 Welcome. I'm Katherine Morris. I'm the Sackler Family Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Start, and I'm thrilled to welcome you all here this evening for our amazing panel discussion. I'm going to ask you to please silence electronic devices. That would be helpful. I'm just going to introduce our speakers and invite them to join us on stage and then we'll get started. So, first, Alexis O. K. O. joined the New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. She was working on a book about people standing up to extremism in Africa and is a fellow at the New America Foundation. She has worked in New York, Mexico, Nigeria, and Uganda. She was a 2012 fellow at the Alicia Patterson Foundation reporting on gay rights in Africa and a 2012 fellow at the International Reporting Project at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. She is writing about sectarian violence in central and northern Nigeria. She has previously contributed to the New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg's Business Week, and the Financial Times. And now you're calling. She's a visual activist whose art makes visible the Black and Lesbian and transgendered communities in South Africa. She is the founder of the Peer Focused and Peer Run Media Network in Kenyeso. Mujole was won numerous awards, including the Ryerson Alumni Achievement Award in 2015, the Define Prize for an emerging artist at the 2013 Cardigan International, our Prince Claus Award in 2013, and the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expiration Art Award also in 2013. Her work is on view through November 8th here on the fourth floor of the museum and exhibition entitled Zanelli Mujole, Ysibonello, Evidence. The exhibition features 60 photographs from Mujole's celebrated Faces and Faces project, which New Yorker critic Andrea Scott called incandescent. A new exhibition debuting tomorrow, a series of self-portraits, opens in Yankee, Richardson Valley, and Chelsea. Finyaranda Wenene is a Kenyan author while ensuring cultural worker. He is the founding editor of one of Africa's leading literary institutions, Pani. His essay, How to Write Back Africa, attracted wide attention globally, and his critically acclaimed memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place, has been translated into several languages. He has been a Sterling Brown Fellow at Williams College in Massachusetts, and a Landon Fellow and a visiting writer at Union College, New York. Until 2012, he was the director of the Chinoah Chave Center for African Writers and Artists at Warren College. In 2014, he came out publicly and was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Please help me welcome any more panelists. Thank you. Thank you everyone for coming. I think to start the conversation, I wanted to ask both Finyaranda and Zanelli if they could describe their work, specifically their most recent projects. Finyaranda, of course, the work here at the museum and her self-portraits opening tomorrow, and how that work has been received both in their home countries of Kenya and South Africa, how that work has been received abroad and the differences, and how they think their work has, or what role their work has played in the conversations in their home countries concerning LGBT rights. Good evening. In terms of reception here, we are honored to be here, and I'm excited that one got to showcase our photographers at Group A Museum. Thank you so much for the best early session. Home is where my heart is, and home is where my heart heads. Reception from the people who are featured in the work, I'm happy, because, for one, I get to work with a lot of young stars and a lot of good, very supportive activists like Finyaranda Soldat who's in the audience tonight. And a lot of friends have been good to me in so many ways, and the people's self-reception differs because they're the government and the people and the activists and the artists. So for me personally, I could say that I'm indebted to so many individuals, especially the participants in my work who made this project possible. So without them, there is no me. Without them, there's not even reception, you know. So I'm really grateful to those who made it, who trusted me, who made sure that they agreed to be in the work. And risking their lives, of course, and also trusting and believing in the importance of visual activism and care. I had a home in and tried to tackle the two things, and at some point, I was kind of done. Not with here, but with being a home. And about three days after I landed, a young friend would be sitting in my house, and I almost started to hear this, and of course, died. Oh, he died two days before I arrived. So about three days later, I had to bury him. He was 23 years old. We love the young man. And happy to have a lot in particular with family since he was eight. We did the Zoom, we met, I'd go on a trip, because someone just tried to show me a project that I was doing, and we just had it off, and became very tight. And at some point, he called me up, and he was like, I want to, I need to do the Zoom for whatever reasons. And that is where I lived. And so, those all these long process, so it goes back to my house, and then it comes back to America. So we were working on the form of texting, then it went quiet, and it disappeared. And then when, at some point, people were calling, and saying, where is he? He found his brother, and he told us he had total cancer, all these things for him. And eventually a close friend, or a close friend, found him at his parents' place, because it was not a thought project. And he died three days later. And he died of AIDS. And some of the work he was doing, he was part of a sector of the group, which were helping encourage people to learn different things, and so on and so forth. For me, that political moment was very important, because you know these things in your head, but there's no way for you to live a life of dignity in a way that what you do is criminalised. Like it infects every part of your body, your interactions. Every political part of you, every personal part of you is affected. So now when all these ideas that you go and see something that looks like a duty-to-project, that people are learning awareness, you know, there's all these things, and it seems very beautiful. You see what I mean? It just became impossible to say. It took a while because arriving home was difficult in terms of re-adapting, my dad was dead, all this things going on. But I knew by that time that I had figured out how to do one of your personal words in words. And I kind of understood that if I was going to have a new contract for coming back home, this thing would just be right, right, right, right, I was not enough, and that sitting there as a secret gay helped nobody, at least myself, right? So because you're already in your class and among other fellow artists everybody knows, but nobody will say that, like nobody will come and say that, right? So yeah, that's my business. Well, something that comes up with both of your work is the idea of visual activism, whether in literature or photography. But there's a reason why many African LGBT artists, writers find their support in the US or Europe, because there's not that kind of space on the continent. But what are your thoughts on how your work, work of other LGBT artists and writers, can open up spaces on the continent, in your home countries, and further a conversation that is still in its early stages. I mean, South Africa, you know, it's enshrined in the constitution, but on the ground it's