This is the story of a youngly counsellor working deep in the mountains of Lesotho, to ensure that terminally ill patients get daily support and supervision that guides them to health. Karabo Rakolobe is a young man raising his small family with his dedicated partner. He wakes up each day to travel long distances to reach far-flung villages to consult and visit sickly people who would otherwise be unable to reach medical facilities.
And while his family provides moments of respite within an immersive environment of the sick and dying, he continues to express a sense of hope, hope in a world that seems inundated with strife and poverty.
Yet, his daily existence opens up ways to understand the desperate times and modes of existence shaped by different social circumstances, allowing us a glimpse into the power of human interaction and its therapeutic attributes.
We ignore the dead to our own peril, and as all mysteries never remain hidden, the dead will continue to speak from their graves, unto a future uncertain and flawed.
When voices from the past continue to haunt the present, what future will be free of ghosts?
Can the weight of traditions protect us from the horrors of forgetting, or do we always we make a journey that others have made before?
Once we prayed in the words of parents, but then our world expanded and the prayers fell short of the reality of living under the oppressor’s boots.
Many activists set an example of selfless sacrifice, their lives stolen by the hands of those who feared change.
They were caught between the forces they tried to change but could not fully escape.
Yet, change is inevitable and and to be alive is to know ghosts.
And now, we hear their whispers when we listen.
The echo prompts us not to ignore the dead.
We are haunted by their disappearance, and we cannot outgrow the pain.
Can the future be free of the demons of the past and traumas caused by a brutal police force that served to terrorise people of colour in the land of their birth?
Resist Or Die
Generational perspectives are important to the preservation of memory, and censored memories are part of what constitutes a subservient society.
Providing a foundation for exploring themes of colonial trauma, this video poem is contingent, and quietly political in the sense of depicting various events into a unison of collective revolt.
When black people are governed by routines of adjustment to the mess of colonial tyranny, what other option is left for emancipatory action?
In this montage, memory appears in traces, returning them as images or accounts of colonial legacies of a an authoritarian regime.
Affective archives, fragmented narratives, and the question of how aesthetic resistance can be articulated beyond dominant regimes of visibility is the crux of this enquiry into the past of others who were instrumental in liberating many.
This video poem interweaves historical archival documentation, and local narratives of activists, with an experimental visual and sonic language, deliberately foregrounding ruptures of communal rage and resistance to open up forms of visibility beyond the strictures of oppression.
And on several levels, it is therefore a is a meditation on times of violent struggle for liberation and its witnesses.
“Most humans are drawn to visual harmony, challenges their visual system or aesthetic preference. Colours are the mother tongue of the subconscious." Carl Jung.
A film leader is a length of film attached to the head or tail of a film to assist in threading a projector for a moving reel of images that pass through a film gate. These strips of gelatine have always been enamoured by the complexity of the colours that precede the main images, colours and shapes that linger between the numbers during the countdown.
The bright shaft of light that eventually sizzles into dust hairs that euphorically turn into luminescent forms that boggle the mind, this light seems to be the genesis of these marvels of the film medium, which are what makes one nostalgic of the days of shooting on film and projecting the final reels.
Typically made from rejected or retired prints of previously released reels, these snippets conjure up another side to the vision sparked by the persistence of vision, and like painting in motion, they are what I would call film art.
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This video poem, therefore explores changes in human cognition when indecipherable forms are persistently perceived, and the boundaries of the real seen through the boundaries of the real seen through new eyes.
And living in this multilayered video are translucent entities born of light and silver granules, replayed with light and hidden by light. The film gate - a crucible where opposing energies generate their light, is a sacred site.
Like a vast interface with unending flows of the unimaginable, this ode o cinema’s mysterious beginnings and endings, draws a circle in the life of the shifting contours of sight and sought.
Ultimately, the film art offers a personal space to inflict images of one’s unknowable imaginings, seeing what one wills and imagineers, a form of realising (MAKING REAL), the massive microscopic beings lingering in the light at the film gate.
The visuals are modes of self-fashioning owned imageries, signals toward the path still unfolding ahead, a liminal space where the possible in inevitable.
The forms and shapes that dwell in these entanglements between frames, can become forms of dream objects, what has yet to be named; that which invites the beholder to actively participate in shaping them.
Therefore, the video poem is a two-dimensional space of presences, evolving in relation ration to viewers’ perspectives, and their unsupervised methods of listening to inner ideas that rarely have a fixed course; activating forms of attention that escape closure.
This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 28, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
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STILL(ING) The Ocean
The ocean and its waters seem omnipresent and omniscient; it appears to house fossils of long forgotten tales of journeying into the unknown, and deluges of sadness for souls that perished into its watery canyons.
It bears and moves shared memories of slaves drowned for their rebellion or sickness, the ocean in its stillness is where wet worlds inhabited by large and tiny organisms unbeknown to man thrive.
Water reflects the intertwined facets of human history, from cradle to graves which would soon be swallowed by rising levels as glaciers melt uncontrollably.
The ocean is that economic corridor that fuels he world’s capitalist machinery, water is a pathway from here to there, a transitory space where time leads to escapes to freedom, of eternal wandering, of discovering and rediscovering synergy spilled out of the ocean unto the open sands.
