Towards - A conversation between Lakisha Apostel and Lungiswa Gqunta

Upon entering the exhibition space of Nest in Laak, you are immediately caught by concave structures that guide you through a landscape made up of soil, clay and white sheets. The two installations interlace so seamlessly, that it’s hard to believe that Lakisha Apostel and Lungiswa Gqunta had not met each other prior to their dual exhibition at Nest.

Only a couple of months ago, curator Zazie Duinker introduced the two artists in light of the proposal to tell a story about decolonial forms of embodied listening. She sensed similarities in their consideration of the body’s movement, rhythm and direction in creating a sense of belonging. In her performance work We Shared a Belly, Apostel uses sculptures as tools in a ritual to help the uprooted body embed itself into the earth. It’s a response to her ongoing longing to connect to her homeland, Curaçao. At the same time, in Riotous Assembly Gqunta engages with her own connection to her home in South-Africa by exploring how history persists in the body in the present. The video installation depicts the folding of sheets by women as an opportunity for collective conversation.

In both works, there’s a care, intentionality and commitment to the ongoing embodied efforts to connect to history. More so, this commitment to the process runs through both artists’ entire practices. In the way they talk, work and live Apostel and Gqunta are not afraid of giving things time, coming back on an opinion, or not quite knowing. It reveals a constant evolution. In conversation, they demonstrate it perfectly as they initially consider themselves to be doing two totally different things, but gradually find themselves coming closer together. In comparing how the body engages with space in their work, for instance, the artists initially emphasize that their situations are different. Apostel is eagerly seeking a sense of place, while Gqunta feels she has an expressly strong sense of place already. Yet, both continue to grapple with it. How so?

It emerges from their talk that place isn’t plainly ‘out there.’ The idea of place turns out to be dynamic, and it evolves from a destination, to something that needs to be upheld, to a gesture. Gradually leaving the tangible behind like this, it prompts you to reconsider negative space. In A Map to the Door of No Return, an exploration of identity and connection to place, writer Dionne Brand writes: “Anywhere they live is remote.” Initially, this sentence stings. However, the thoughts expressed in the conversation below stimulate a more comprehensive reading of it. There, Apostel and Gqunta discuss how history persists in the present, the deliberate embrace of incomprehensibility and this thing called it. In doing so, they develop a view of place, history and identity that is dynamic and, correspondingly, of practices that aren’t directed at a determinate end, but are rather constant gestures towards. From this perspective, could it be possible to claim the distance Brand cites, to harbor the potential it holds and to use that towards placemaking? Could they bend it to their needs, navigate it in their own way and ground through the process itself? As Apostel and Gqunta discuss in this talk, could existing in space be a continuous gesture towards?

Zazie:

How do you think your works combine at Nest? What harmonies does the combination of them elicit, and what differences does it call attention to?

Lakisha:

To me, the works feel close in the sense that we’re both talking about the relationship between identity, the body and space. At the same time, the methodology of what we're trying to do is different. The way that I approach We Shared a Belly is from a question: how can I connect? I have this need; this yearning for belonging, this yearning to feel at home, this yearning to not constantly feel this hovering or this state of errantry. I decided to make a work that helped towards solving that, to get to a place where I can belong.

Lungiswa:

Even the existence of the body in space, I think, is very different in our works. Yours has actual lived engagement, whereas mine has what I think is like a ghost body; a body that is no longer there. Or, it is, but in an intangible form.

You say you use your work to help with space making, but I have a very strong sense of place. The use of ‘displacement’ in the exhibition text therefore really had me pausing. Am I dealing with that? Am I displaced? How do I engage with my understanding of displacement? I think I deal with displacement in a very historical sense. I mean, it is lived, but it is residual. In engaging with my identity in relation to space, I try to counter those historical as well as present attempts to displace me. We may know the forms displacement has taken in the past, but I’m trying to look at how it persists today, how it presents itself and how it continues to uproot us from the place that we have made home.

Zazie:

In Lakisha's work, the performers' bodies are present in the space for a considerable period of time. By comparison, in Riotous Assembly bodily presence is more fragmented as it takes the shape of hands folding sheets on screen.How does this inform the way the body engages and deals with displacement in your work?

Lungiswa:

You, as the viewer, are the bodily presence now, but you stand in relation to whatever was there before that. It could be ancestral presence in the space, those are the bodies that I am referring to that have lived and are no longer necessarily within this realm, but are still present in the work.

Lakisha:

A lot of what I'm trying to understand is that residual displacement. What are the remnants or the effects of the colonial history that we have? For me, unpacking this history and especially understanding how it exists in the body in Curaçao is in the beginning stages at the moment. We Shared a Belly is a methodology to understand these things for myself. I am not making the work from a resolved position of: I get this and I'm healed from this and I want to highlight this. Instead, it's really from a position of: I don't get this. I don't understand how this works within me, but I feel it around me. I feel this echo, these remnants, these bits of pieces of history hovering around us.

Where do you place yourself in the spectrum of understanding how history exists within your body and within your work?

Lungiswa:

I’m listening to you trying to understand all of this history, and in my mind, there is no understanding it. It makes no goddamn sense. There's not a damn thing that anyone can say that makes me understand it.

Lakisha:

Mhm.

Lungiswa:

In the work, not reaching an understanding with it is a way of refusal, of defiance, of countering. A lot of the work is coming from not only my lived experiences, but everyone around me. And as we'd have conversations trying to wrap our heads around it, we’d realize that we're still in it. It’s hard to understand how things happened, when you’re still in it. The history keeps coming. It has a present energy. I cannot possibly know it all, it just keeps coming.