very different in Kenya from very early stages. How are the qualities? I don't know, you know those movies. Cover me in the way through. And then you run forward and then it clears the space, right? So I'm a bit of a clumsy person, so like I'm like, you tell me how to get directly from A to B, usually I get lost. So what you have to do sometimes is you're like, okay, I'm not sure, but let me throw the landline clear for you. Let's see the way. And then I can find my way and make a list of the ones. This is my point. So I see the landline. We have something through the limits, right? So what you see now, in a thing like that what happens, you may enter a meaningful conversation, but certainly it means it's a really available where you Skype to me, right? Yeah. And you're like, I want you to come in one of these kids that have been discharged. Right. So in your mind, I find a way to get out of it. And I'll tell you why specifically, right? So I'm like, do you think there's an anthology about queer things in our mind? I didn't understand yet what it means to do an anthology of queer things, because the rest, as I know, it's not so much that they absorb, but there's a certain kind of aspiration on this, it's only English, it's all happening. It's a hypothesis. Now I found the bomb. That's what a satisfying thing to imagine. And all people are calling you but also say, what can you do? What can I do? Now, this one, it's sort of like a memoir, the idea of a memoir, you know, like going to a community of queer, the whole different LGBTQ, young people, and this is a question of, not more than the question of the self-expression, to not figure out how, not for me to answer, because I'm going there to have a gym, but not to have a diet, there's something I need to know. So we learn something together. Right. So now that's one thing that I'm going to bracket inside that space. In terms of what do you have to do for the, like you have to completely keep in touch with everything that's going on in the public and in the personal that many ways are possible, you have to find ways of making different kinds of alliances, some are likely. Suggest. Okay. So for me, for example, there are very clear things that I had to say to myself at the beginning. I didn't want to enter, to use this to enter Western family games. I really did not, let it just be clear. And I had to tell myself, you know, like not because I can't resist it, but because I know I've been a certain kind of darling in my past, I know what is going, you know, you have some pictures coming. So when I came out, I was like, go to the text of the 12 different blogs, see where it goes. I knew who was going to call it, the other people who called it. Can I really go and go, my, do you see who I am? Right. So I saw him suffering, he was a nurse. Right. Then what had happened, I had a conversation with a realist, he will make a new story in our lives, continue to do. And he said, just come to my house and put a camera in the middle of the house. And then we see. Because to edit it, to make a speech, I couldn't figure out. So if they had footage, broke it into six parts, put it on YouTube. And then put it on the floor. For a week. So I felt that at least in the circumstances, within that category, up to 100,000 people, majority of them African, wherever they are, were entering some kind of conversation. I didn't want to do that comment. So I just, you know. And then from there, then one by one start to accept it. But at least feeling a little bit of my own house. So I haven't, there are many proposals to see. But I wanted to know that I can sit in my room, where it's not really going to be. And I can find software to thrive and survive and be free to be, be free to dress, be free to be, because myself as I can. So that freedom came not when I was in America and New York, but I threw the bomb for it at home, right? And then now when that bomb comes, all the interesting things that should clear and make my way to help me see my way fast. That's really where I am. And Zanelli, I mean, you started as an activist, activist along while you were photographing. So it's been a joint endeavor? When I started more than 10 years ago, I really did not get any support from those NGOs abroad who were looking specifically at programming Africa and the LGBTI advocacy work. I think maybe it was difficult and people did not understand how visual activism could speak to advocacy work. And yet at the same time, everything that we do as LGBTI activists is visual. It could either be from the placards that we hold and the puppets that we create to advocate for our rights, et cetera, et cetera. This morning, my friend Funera reminded me that when nobody was documenting, I documented that's how many people remembered me who know me for a long time. And I was like this man passing who was like always with a camera. And at that time, I never even imagined being shown in a space like this one, you know? So I reminded her that we were together at the Deben Welter Games places and conference in Deben that took place in 2001. And that's my friend that I've been with for so many years that even though I don't see her like everyday but I get to share the space and show her this exhibition here. And as the time went on, people kind of like started listening. And honestly, I have to declare tonight that if it wasn't for the Stevenson Gallery that took risk with me and showcased my work at the gallery in Cape Town, I don't think that my work would have been distributed as much as now. Because the active spaces that are there really did not see how this thing see fits or how it fits within the agenda of the LGBTIs. For me, I didn't want to limit my space or my work into only active spaces in as much as I had in fight as a visual activist. First off, I had to call myself a something because I didn't want people to limit my work into like visual art. So I had to connect to it visual, activist, then to be a visual artist. So to say I'm speaking on a different agenda, on a specific agenda hand, which spoke to the need for people to be visible, to be heard, to be understood, to be historicized in different ways that other countries have done it before. The funding that is allocated for LGBTI funding is not looking at visual activism until recently. And like after Brooklyn Museum, there are a lot of interesting stuff people don't want to publish me now. And because I'm here, I become what I'm in here. Yeah, so painfully. But to say that the LGBTI funding that we receive, there's organizational like, do you have the experience where HIV positive? And also there's a lot of buzz and excitement. How many of the experience in our work who are hate crime survivors who have been raped? It's painful to talk about curative value. But then I needed to create work that no beyond just violence, which is why when you see the show here, you see the people from my province who, we have the marriage in South Africa, we have civil union, which is problematic as in the US, you know? So that's why I had to juxtaposition between love and loss. That looks at, yes, we do have hate crime specifically. And we have people who are getting married, who are in partnerships, or who are in different kind of relationships and that need to be acknowledged. And also, I needed to use my language, which is why this show is called It's Morning. And I'm happy that I have my friends from there been here that I really, I don't even respect their work. Time they're not in my pool with new friends that I just met in Tandy Hill. This guy is doing an