Installation photo Mary Sibande - Conversations with Madam CJ Walker (2009), photo (c) Eva Broekema, Framer Framed 11 Oct 2016 – 20:00
Performance: My Tongue Softens On The Other Name
Date October 11, 2016 Time 20:00 ~ 22:00 Entry Free Location Framer Framed at the Tolhuistuin IJpromenade 2 1031 CC Amsterdam Route Framer Framed at Tolhuistuin can be reached from Amsterdam Centraal Station with the ferry ‘Buiksloterweg’. The exhibition space is located on the first floor, next to restaurant THT.
Open and interactive performance where artists, cultural performers and thinkers reflect on the exhibition Re(as)sisting Narratives through taking inspiration from a poem by Gabeba Baderoon. My Tongue Softens on the Other Name plays with themes of desire, intimacy and healing.
Guests Patricia Kaersenhout, Simone Zeefuik, Barby Asante and Happy Kinyili will bring an intervention, performance or reading to the space. My Tongue Softens On The Other Name invites to rethink how we make sense of space and time within the exhibition space. Through the use of words, art, ritual and performance, new narratives and fragments of past and present are woven into future perspectives.
This event is curated by Chandra Frank and hosted by Framer Framed.
On the speakers:
Simone Zeefuik is an Amsterdam based writer and organizer whose work focuses on imagery, representation, anti-Black racism, (digital) archives and the undocumented members of the Black communities in the Netherlands. She’s the co-initiator of #DecolonizeTheMuseum and #UndocumentedNL, the initiator of #UndocumentedEU plus the founder of literary platform RE:Definition.
Patricia Kaersenhout is a Dutch visual artist, cultural activist and womanist of Surinamese heritage. She studied Social Studies at the Amstelhorn Amsterdam and Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Her work investigates the fact of invisibility as a condition of the African Diaspora. It also looks at colonialism in relation to her upbringing in Western European culture.
Barby Asante is a London based artist, curator and educator whose work explores space, place and identity. The drive of her work is to create spaces for dialogue, collective thinking, ritual and reenactment. Using archival material in the broadest sense, she is interested in breaking down the language of archive, not to insert or present alternatives to dominant narratives but to interrupt, interrogate and explore the effects and possibilities of the unheard and the missing.
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MY TONGUE SOFTENS ON THE OTHER NAME
above chillies and wild rosemary.
Kapokbos, cottonwool bush, my tongue softens
on the rosemary’s other name.
Brinjal, red peppers and paw-paw grow
in the narrow channel between
the kitchen and the wall that divides
our house from the Severos. At the edge
of the grass by the bedrooms, a witolyf reaches
ecstatically for the power lines.In a corner in the lee of the house,
nothing grows.
Sound falls here.
Early in the day shadows wash
over old tiles stacked
against the cement wall.
In the cold and silence
my brother is making a garden.He clears gravel from the soil
and lays it against the back wall.
Bright spokes of pincushion proteas puncture a rockery.
For hours he scrapes into a large stone a hollow to catch
water from a tap that has dripped all my life.
Around it, botterblom slowly reddens the grey sand.
A fence made of reed filters
the wind between the wall and the house.
Ice-daisies dip their tufted heads
toward its shadows.At night, on an upturned paint tin, he sits
in the presence of growing things.
Light wells over the rim of the stone basin
and collects itself into the moon.
Everything is finding its place.
Feminism / Performance /
Exhibitions
Exhibition: Re(as)sisting Narratives
Exploring lingering legacies of colonialism between South Africa and the Netherlands through engaging with contemporary artists from both countries
Network
Simone Zeefuik
Writer and cultural programmer
Barby Asante
Artist, Curator, Educator
Chandra Frank
Curator and PhD Candidate
