After The Fire - Images By Paul Zisiwe

Secrets Lessons About Insects - A Khahliso Matela Film

Sitting around a fire on a winter’s night, a father and his children hold a jovial discussion about what insects can teach humans about ‘the art of budgeting.” Using a number of well-known insects found in the pristine environment of the mountain kingdom, Mohau Matela bestows pearls of wisdom to his descendants, while encapsulating the tradition of transmitting knowledge for which Basotho are famed and envied.

Filmed in single take, while Matokelo was still among the living, this film is cut as both eulogy and celebration of times fired by the warmth of familial love, which is characteristic of many Basotho households.

The robustness of thought that went to devising parables recounted in the film is a mystery to the filmmaker, but these lessons will always remain examples of what communal intellectual property comprises.

And told through flames and beauty of nightly silence, it could well be that a myriad of families share such jewels before slumbering into dreams, preparing a generation of wiser future highlanders geared for preservation of all their gains.

A Kokosi Park Story - A Freddy Zisiwe Film

What will happen to one man's dream of establishing a recreational park in his township? Will the negative motives of his peers distract him, or will there be some help that aims to see this collectively beneficial project come to fruition? This story is a beginning of a venture, which Freddy Zisiwe and Abraham Marite wish to see come to life.

Kokosi - An Arrested Development

An Arrested development

The issue of home settlements has remained a contentious one among many South African township residents, and with the advent of infrastructure development projects being instituted under government mandates, there seems to be a rise in corruption within the sector, and more devastatingly within community based housing projects.

Kokosi is one of such townships, now embroiled in various disputes with contractors and their municipal cohorts, while the disgruntled community that has been overlooked by house allocation processes continues to suffer.

This story is mere glimpse into what is a growing pandemic, which within these conducive virulent environmental conditions brought in by Covid-19, has mutated into what will soon become societal bug of an unprecedented scale, following in the footsteps of various global protestations against the POWERFUL.

A New Way Of Being - A Vuyolethu Seripe Poem

A Series Of Letters To Poets

To Poets Of A Millennial Cage

To us, the corruptible spawn of a vile voice once wombed with bilious rage, in our mothers bellows an eternal travail while our fathers mine soiled hearts for pennies.

Today we are vacant of souls.

Watch how we’ve become callous speed-readers of tragedies, soliloquizing in languages defeated by complacent rhetoric, spelling names of our future seeds from foreign manuals and work-rosters.

As we stand at close quarters with our shadows, in rooms hoarding memories and books gone stale with pornographic fonts, other bored youths are celebrating social grants fleeced from lumpen proles disguised as taxpayers.

Those peers who beat strange gods into boxes carried by Glen Dlamini wrecking havoc through suburbia, swore never to return to townships burning with sculpted corpses of other charred dissidents.

Many are now streaming slogans and odes on digital planes, singing praises to a fossilized civility, fifth generation prosodies lulling our nightmare at hand.

Yet, with is letter I ask if our castrated voices are forever hushed into doodles for tweaked consumers and woke patrons?

This letter is torn in plain view of cloned leaders and vaccinated parole officers warranted with tyranny against black flesh, and it is paling its lettering into broken eyes of worried pets huddled by lonely poets incarcerated.

It is blotting its final ink on lips of rehabilitated alcoholics, who are now addicts to algorithms and war archives.

What have we done, poets?

Deserve we not this repulsive disdain when we sold volumes of ancestral pain to crusader publishers and agents of showbiz puppetry of words and wits?

Fellow poets, are we not to be judged by the many marred faces staring back through tinted windows of fraudulent churches and our literary museums?

And as an exodus of our liquefied tongues is forced into pilgrimage towards rusty towns of our upbringing, locked downed with our worst family feuds and illegitimate siblings, what have we to say at this pandemic of disturbed comforts?

Would we die coldly touring our past adventures at an hour of peril?

Will we rewrite a short history of life in a millennial cage fashioned in metaphors of a cowardly retreat to servitude or, will we chisel introspective prophecies on our canvases, of distant portals from whence a new rebellion will be birthed?

A Method Of Isolationist Projections

These presented reimagined visual montages focus on art’s ability to (re)create spirit of a sociocultural site of events, and from this theoretical perspective the artist defines his video poems as both conservation and sustenance of continuity.

The artist defines any human habitat as a socio-cultural rhizome, possessing an intangible quality of a material site, perceived both physically and spiritually. 

And considering that re-purposing derelict spaces for art exhibitions is nothing new in the art world, it was easy for therefore for artist to locate his experimental pieces in the locale of a shack that was his home for over twenty years.

The shack, as site of human occupation and spatial localization is therefore identified as a physical reality, a mediators and medium of familial interactions , while at the same time bearing memories of struggles of ‘others’.

It possesses a distinguishable set of fundamental attributes: integrity, continuity, a touch of eternity, while being both a reality and an entity, and rhizome from which many interpretation stem and sprout..

Constructing a shack entails a process of assembling discarded elements, objects and re-assembling them into dimensions, forms and sculpted for human habitation. This process of reformation of the deformed is what the series of projections attempts to credit as the thread that runs through each video poem, each being a node in the growing stem from a place of origins.

Through filming images projected on the shack itself, a new dimension is added onto that cacophony of visual concepts at play, and re-projecting and filming the projections is another method of perfecting deformity, or exploring the sublime chaos.

An idealization of the shack might another layer of interpretative discourse that can be roused by the series, for by annexing this previously occupied ‘sculpture as location of present artistic output’, the artist is evolving a language.

And this language serves to both articulate the physical chaos of the shack as a deformity, in contrast to an aesthetic form taken when captured within frames of multiple projections.