amazing work. So words, media, visuals, all these things are connected. So to be in the space that is American, where English is the spoken language, coming on board with my Zulu name, which is one name, you see one name, you know? Which means evidence. I just wanted to bear and share with the people that besides being queer, we need to speak our languages. We want to undo all these terminologies that says that it's an African for us to be lesbian, or gay, bisexual, and transgender people. We not even reach their friend. So I needed to make sure that in as much as whoever that was trying to help me, I have my own personal agenda at hand, which spoke to the people that I work with, you know? And whoever I do not understand, I have young people who do research and also help me to understand some things where I get wrong, you know? So she's also impacted in the faces. So it's so unfortunate that not many countries in Africa when you have daring visual activists, especially at the heights of these anti-homosexuality bills, et cetera, et cetera. But I know for sure that all those people in those spaces, they need to have their work shown at places like this. And also at museums in Africa without places like that. Right. And I think what's so extraordinary about both of your work is that, as you said, it shows the lightness of life, that there's not all murder and rape and oppression, that there's love and intimacy and joy. And I think that as we were talking about earlier, it's important, when you're talking about LGBT rights in Africa, to talk about the sort of longer well-being of LGBT Africans. There's an emphasis right now on LGBT rights. But what does that mean in the context of what's happening on the continent? What does that mean in terms of education and how people social and health and welfare for LGBT Africans? So what are your thoughts on, I guess, the way that in Kenya and in South Africa, leaders have both said that gay rights is not a pressing concern. This is not something that is of value to their constituencies. When it's obviously that's opposite on the ground, just Kenyatta said that recently in Kenya. Let me say something. First thing, it's now 56th year. In sort of, you know, there's no one African. But then all Africans, we all colonized, or certainly the map was made in one meeting. And much of, I think, what, and that is a very important thing for our generation in general, is how that map must be fitted. Right? I'll put it like this. So when you see Kenyans are Kenyans to Kenyans, I'm not going to speak about it, because he's the last person to explain to you all the way. You see, it's possible to construct yourself as a middle-class, educated African who went to the school, and that school, and that school, and then you see Kenyans, saying Kenyans, because that's not English, Kenyans, right? Or Spanish, Kenyans, it's the Kenyans or that constitution for them. It's the Kenyans of those who just want to be colonized even for others, as well as the LGBT people, and you understand. So for example, for me, the test of our conversation is what happens when you come to the Republic without proof of the interest, if you understand. And you're like, I'll put it out here. I don't have the national newspaper to legitimize or to frame it. Just to see it, because how then does it do it? So I'll tell you this. There are many threats that exist for a gay person of any kind, a queer person of any kind, and me and not me. There's some introduction I have because I was told before, all of that. But I say this, I have everything, and it's not because people feel it. But there's a certain, there is still that constitution that guarantees those rights that Kenyans are thoughtful, still also believes that there are things that they choose not to understand. But they don't know, so there's this question about who to what human space, or what human space is. So for example, to think about that in the context of how for example, can we start to have a conversation about the queer in our languages that is not just a national language, which then you're having an issue to the state. How do we start to do that? And how do we start to do that in a structured way that's not a HIV campaign? Me now, I'll be honest and say, like to come to the understanding already, everything about being black is really about the fact that you're supposed to be a spiritual body. And so the profession that you're supposed to be is bias, African gender bias. How are we supposed to be in the bias? Is it machine and it's got bias or what are bias? So money comes for fixing biases and everybody comes to live because of fixing biases because you're scared that the bias will jump from Congo to New York. So then you're like, let's bring them to the problem, right? Now this is what it's going for, right? So, but the idea that a person never sees themselves as a body, it's a spirit. It's not even just about a spiritual idea. That one comes far down the line of a certain kind of mind, how a metaphysical person is believed in us, right? And to shift that thing is the biggest politics we have to do is to turn that thing completely back upside down and find a real person again. It's a big deal, right? And so these are the journeys that one sets out. For me to be a gay man in Kenya is now set in a journey to find my own language as an African to be gay. And it means that I'm forced into taking myself or myself into alliances that take me further along that journey. So being queer is a colonizing, a sort of the colonizing thing. And it's a journey that one sets out. Now we're talking about, so I don't see that much. There's a very practical difference. That's all my work, this is my work and this is my work. Those words when they are written, there's spiritual things going on. I know me, you know, there are things about a broken metaphysics going on and coming to make that thing happen. What the thing that separates you is still the same thing that's how you put air in your mouth, you know, against other proteins, different content, because they have to jump into either the glory of the nationalistic definition of themselves, which never asks about the spirit. My constitution, the kind of constitution, which is a political constitution, we have this is my constitution. And then it says, English is official, because what he is, national and then there it happens. Like, now, just when you ask about the question of meaning, like why it's so important for something to be named, so that you make space for it to defend it and make offence, right? That thing never put up that sort of a matter that you name while people decided to call on themselves, that's not the essence. So those people end up saying, yours is named, or I have to name you, and I come inside you to fight a battle because my name is not to be in that place, it's just not you. So at the level of being clear, all these things, there's no way to sort of see the time limit, and there's no way for yourself not to put yourself in a position where you have to do that. Right, and it's interesting that you compare it, finding your identity as an African man as decolonization, because in a lot of African countries, laws against homosexuality were introduced by British, other European colonelists in their penal codes. So do you identify with this process of decolonization, finding your identity as a South African? We're looking for a name. Yeah, naming yourself, basically. Naming is very important in many ways. I'll say, unlike many other countries, South Africa is 11 official languages that are organized