, I'm called upon to do this kind of work. It's very frustrating sometimes and then also for like Whit boys, the I've heard many things about you. Whit boy is the daughter that I was very connected to so she was, she was, Whit boy was headhunted by the British and the Germans, and one of the times when he escaped his daughter was actually murdered she was kind of running with him. And they have a log of this and they don't know whether she was between the ages of 17 and 19. And I was reading that she kind of cursed the person who was who murdered her basically, and said you know you will regret what you're doing in a nutshell I don't have to quote with me in my head. And you know you'll be cursed and you need to go back to your own land and my father will basically like come down on you like a lion, you know. And I thought for a teenager and that time of being exposed to gunpowder for the first time is a massively powerful position for her to have had the courage to do that. So for the walk, I kind of sought out her energy to do the performative element of I've heard many things about you. And when I was first starting the project and I had the kind of concept in my mind. Yeah, I leave it at that. Yeah, so there's, there's a, I'm not alone. I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm not alone in the in the work and I'm not alone in the. Yeah, I'm not alone in the work and I don't feel alone in that work. Yeah. Thank you. Just before we wrap up, let me ask some questions that we have for the audience. First of all, is what is what what has been particularly informative for you in practice is a one one can be. I'll say it again I was concentrating on the question sorry. Is there one work that is there one work that you can pinpoint that you can consider particularly formative practice. Yeah, there's, well there's two major ones one is called tortoise atom, which I did in 2002 in Chicago which was actually my like graduating piece. And it was a significant because it was it's connected to the death of my mother my mother suffered from cancer she was diagnosed at the age when I was eight. She died when I was 22. So a large scale of my formative years were kind of surrounded by. How do you say her illness and this kind of fear of the terminalness of cancer. And she had actually died when I was in my last year at university and tortoise autumn is kind of my first installation actually. Funnily enough, it had projections that were moving and sculptural elements and fabric burlap on the on the wall, and the sound, a rasping sound of breathing that I experienced when I was an ICU with her then her neighbor was having a hard time breathing. So I would think that's like a, that was the first kind of installation with no performative element but all the other elements of my installation practice were already present there. Stemming from the autobiographical. So like auto historian term coined by Gloria Alzolda was very useful term for me because I was some years ago consistently struggling in the kind of science and academic circles to explain process and and practice and art and validated without being validated. And so I had to build a language around those kinds of presentations and auto historian is a very useful term, because it allowed me in an academic sense to to be like yeah this is my process it stems from from an from an autobiographical standpoint. And then the other one is cruising utopia by Jose Munoz, which is actually utilized in the queer community, but I've kind of adopted that for myself as well because it's this allowance to explore and to follow threads and routes you're not so sure where it's going and not necessarily starting with a clear frame. And then I would say the other work is the one I mentioned earlier which is woman for lamb dance and me. And I think those two permitted me to now make works that are more removed from the autobiographical still rooted in there but not so direct. I just wanted to tell Celia it's fair flesh don't I write it down for you but I'm bad at spelling. I'll write it in the chat while you ask the next question. Another question is what, what is the origin of the name. Yeah, super. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Casper in in German is the Casper the Joker, the trickster the trickster character is nothing new it's like in loads of cultures all over the world. And then Paula. Okay, so while I was doing the, the beginning research in 2018 and 19 of this body of work. I was very okay so Paula in case what he is like they're like just there, visibly there but not like very close to you. And I was, I then created my own shang so I've got a backtrack shang is basically a language that exists in Kenya where you can very define who was born when and where, which kind of part of the city you grew up in, depending on your shang you can tell like oh they're from this place or they're from that place or they're really old, that happens to me, or they're really young there's like some shang like now that I don't understand because it's like completely different, it keeps changing. It's a mix of kiss for hilly and English and sometimes kick who you what do you is it does kick where you come into shang as well. It's a lot of sort of like many of the major language that I spoke in the urban centers. Exactly. So I think it's a super interesting tool. It's also a tool for youngsters that was like brought about because youngsters wanted to kind of speak freely for themselves. In a society where that's not always like promoted or possible. It's kind of like also a resistance in a sense I like that a lot. And so I created my own shang out of Pala, as in the English of there, like, you get it like the. So that's how the word cast Pala came about for the character. And let me write this for flesh. I'm terrible sorry. I think that's the right spelling. I hope so. Another question. What do you think is important to national identity, if at all. Oh, God. Yeah, no, I think it's