How is it that it’s still able to be in existence, to thrive, to develop and morph? That's the part that feels baffling. It's a gaslighting kind of experience; trying to reckon with histories and the things that are there today. What language can I try and make sense of ‘this thing’ in, in the hopes of, forming another level of clarity that is accessible? For me, I leaned a lot into emotion, something that sometimes can be so involuntary almost, as a way of trying to communicate something.

Lakisha:

I think I understand Lungiswa very well. It’s very hard to understand it. It's not just history. There is this it hovering. It’s a thing that shape-shifts, taking on a lot of different shapes and voices. I think what our works are trying to do is to dip our toes within that void and attempt to grasp it, but not necessarily to name it. I think that could be difficult to understand.

Zazie:

Is the attempt to grasp it for yourself, or in order to be able to communicate with and to others?

Lungiswa:

In the beginning it’s so I have a bit of clarity towards 'this thing,’ but then it becomes an attempt to communicate it to others. However, in doing so, it can shift around and do a complete 180. In installing work, especially if I don't have all of the motions and I'm led by intuition, it ends up teaching me a lot about what my methods are, what is missing, and how I need to start moving. It lets me realize that, actually, I had lessons to learn from the work, and it wasn't really about articulating anything to anybody.

Zazie:

Does that resonate with you, Lakisha?

Lakisha:

Yes, very much. The way that it resonates is that for me, the performance occurs with or without the audience. It's not a performance that I do for people to see. It exists on its own because it needs to. The emphasis of the work is the attempt to connect to something, and that takes place between the body and the work, and not necessarily between the audience and the work. The audience is invited to think about the possibilities of connecting to something. What are the methods we can create to engage?

I can recognize my work has a bit of absurdity to it; I’m digging up soil in Curaçao, carrying it across the ocean to the Netherlands, placing it in tools, and then placing people in those tools trying to create a link. It’s out of necessity, the extreme need to have something close. But the connection is not a given, it lies within the gesture. It’s really a practice. I’m not saying that I can resolve it all and that you just have to lay here for an hour and you'll be connected. What if we try? It’s like a workshop, it needs to occur over and over and over, throughout time.

Lungiswa:

I’m in shock hearing you speak about absurdity in your work. I was like, what? What is the thing that you're calling absurd? Why is that so absurd? It's not at all. When I moved to Amsterdam for my first year at the Rijksakademie, I also felt that rupture from home. I couldn't locate myself. So, the first thing I did, I went and bought a bunch of bags of soil, and I just put it in my studio, and I blew up my mother's photos. And that was the grounding. And later on in that same year, I went and found a metal plate, which I filled with a body of water. So, I guess that makes us both absurd.

Lakisha:

It might be this outside lens. You wouldn't think it's absurd because we have similar needs. When I'm looking from an outside perspective, I'm like: what am I doing? But when I’m up there, hovering, I’m like: oh, okay, yeah. It’s very logical within my practice. It might be a bit absurd, but when I'm in it, I feel like it's very logical.

Lungiswa:

I still see that ruptured connection while I'm here at home. You don't have to be nowhere else other than your home, because these histories of displacement and destruction, these colonial histories, exist on all scales. They're in your backyard, as well as wherever it is you choose to go into the world. It’s the basis.

I just realized that neither of us have a desire for resolve. Not at all. I think that’s a very beautiful place to be.

Lakisha:

Why do you think we don't?

Lungiswa:

I think some of it has to do with the reasons we make work. Who are we establishing these methodologies for? You go into the art world, and you get thrust into a thing that asks very specific things of you and you're told in order to exist in it, you need to respond to those things. I guess somewhere in there I was like: no, actually, I don’t. In my post-grad, during our final presentation, I presented a body of work and I was told, ‘I don't think you make the kind of work that will sell.’ Immediately I was like, oh, damn. Oh shit, because I really need the money. I was panicking. But then I started to think about what my work could be. It released me from everything that this entire system wants and demands from us. Maybe the urgency, the thing that is watering us in all ways to continue to make, doesn't fit in with whatever conditions resolve requires.

Lakisha:

It also has to do with the relation to the collective. I find it difficult to say: this is the way we need to exist, and if everyone just comes to my work it will all be good. I don't know that. Again, it’s a gesture. Although my practice is open for others, I can only really speak for and from myself. That's also why it's not resolved for me: my solution is not everyone's solution, and that is okay.

Zazie:

What is it like, then, exhibiting at Nest? In what ways do you feel it constricts you in wanting to work in a way that doesn't strive towards resolve, and in what way do you feel like it does lend you the liberty to do that?

Lakisha:

One thing that I find constricting within exhibiting my work, is the audience. A lot of the people that will visit Nest, do not have the context that I do. Lungiswa immediately understood that it’s not absurd to travel with soil, but not everyone has that personal background. That can be scary. It can be scary to have people see the work without that need, because you might not be understood. Or, not just not understood, but misunderstood.

Zazie:

How is that for you Lungiswa?

Lungiswa:

I realized: I don't care if the audience does not understand it. I am choosing to be in a place. My only hope is that the Black people visiting the exhibition can understand it in that way. If y'all can get it, then I'm good.

I didn't translate this work, and I didn't put subtitles in it, for a reason. You can ask for them, but you're not going to get them. No, no, there's no care in that, having to continuously labour for your understanding. I play with those issues of accessibility in the work a lot. I will move how I want, where I want, and I will share information with who I want, and I know how to do that.

Zazie:

It sounds like it's not a matter of whether the space restricts you or not. The space doesn't hold the power to restrict you. Instead, you decide that you move unrestricted.

Lungiswa:

None whatsoever. I'm not seeking anyone's approval to be where I am. There are so many ways to live and to do what we're doing, we don't have to be chained to a system. I move with that attitude. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But I just insist, and I insist: this is how I am.