by a little bit. And Zulu, which is my first language, happened to be the most spoken language. And they told me that English is the seven spoken language, half is that. So if you want to make sense, you could either use your own traditional codes, like for us as Zulu people, we use the body that means all those elements that defines our being in space. And I'm so proud to say, with its own challenges and all, but you could easily identify with the Zulu, yes, the tribe at home. So I think that naming comes a long way. And talking about decolonizing these and that, first of all, we need to make sure that our people, actually if they are black people, get the best education as much as possible. Because without education without skills, it would be difficult to defend yourself. In most people's minds, we think that when you speak English, that's the only way that you could be understood. And if you can't pronounce procrastination when you're done, we have our own languages. We have, I saw it even difficult to pronounce, that Jess was finding it difficult just to say so nyam, but it's okay, babe, it's okay. Yeah, that's my language. Yeah, so the decolonization comes with us being equipped with information and knowledge and before the degrees, because degrees also are level. And it means that by finding this language and all these same knowledges that speaks to us as the black people in any space, we'll be hitting the right call. Because right now we have to depend on our sources in order to be respected, to be recognized. And it means that for you to understand a certain kind of gender or complex genders, space and theories, like the Pesos is Michel Foucault on the history of homosexuality. Then another Pesos will be... You're doing it by yourself. So in my space I'm thinking that being a Vanda and a lot of the many Africans who are growing up today, they become our theorists. If only we as Africans and people of color in different spaces, because now we're dealing with migration, everything is mixed, which is okay. It means that we need to work together and recognize each other before we expect other people to recognize us. It means that there's a need for all the LGBTQI organizations and allies and service providers who are providing service to the population or people in our spaces to come together and join forces and fight any kind of violence that would be, because if we do not listen to each other, if we do not share information, if we do not work together, it is for people to come in between us. So that's major for me. So togetherness means a soul in a real sense is the key. And also to undo the hierarchies that exist within the African nations. Because if Nyavan comes on board as the best Canadian gay man, and I have to be the other South African lesbian, we're not going anywhere. Which is why I requested to have this conversation with him specifically because we had to do this as Africans. And I'm not saying we're presenting Africa, we're not presenting Africa. Africa is the continent. There's a nice bloke called Africa is a country because we could always miss it, especially those who have not been to Africa. So the need for miscommunications, the need for togetherness, the need for us working together, and we try to come up with our strategies in which we could break through and fight all sort of phobias. So togetherness would be the key. But mainly education for LGBTI individuals is important. And skills development, because some of us don't even know how to write proposals, therefore it's easy to be rejected when you try your luck to apply for funding. Even if there's heavy genie true, true, coming with you, it means there's something going on there with you guys. But for us, I don't know how many of us in this experience would do that and sit down and one-speak and deal with the content that can speak with large population, you know? Yeah. I'm curious about your personal experiences. Benye, you said that you threw a bomb and now you're kind of dealing with the mess. I noticed on Facebook that kind of in recent months, you will have Facebook friends who maybe say something derogatory about gays and then you'll de-friend them and you'll say, I've de-friended this person and this is why. Is this something? Where does that come from? No, client. I mean, for me, you deserve the very personal clients that you have to do, you know? And there are all these, you know, because what happens is your world's combined. So you have friends who are, I don't know, secretly will be there in different places on Facebook that you look for, and then you're friends or buddy writers and then they're saying, oh, I was just going to put a couple thousand pages into that about shop, but I knew one of them is this. And then now somehow you forget people from your timeline. You're posting shit about gays and gays, right? And somehow you're trying to say something insanely dehumanizing or just to say king, because of course, you know, it's a death penalty, yes? So when you're saying it casually, you're invoking. But what you're trying to do is, for example, you have an editor in the field, right? You have a collection of poetry, yes? But somehow you have, you are saying that you have, is that an Africa? Is that an Africa? Is that an Africa? In Nigeria, you said you want to get married, right? I don't know an activist political private who is defending the right to get married in Nigeria. You're trying to defend the right to get married, right? So you're pretending like there's a fake argument, but you belong to the edit who think we might be who occupy Nigeria on that shit. I'll leave you up there. So then your friends come and I say, I don't know what you're doing, I'm like, well, you have to do that. The thing has to be clear that you know where the building and end of my map of my Thailand is. You're quite free. You're in your family, you're going to be what you are. And I'm quite free to tell you that you're not going to see shit all my timeline and you're going to be named all my timeline. Now, sometimes it's dramatic. Sometimes, you know, there are all the problems, but there's occasional moments where it's impactful. So I can see this from my very chronic characters. So there's somebody who's a very good journalist, a very good journalist, you can, who has a moment for a long time, who's my friend, many of my friends don't really know each other, but somebody who commands very senior editorial power in the country with family here. And she puts the story, right, on her book, just imagine just what happened. We went to Java to have coffee with our daughters, and then these two guys were sitting in the corner looking at each other like I, sitting next to us. Can you imagine that is happening, like she says? And she's like, we were so concerned for our daughters, we paid the bill before we came and we left. So I'm just reporting what's happened now, right? So I had seen that thing. I had seen half of it. Then I was like, I can't be like too busy, so I'm first going to try to run away from it, do whatever I can to do what I was doing. Then I was like, so I was like, actually you know what? Because this one will regulate, yeah, it will take effort for it to regulate. So I'm just going to repost it, and then I'm going to explain exactly now, not just what you mean, I'm going to explain it, not if I don't want to give an excuse for it, but to say there's no part of my life and anyone who wants my approval that you're part of. Because what happens is that different groups, media people, journalists people, opinion makers