a total illusion. Human beings have been moving and migrating and cross pollinating for eons like since inception. I think the ideas of nationalism came around with the ideas of borders. And it's, yeah. Yeah, I'm, I'm, I, I, I like multiplicity and I guess, sorry, just to backtrack with the cast Pala creolization with shang and whatnot I was looking a lot at glissand. And with, I was also reading a Stuart Hall and his conversation about multitude they both talk about that actually, and this power in the multiplicity, and that you don't lose yourself in in the in the multiple necessarily. So, I think it's an illusion that we've been conditioned to I think this problematics with borders and identity and which place you belong to or don't belong to which country you can access and you can't access is, is a system. And I'm not so interested I think the reference to nationalism in my, in my presentation was just in the in 2010, the Kenyan government had moved into this desire to find a national dress which I don't think ever succeeded. I don't know if you remember it didn't like pass through and I think it started because we had the violence in 207 and eight that then the government's response was this national dress kind of response but like we're 42 different tribes like there's not one it's it's instead of really addressing the issues and targeting educational platforms and celebrating our multitude. It was like oh no let's let's let's find one national thing so we don't have this issue again or instead of resolving the real problem which started with our independence and land not being correctly redistributed from colonial time. You know, that's not the case or even the fact that a lot of, we don't realize that a lot of women were in control of land pre colonial time that's like, I found a one sentence in like one book by chance about this you know. So, yeah, I'm, yeah, anyhow, I think I've answered the question. Um, um, one last question. Um, and I think these two questions kind of fold into each other. Um, what are the art forms of media to draw a racial form, following that has science or medicine at an influence in your practice. Good question. Um, yeah so the science bit yalla yalla they always they always want to use art as a tool to communicate, which is quite frustrating. It's understandable because of our lack of our education system globally is flawed because we're compartmentalizing subjects and actually you know there's a heck of a lot of chemistry and physics and mathematics in the art practice. If I was a horrible student in high school. I didn't go to university but I suffered in primary school in high school, but um, you know, my and my parents were like oh do biology you know just to get your, your, your mark or whatever and it was like oh because you can draw some plants and, and actually if I had done chemistry it would have served me well much better with with with ceramics than right so there's this kind of, we don't have this. This is an education of subjects and our education system was built on like an industrial idea and a factory format which is being challenged and worked on but it's a very slow changing. Industry, you know. And so science yeah so there's a there's a struggle because there's always this expectation of art being a tool to communicate somebody's data, or this misunderstanding fundamental misunderstanding. There's very beautiful moments when you get into the psychology or the philosophy that I've had a couple of times with individuals who are like coming from that field, where we can. There's definitely deep connectivity when we get into the philosophical philosophical sphere of like mathematics or, or science and that really does relate and resonate very much in both disciplines. What was the other part of that question. Are there any, apart from theater, are there other forms. Oh yeah. So, lots of photography for sure. I tend to use photography as a tool to sketch but I also use it as a tool to create visual moving image imagery. What else I draw a lot use ceramics a lot. The medium is really guided by the research. So, from the research is the research will start to dictate what material can translate the research component well. So that's why there's quite a vast ray. And what I think happens repeatedly in terms of materials is mirror usage of mirror usage of Cecil and usage of ceramics and photography, but my practice is very broad. Don has been in the studio he knows that has to do with show that's coming up he knows that this this elements are several. But I would say photography ceramics and textile work. I think, let me just check one more time to get any questions. Yeah, Amani is in Kiswahili and it wasn't connected to the research lab in Tanzania. Right, then I think that's all from me. Yes, thank you so much for this wonderful conversation for giving us you know, inviting us into your work and your thoughts. It's always a pleasure to talk about the work and continue to learn about how it relates to the greater world. Thank you very much to Elspets for making this touch and to the center of Africa as well for making this possible. I'm just trying to unmute myself. Thank you very both of you from the bottom of my heart actually it was just a very inspiring and generous present presentation and then discussion I think we covered a lot of ground. It's a look forward to the exhibition that you'll have it and later it marches I believe it's opening. 23. There will be future talks. In fact one tomorrow with Sokari Douglas camp at the at the V&A that's an in person as far as I understand. Joy Gregory is coming up at so as the 24th and that's online if you wish to see her. She has worked in Kenya on a residency in the past. And the final program so far is with Hassan Musa and Michael Harmitage that will be both in person and online at the V&A in 17th of March. But thank you so much I'm really pleased to have been been with you tonight. And everyone else. Thank you. Thank you so much.