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Beyond Mundane:
Zim Nqawana’s Environmental Improvisation

When the studio of South African jazz saxophonist Zim Nqawana was destroyed by copper thieves, he responded by improvising with the wreckage. In ‘Beyond Mundane: the environmental improvisation of Zim Nqawana,’ Joanna Ruth Evans studies this performance through the film ‘The Exhibition of Vandalizm’ (2010), which documents the full day and night that Nqawana spent drawing sound from the detritus, and meditating on the psychic effects of South Africa’s colonial past. Nqawana’s creative response to an experience that is at once extreme and commonplace puts pressure on the concept of ‘the mundane’ and its racialized connection to the fantasy of aesthetic transcendence. Evans argues that the shifting connotation of ‘mundane’ (from a sense of worldly belonging to one of dull, repetitive ordinariness) is coterminous with the emergence of the liberal subject as a figure who is in but not of the world. This shift in the word’s association corresponded with a racialized denigration of material embeddedness, and followed upon Kantian aesthetics, which secures the liberal subject’s universality through the transcendence of aesthetic experience. Through a black studies critique of Kantian aesthetics, this discussion tracks connections between material vulnerability, mundanity, and art (including the embrace of ‘the mundane’ by twentieth century performance artists and scholars). Ultimately, Nqawana’s experience pushes both ‘the mundane’ and aesthetics to a conceptual breaking point. It begs the question: without access to the regulative framework that secures environmental autonomy and stability, what becomes of art? Faced with this crisis, Nqawana turns to improvisation. Refusing cynicism and reactionary closure, he enters the reality of the destruction with a creativity that does not transcend the material conditions of its emergence, but rather engages the already given creativity of his material environment in all its instability.

“Beyond Mundane: the Environmental Improvisation of Zim Nqawana.” Performance Research. Special Issue: “On the Mundane.” Vol. 28, Issue 4 (2023). London: Routledge.

^{Images from The Exhibition of Vandalizim, Aryan Kaganoff (2010).}

“As the world trembles”
Borders and borderlessness in the thought of Édouard Glissant

In the film Édouard Glissant, One World in Relation (Diawara 2009), Glissant states that “borders are necessary in order to appreciate the passage from the flavor of one country to the flavor of another.” This statement inspires an exploration of the workings of borders in Glissant’s work, focusing on his book Poetics of Relation and the film. It argues that Glissant holds an attachment to borders that is both pragmatic and ontological, and through which he generates a philosophy of the border as generative, distinguishing it from modernity’s externalized borders to greater and lesser effect. It also suggests that there appears through Glissant, and often in spite of his own attachment to borders, a trembling sense of the possibility of borderlessness. Trembling is invoked throughout as a material and conceptual force with the propensity for destabilizing and even negating borders. Glissant’s work is read through a number of performative scenes, including: Martin Heidegger’s famous reaction to viewing photographs of Earth from space in 1966; the dance piece more, more, more… future (2011) by Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula; Glissant’s own half-ironic, and ultimately unrealized, suggestion for the making of the film; and scenes from One World in Relation of Glissant and Diawara exploring Martinique together.

“As the World Trembles: Borders and Borderlessness in the thought of Édouard Glissant." Women&Performance: a journal of feminist history. Special Issue: “Border Encounters, Performing Thresholds.” Vol. 32, Issue 1 (2022). London: Routledge.


^{Image credit: Agathe Poupeney. From more, more, more... future (2011), by Faustin Linyekula and Studio Kabako.}



Unsettled Matters, Falling Flight:
Decolonial Protest and the Becoming-Material of an Imperial Statue





The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window

Written by Lorraine Hansberry. Directed by Anne Kauffman. Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), New York, March 3, 2023.

“On May 24 1963, in the aftermath of the Birmingham protests, Lorraine Hansberry was amongst a group of artists and black activists invited to the home of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to open dialogue about the Civil Rights Movement, and the anger of black people at the administration’s response to white supremacist violence. Amongst the attendees were James Baldwin (who had assembled the group at Kennedy’s request), his brother David Baldwin, musicians Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte, and Freedom Rider Jerome Smith. At a crucial moment in the meeting Smith, who had been on the frontlines of the movement and repeatedly beaten, broke down while describing his experiences. Hansberry detected Kennedy physically turning away from Smith and, with a directness that shocked him, implored Kennedy to listen to him. The meeting quickly devolved, and Hansberry is reported as saying to Kennedy, ‘You are the best of what white America can offer us, if you can’t hear us, then we have no hope.’ Soon after she walked out, followed by the group. Hansberry wrote afterwards, ‘I had a feeling of complete futility, and as we got on the elevator I wondered if there is any way to make the white people in this country understand.’...”

Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.” Ecumencia: Performance and Religion. Vol. 16, Issue 2 (2023). Penn State University Press.



A “Jail Bird's Eye View:” Workshop 71’s Survival in South Africa

"Referred to playfully as a ‘jailbird’s eye view,’ Survival would come to tell the stories of five prisoners – Vusi, Leroi, Edward, Slaksa, and Habbakuk – as they struggled to survive in the prison of South African society."

Read here.

Black on Both Sides: Survival in the USA

"Between the 1976 Soweto uprising, Nelson Mandela’s release in 1990, and even the release of Roots in 1977, Survival has a knack for popping up at charged historical moments.”

Read here.


Amelia and Andile are children from very different backgrounds who befriend one another over a garden wall. Ten years later, they have become estranged and, in separate accidents, fall into a concussion at the same moment. The meet again in each other’s confused minds. Their bodies are broken but their throughts are very loud as they reach out for contact. While piecing together fragments of self, their memories draw them back to 1997; the year of Ninja Turtles, bicycles, and R. Kelly’s ‘I believe I can fly.’ And the year when their friendship was shattered by a place in which it is impossible for even a child to feel at ease.

    - Mike Loewe, The Critter

The Year of the Bicycle. Junkets 10 Series. Cape Town: Junkets Press. 2016.