people, now have to enter that decision to go to our comments page and say, it's so terrible what you need to do. And that's clear. And then you have to get in front of me. So that means of course, you're like girls and friends. Right. And that was very simple. Yeah. But it's not a big deal. These are just daily management processes. You know, it's not like if you can't make the job, there's work to do that, don't work. Right, right. It's just. Okay. Right, right. Yeah. Susanelle, do you relate at all? No, not at all. Friending, but to the like personal house planning or your personal experiences having this work out in South Africa, internationally. And then dealing with not reception just from your own community, but perhaps from people who are not as sympathetic. Oh no, I have traumas from other activists who never thought that one day I'll be here to declare the way we're bashing each other as family and friends. I always like to make examples that are immediate. I shoot for mega. I'm interested in for mega because for mega's work. And then another activist goes to for mega and say, oh, why don't you think of yourself being in the rest of the class? She's making money out of you. And for mega then has to respond. So this is a person who's on Facebook with all the activists and we all fighting for the same cause. Whether someone is making money or not, the fact that they are going to do the runs, they work through the same people it has, you know. Except that my activism is visually different than the black heart out of trust, of course, because I've been there before. So then in that way, I'm depending on for mega to say that one person of heart is because now people think like they're becoming too prominent now. And then others who are so against video activism or need big time, they try to do it even more, you know. And it just helps, you know. The big seven from the people that you trust and most of that believe in the same cause, that are pushing the same edge to Iraq's telling their backs on you when you need them most. Not even the strangers in a straight woman that are friends with me about Facebook. For me, like talking to the people that are being, you know where I come from. You really know where I come from. I haven't even done much and just producing images is so expensive. Having just a show is even super expensive. Moving and moving to different places, it's super, you know what I'm saying. Then if you don't get an opportunity to be shown or having spaces to be in any space, then it becomes difficult. But when your own people, they get up against you. That's the most painful experience ever. So I'm at a point where I cannot afford to be delayed. I'm in a machine. I want to reach a certain age to have publications like any other great man in photographic history. You know, I'm in a machine thinking about 27 days and that's where two publications are. By the time the sisters and brothers are still gaining up on some clip kind of machine and it's even like I can with anybody in my family. But it's how you finish your agenda and your conspiracies and stuff. I'll be so done and I'll be opening another show. So I'm at a point in my life where I'm working. This is work, it's painful work. I need to wake up at home in my own bed. I need to make love to my woman and she's far away from me. I can't because I have to work for many other LGBTIs people to be respected and be cared to be seen as spaces that were not meant to be for us in possible spaces. To have friends, I mean like now I'm chasing my friends. I have one friend that I wake up with. I sleep with this young staff here. Who's like my son, my daughter. Then I have my friend that I've known for ever also never and few other individuals and honestly to say who are friends, what's not and so on. And my family then becomes my, the guy that I work with, you know, because it's safer in that way we know that we are working, we are all working. We have maybe that's an interest or not. But for me to say, how do we save life as visual artists and activists? Who are really our friends? Who are we safe to have conversations that could build us? Who are they? Some of them are not really LGBTI people. They are straight women who are, you know, who believe in the cause even though they are not like the 24-7, they won't be with you at the fight match, et cetera. But who are they spiritually and emotionally, you know. Sometimes it's just really painful when you are divorced by your own. When you really want to cry out loud, you know that if I could just die now, people may not be interested in writing or be sure that they don't even know what the heck, what do you like, you know? What I hope is, et cetera, et cetera, except just getting a camera. So I think as activists and visual people and all the like, we need that kind of emotional support because you spoke about that one being of the activists. There is none. I know that if anything could happen to me now, that one could live on. But sometimes there's just many people to have conversations with, not that they're a priest, not that they're a psychiatrist, not that they're a psychologist. Just people, you know, and not to have a conversation with me about the LGBT, but about the well-being and in a way that I proceed with me about that, there's something that is called a cyst in my breast. It hurts, it's painful, and I'm worried that one day I wake up maybe with something. So I need to feel safe in that way. We're being about to say, oh, what is, let me check. Luckily, the internet is so fast here. So there's a way you can know what I'm talking about. Yeah, so there's so much going on. And this is the first time that I talk about this, because it hurts me. Yeah, because I had to talk about this. But it certainly happens a lot with the LGBT, and unfortunately, yeah. And in that way, it's safer to be with my street friends who don't even know what's going on. But it's cool to know that I'm just a girl, and I like it. Yeah. So, I'm interested to hear both of your thoughts on each other's work, and what you think are the strengths of each other's mediums. All right, I'll talk slowly. Yeah. Benia, Vanda. I hate you, South Africa. I grew up there. I was 19, confused, kind of arrogant in the wrong way. And I lived in Montana. I was a student there. After living in middle class, Uganda, in Montana, I ended up in Ipulawes. And I was adopted in Ipulawes. Then it disappeared in P.E., in the mother of the year, for the whole day. So, a certain secret half of this was 1991, from 1991 to the beginning of 1994, like I was looking through this glass of a place that wasn't yet alive. Everyone knows it's alive. It's alive because there's a place there for it. This is the place that I'm going to go, right? It's everywhere. There's no place. There's no oxygen anywhere. Coming from Kenya seems like this. So, everybody say, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay. I'm by your control. No, that doesn't necessarily mean Kenya. Not that there wasn't any politics, but you felt, if you throw a match, it wouldn't be the right, you understand? It changed you, right? And so, this is the, what things are there to work? Tell me, I'm trying to correct you a little bit right now. Well, since I arrived here 20 years later, it was both familiar and completely magical, again. The first time I saw the news log was in Cape Town, when you were sitting here. I had a meeting, I think that's the first time I've heard of that conference, please, anyway. No, not in this class. Open society. Open society. And I was still in the lobby when