From 4-10 May 2020, members of the international Practicing Refusal Collective will join local artists, writers and thinkers in Johannesburg and Durban to present the Sojourner Project jhb/dbn, a week-long programme of art interventions, performances, screenings, conversations and public master classes.

As a Black Studies Mobile Academy, the programme will encourage transnational dialogue on Black precarity, fungibility, and futurity. These ideas are central to the work of the Practicing Refusal Collective – an international Black feminist forum of academics and creatives. These global concerns will be explored in relation to local debates in South Africa on Black agency, anti-blackness and decolonisation, catalysed by the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements, and in ways that allow for a necessary evaluation of their stakes, accomplishments and potential for future social and political transformation.

The Sojourner Project jhb/dbn is presented as a collaboration between the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD), University of Johannesburg, Art for Humanity (AFH), Durban University of Technology, the Market Photo Workshop, and the Practicing Refusal Collective.

Project Outline:

Scheduled for 4-10 May 2020, the Sojourner Project jhb/dbn, is envisioned as a dual city cultural intervention – or Black Studies Mobile Academy – and will be collaboratively presented by the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD), University of Johannesburg (UJ); Art for Humanity (AFH), Durban University of Technology (DUT); the Market Photo Workshop; and the Practicing Refusal Collective (PR Collective).

The PR Collective is an international forum of leading artists and scholars dedicated to initiating dialogues on blackness, anti-black violence and black futurity in the twenty-first century. In 2018 they launched the Sojourner Project, as a way of facilitating a global dialogue around these concerns.

The Sojourner Project jhb/dbn will be the first African iteration of the Sojourner Project initiative, and will take place in multiple venues in Johannesburg and Durban, with each city playing host to a dynamic programme of art activations, performances, screenings, conversations and public master classes. In an effort to establish a meaningful transnational dialogue on black precarity, fungibility, and futurity, PR Collective members are already in conversation with a group of local artists, activists, curators and cultural workers. These key concerns include:

• What is anti-blackness globally?

• How is black agency articulated locally?

• What are its national or regional idioms or inflections, and how are they complicated by different historical trajectories and aftermaths of enslavement and colonisation?

• (How) Do these critical terms travel or translate?

• What might it mean to understand these questions/terms in majority black communities?

Leading the programme, these key questions will allow for a transnational conversation that foregrounds local debates in South Africa on black agency, antiblackness and decolonisation, as catalysed by the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements. The envisioned discussions, engagements and creative encounters will provide important opportunities to assess and strategise around the impact of these seminal movements, and their demands for change within (and without) the university, as a direct legacy of the unfinished work of post-apartheid restructuring.

Aluta Continua...

The question of national and regional inflections of anti-blackness (including black-on-black violence and Afrophobia), the resulting formations of black precarity and fungibility, and the possibility for alternative futures will serve as a critical toolkit for exploring the role of Black Studies in creating intellectual frameworks for educating black communities in practices of social transformation.

Toward this end, the Sojourner Project jhb/dbn, will be structured as a mobile academy that intentionally aims to exceed the literal and figurative walls of the university. Organised around a series of site-specific encounters that integrate the cultural, intellectual, political, and social landscapes of Johannesburg and Durban, the structure of the mobile academy is intended to cultivate multi-directional engagements with the histories of struggle and practices of refusal that have emerged in different black communities.

Pop-up learning modules led by collaborative teams of artists, scholars and community and cultural workers will create both research and pedagogical dialogues that enact and illuminate the differences and similarities of these histories and practices.

Alongside these encounters, the mobile academy will stage a parallel set of collaborative “black study groups” which will hold seminars to discuss the different trajectories of Black Studies in the US, Europe and South Africa. Significant to this is the deeply concerning absence of Black Studies platforms in local university contexts, as observed by the PR Collective, VIAD and AFH.

As an equally important component of these conversations, will be the transformative insights and contributions of multimedia artists, included through a series of screenings and performances that will encourage reflection around the impact of embodied practices of black theorising and world-making, as a crucial dynamic of what it means to practice refusal and articulate alternative visions of black futurity.

In this regard, the project will connect renowned African American artists, Simone Leigh (2018 Hugo Boss Prize winner) and Okwui Okpokwasili (2018 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Award winner) with a selection of Johannesburg and Durban-based artists and curators.

Partnerships: the Sojourner Project jhb/dbn will be hosted by VIAD, AFH and the Market Photo Workshop, in partnership with the PR Collective – and with support from the President’s Global Innovation Fund, Columbia University.

Other key partners may include:

• The US Mission to South Africa

• Institut Français d’Afrique du Sud

• Business and Arts South Africa

• Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture, UJ

• Faculty of Arts and Design, DUT

• Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action (GALA)

• Centre for Civil Society, UKZN

• Durban International Film Festival

• The Mobile Women’s Museum, Philadelphia

• The Windybrow Arts Centre, Johannesburg

• Keleketla! Library, Johannesburg

About the Practicing Refusal Collective:

Since its initial meeting in 2015, the group has met bi-annually as a working group sponsored by the Barnard Center for Research on Women. In additional day-long working group discussions, the group has hosted a series of public events engaging the work of members of the collective, including a lecture and graduate seminar by Denise Ferreira da Silva, a screening and panel discussion on the films of Arthur Jafa at the International Center for Photography in New York City, and book salons on Christina Sharpe’s, In the Wake (2016), and Tina Campt’s, Listening To Images (2017).

Building on the success of the first Sojourner Project event at the Paris Global Center, and following the programmes planned for Johannesburg and Durban, the Sojourner Project hopes to expand further by collaborating with Global Centers in Nairobi and Rio de Janeiro.

In addition to its conveners, Saidiya Hartman (Columbia University) and Tina Campt (Brown University), the Practicing Refusal Collective includes:

Rizvana Bradley (Yale University)

Dionne Brand (Academic & Author)

Denise Ferreira da Silva (Uni of British Columbia)

Kaiama Glover (Barnard College)

Arthur Jafa (Artist)

Simone Leigh (Artist)

Tavia Nyong’o (Yale University)

Okwui Okpokwasili (Artist)

Darieck Scott (UC Berkley)

Christina Sharpe (York University)

Maboula Soumahoro (Uni de Tours François-Rabelais)

Deborah Thomas (University of Pennsylvania)

Françoise Vergès (Academic & Author)

Alexander G. Weheliye (Northwestern University)

Gloria Wekker (Utrecht University)

Mabel Wilson (Columbia University