you were sitting here. We had seen photos and things and I never seen it in a physical way, which was really interesting to think about. And I had seen it around in these videos, which said it had an open deal, I had set up things, timing was finished, she had everything I said. I just thought, I don't remember that you're putting it up, but I have to ask you, if it's physical or you're just putting it up, but don't image it, image it. And I caught the view of them there in Cape Town. And I felt homesick, in love, this was, this was not, I feel that I'm probably wearing but very familiar, very sentimental, but also feeling the sense of power that there's somewhere still underneath this South African thing that has to puncture through for South Africa, not just LGBTQ to find their place in the South. But really that, for me, her work is that one continuous changing image that completely always says that thing and that it will not end. But at the same time, it's like, you cannot be forgotten to remember the simple human best over the fact that that's never going to end. You know, that question is never going to end. And it's not going to end now, right? There's no work of literature or visual work in a very specific way that makes me feel like that all the time over and over again. Yeah. I also remember that, I was also at that open society conference and that was the first time I saw you, struck by how intimate, I'd never seen anything like it before. I think something in the media and God, yeah, that they're the citizens of a big noise that walks down the street, you remember that, okay, because I was in Kenya. So I was still trying to translate from what this is, what this is, what this is really about. I think that this is a wedding. So, there's a time I think I even thought, because I'd seen something, it was in the Facebook, but I'd seen some images and I thought, oh, this is kind of retro, it's kind of before the 90s, someone would have been waiting for it. I had to sort of put together the picture. Then I think later there was the love, there was a wedding, there was a wedding series, I don't know where it was, I wasn't able to explain it, but. And I was just like, you can't do that. You know, stop, like you feel stopped because you feel 30 miles, 30 miles is never going to be. I love myself to dream that actually somebody's doing that. Then now, I'm going to have to come out, you know, I'm going to have to do something. Yeah, so I'm going to be like this. Yeah, I'm doing it with the people who are in for the course. Again, so grateful to every single person who is in this work, because honestly, it's not for me, but it's for those who are looking at it and for those who are featuring in it, and I have been to be the messenger of God, yeah. So to say what do you think of being in this work, instead of telling me about what I think of his work, I'll tell you about what I wish to see, yeah. And I've been proposing for long, I'd like to work with him, yeah. I'd like us to put together something that will leave beyond us, you know. Because there is a need for these voices to be put together into something. So that's my dream, then what I think of what exists that being consumed by many other people, but I want to work with him. I want us to have a book that will bring all the LGBTI voices in one space, even if it's like 10, 12 life stories in which we will say that we have contributed to what our community is. It doesn't matter whether those stories are produced in Kenya or they are produced in South Africa, et cetera, et cetera. And I sometimes think that I have access to those wonderful and amazing individuals in different parts of the world. And so I can't agree and give that to me. I have to make sure that I share this information and share that with other people to touch base or to touch or hold hands or get those beautiful hats from people like him, you know. Yeah. So I guess we're finishing a project and we should be published next year before end of the day. I don't know how he's gonna pull up his strings. He knows how to beg to not ask from other people, but whatever, whenever. Whenever. So we have a publication that would come out and I'm seeing it on record. The regular half of the time. 2016. When? I don't know. I wouldn't wear out a little bit. I would be held in. Like, you know how it looks like a half hour, half an hour in South Africa. Just like that. Is that okay? Where are you? There's a thing you have to follow. I mean, the first thing, the first thing you're like, I've been thinking about an archive. Where are you going to store an archive? Where are you going to have the idea of an archive? To store all these things. So there's a repository for the memory of who we are and what we are really. And it's all over the top. So I'm like, okay, this is to the morning. I'm like, okay, yes. So first, I mean, I don't know how to explain. It has a gender element. You're like, okay, I'm just gonna sit here. In this date, you buy the record. Yes. You pay the bill and it's there. But automatically, you don't know what happens in the mess. There's a few people who come into the planet, you know. You know, so you clear the hope, you're clear if you're out or if you're into somebody else's life. So what are you gonna do now? Well, I'm thinking about it. I'm not gonna lie to you. And then it's all like, where are you going to do this? Like, the place is in the media. There's one of them is still in the media, which is also another land. That place is clear and everything. So, yeah. So we are outside to 2016. I come down to Europe, it's my first clear year. Somehow it doesn't belong to anybody, so I can jump. So I know I want to clear after this thing, 10 days. So initial 10 days. From there, I think we'll define ourselves. We'll get along for that long time, for sure. And I know we'll define ourselves in our own. For me, the thing is, let's say, one of the words I like to use for, what I become, it's like the great room that I feel is powerful to me, so you sit down. So it's like, what is made? Well, you don't know what is that. What is made? And for me, what is made is small. Income is like, you have to create literature, whatever it is, about making the public real. And you're always fighting to make space for it, right? Because more and more you're made to feel like a machine, you know, like something that is not a collection of feelings or something like that. And to do it, the first thing that is important to be human is to do it for others, right? For me, personally, and this is the truth, I was getting to myself always, and I come out and all sorts of things, but there are certain things that I've already always been. What we want to be in America, for sure, right? If there's one, if the political relationship is there, if you can do that by voting, and be made to work, and be made to work. So first, I have an answer. So people who try to interpret it to see and say, oh my God, you're there, physically speaking, you can't be made to say, the moment that I write about something like that, I'll let it go. Like there's nothing that could bother me that you could possibly be acting, and I'm very curious about this, right? And in a certain way, people know, right? So these are ways that are most of communication. And all of these things that are about being to work. So you have to make that work that is close to what you're only going to possibly be. And then, when you think you're ready, you immediately have one more to do because I'm telling you. And Zanelli, your work of self-portraits is coming out. And what prompted you, you know, Vinyas, you're very familiar with memoir, and you're also somebody turning your camera on yourself. What prompted the switch from taking photographs of people in your community to know you? Are you familiar with the social culture that self-portrait yourself there? This portrait yourself specifically, for too long I've been working with different people and I've had participants in my work and I've been making people to be part of this job. Some, they were okay with it, some, which is okay. That's me. Here I'm having conversations with myself. They say it's good to make love to you before somebody. So here I'm just connecting my feelings to me and looking at my own body as a material but also at the same time responding to racism, using my own body because I couldn't expose another person to this kind of work. I get to be far away from home, wake up sometimes with myself, sometimes wake up with some people and I've produced these images in different spaces. Like this image was taken, it's a Valerie Thomas place who happens to be my girlfriend in Paris. And I've been traveling, it meant that I'm far away from home and there were a lot of events that were taking place at home and it meant that I couldn't catch them immediately. So in 2012 I was going through some things. At the time I'd just been dubbed by someone. And I had to shoot me. I wasn't pressuring what was wrong with me. It wasn't a person's loss, I'm for sure. And then my girlfriend happened to visit me and she saved me honestly because it was her loss. But then I was extract about what was going on at the place where I was and I was on residency in Italy at Shibetella and I started shooting myself. And I didn't get it right. And there's a picture where I had the images stand like this, all to say there's a very important friend of mine who lives here in New York, her name is Elleny Settman. She's the one that fixed most of this, so I can understand the black skin better. So we had quite a number of conversations and we spoke about how this should become, et cetera, et cetera. And as I was still processing there, I was thinking, this is me as a real bone. Beautiful woman who likes skin, et cetera. I'll use this, something. So that's me there. That's not me like full time and I don't look like this 24-7 because I kind of want to exercise with it. But this is me as a family exercising, a feminine kind of position. And then the other pictures where I'm like super something. But I'm looking at the issues of blackness and how do we all might help that black, which will remember who we are and also remembering the other places in history that speaks to all bombing racism. It could either be at home in South Africa and could be here, which maybe might lead to what is called Black Lives Matter here. Same thing, Black Lives Matter in South Africa and all over the world. And also it draws back to, it draws me back to the anthropological visuals that we've seen as a bunch of people in different spaces at home and here, et cetera, et cetera. So I use my own body as a subject of us that what Berwick said in one of the text or art books. So I shot myself using every material that was accessible to me in my immediate spaces. Here I just woke up in Ellis place and I used my own belt. And the sheet that I slept with the night before and I covered myself with it. And then the picture that you see now is captured in my house when I took some break because I needed it and it's like this here. So I'm using every pieces of something and by looking at my material and looking at the black body as a material thinking of how black bodies were used for science and counting from the works of Sarah Parkman and many other cases that you know in history where black bodies were dispossessioned by different ways. And this series of work is meant or was meant to be shot on daily basis which means that these images are supposed to be 365 postcards captured everything as I wake up. In this instance, I use these beads and they are common bits that you find in Mayotte Island when you go to Wujah Beach. These are the shelf that you get. And this past few days I took an image. This one is shot in Oslo in Norway. I was in the first place and they have this ship that the ships give to cover their sofas. And I was like thinking about the Cafe Rade for those people who come from South Africa. How the black hair was used. There's another image that comes of it. It's meant to be next to it. Cafe Rade means kefir hair where black people were classified as per their hair if you want to check if the person was 100% black and was a kefir according to the upper blade regime they would push a pencil in your hair. And if the hair didn't drop, it meant that you were 100% assigned to have no opportunities away from those who were in positions of power. And then also the people where I stayed, they had those shipwrecks and I was thinking a lot of things. The gaffer hair, the black sheep in our families, how we as gay people sometimes feel like black sheep in our families. So I put myself as a black sheep in my own family not speaking for many people. So this is me just like speaking or having conversations with me and dealing with many cases of racism in different spaces but speaking from the endpoint where I come from and things that have displaced or in the mind who degraded the black clothing in any space. And if you see when you look at like photographers, this is Paris, 2014, July, I was in residence there just a day after my baby. And also for many people showing myself the rest of the search. Because for a Zoom child, the rest of them are on the search book and reading. They say, well, Kenya, we don't, you know, the kind of women. And also looking at like how photographers in time is so jailed out. So the amounts of layers that are attached to this particular city specifically here, this image was taken in Amsterdam, and now in September when I was invited to some work there and I was thinking of the connections between Netherlands and South Africa. And I have another feature that I took in London and then I was thinking of the Britain and South Africa. So I'm making all of those connections, looking at the heritage site, looking at the suffocating kind of materials that kind of like constrain or confine that black female form. And that female body becomes me as a point of departure before anyone else. But the project is also biographical, it's personal, it's painful. It's the only way you should speak out, you know, relating these two women other cases in history. Signatory questions. Also questions. Yeah, okay, we can see. Well, one thing I wanted to close on is we were talking about before the current student protests in South Africa right now. You know, I think you're right, kind of just to talk about what the president can know or what leaders in South Africa are saying about LGBT rights. If anything, the change is gonna come from the ground up. So close off, how do these protests, I mean what do you make of them? And are there any other encourages and hypocrisy to see the size of what's going on right now? In terms of education of LGBT population, or me? I guess I'm just going to give an area of the need for a specific development for the LGBTQI individuals and all of us to speak for ourselves and to be quoted and be spoken on behalf of, you know, this major. The student protest is happening now, but there are a number of 100,000 people who couldn't access that education or that classroom or universities simply because they are free. You know, we're talking of the mainstream issue where people are being displaced or they end up with an education which means that if you don't have education, if you don't have skills, therefore you won't be able to have a decent job. This has been ongoing in the league of like 1976 student uprising in South Africa. What is happening now is the new generation, you know, there is roughly a federal of the states in South Africa, otherwise can imagine from 1976 to now, a number of our people who couldn't access education, who are stuck in factories and those factories are not even there anymore because they moved to other places that means that you did it with a large population of people without environment, you know. So coming to the issue of us supporting other people's run was an effect as admitted as LGBTI people who need to think of being unionized and how to speak to this issue and how to speak about the LGBTI presence within those protests in order for us to say that we are you and also for those students in those universities to open up spaces where you have free LGBTI groups that are existing within and it mustn't be only just because we are having issues of like high school fees, therefore we're together but when it's not about school fees, people forget. We need to say, let's go away with high school fees, let's go away with home phobia, career phobia, transphobia, let's all find these struggles because they affect all of us. If not all of us, they affect the next people who are closest to us. It's mustn't be only now but there's a need for the solidarity or ongoing solidarity, you know, as LGBTI people, whether in the universities or not. Coming on board with the humanities issues, have them pet someone and take it from them. And also have good reference points, you know, to say. Let's remember those LGBTI individuals who were at the forefront of the upper playing system, disposition people, the youth of 1976 South Africa who were queer but who are not lucky enough, like we now, to speak out and say we are here. So there's a need for these joint forces to come together, find these school fees, fight everything that is adjusted at the disposition of our people. We now, the next fight will be to ensure that the education system or universities, the librarians, they have our own books written by us for the future generations. So in that way, we are there but we are not completely there yet. We need the media to have our own women, like Mopole, Tandira and them, to speak out and say, to speak on ministry issues, also at the same time, to speaking on change in the mindset of some of those who own the media. And let us be without fear of being a speaker too. So there's a lot of weather that needs to be done. That's the one. Thank you both. I think that's a good question. Okay. First of all, thank you so much. It was really an honor to hear both of you talk. One of the things that I've been wondering a lot is about our own feelings about this work. We're sort of, I think you mentioned, you're maybe not such a fan of queer theory. And I think when we think about queer, you know why I'm speaking about it. It's sort of this radical anti-morbid stance. And I, when I look at your, when I look at both of your work and sort of what you've been talking about, I don't necessarily see that happening. And I'm wondering if you're defining queer in a different way or sort of what your, what your relationship to that term is. And does it, does it even matter, just no matter what we call it, is the terminology important? That would be my question, I guess. I'm not a fan of queer theory. That's not fully familiar. Like, I don't know how, I, me when I have words, then I can use them. So, if you understand what I mean. So, like, you know, the direction has been sort of sucking around with people like Guru Machari and Allah's for a while. You do your self-healing, self-healing, self-healing, self-healing to your software a little bit. So I'm feeling in a position of whirlwind, you know. For, now the African, the problem of, it's not just a failure of text, failure of enough things to read, it's not a material experience, it's translated into something that I can consume. Of course, it's primal, right? I'm finding the mess. Do you know what I mean? Like, at a certain way, like, I just need enough of a library to read, right? Maybe, the shelf full. But there's different kinds of reactions and stuff coming out of South Africa, different African scholars abroad. But even now, there's a kind of positive of it. It's hard to explain it in years, except you throw the poem and then it changes the language and then you find the one, then you figure it out. Like now, I like the one, Guru. It covers many things, it fits many things. It's very, very understanding. In a global way, I like the one, I mean, I like the LGBTQ, right? But at the same time, without a local body of work, it suddenly sits awkwardly in a certain sense, right? Because in certain ways, you're coming to align with many movements that are going on in the world. Some, you're like, okay, so you call me for the LGBTQ meeting and then I'm like, okay, whatever it is that you people are doing in this meeting, it's not something I want to be part of. But that doesn't mean I have not seen the LGBTQ. You don't know what I'm trying to say. So there are all these things that you have to figure out and then align it. So I have to find my language to own enough because to take my four steps over five steps. And so that's what the processes are there for, you know, is to go enter, throw the bonkers place, you take it out, you can make a language. Or if you say ouch, or gay, when you fall in the bonkers, you're like, okay, that's what I'm like with software. Do you understand what I mean? There has to be a certain kind of... There's a comfort zone of things that are emotionally intuitive to you. And then when you create new space, you have to make an event to make emotions. Right? You know, all language emotions. That's it. It's an ongoing process. I like you, too. Maybe what I like in work is so difficult for you to pronounce, can you say it again? Can you say in jogger? In jogger. In jogger. Yeah. In Latin, we have our own quie language, which is called sudo nomo. So that is not routine. That is not routine as yet, you know. So to use the term quie, which might be erotically for some people, is the middle of convenience sake. Otherwise, I can't say it hand-pissed proper because it adds people allergy to that word. It's like saying, it's done. As adjectives are people who call each other, you can call another person that it's safe to say so to her, him, that it's done, and we own it. Because ours were the glimpsing the erotically word and making ours one of us to get back. Other than that, it's not that proper because the minute I say quie, it means I'm excluding the tea because tea doesn't fall under quie. It has its own definition, safe, et cetera, et cetera. So then that's why you end up with all these acronyms that doesn't include our own african languages or africanness. So we're still trying to find the terminology that is easy for us to reproduce by people of the world, because most of the ones that I like, like I said, in Jordan, in this tabern, is nomo. All have quies in there, which therefore equals quie. Any other questions? All right, maybe we should give a hand for our speakers. Thank you. So thank you, Zinelli, Alexis, and Binyamaga, and I will just encourage you all to go see Zinelli's show, which is opening tomorrow, I believe, at Yankee Richard Gallery on 22nd Street, so. Thank you.