A vast array of inquiries are being undertaken by various artists around the world, most of these efforts are constrained expressions of art works produced during a time of ecclesiastical uncertainty.
Through this unprecedented isolation, many have found and modeled new portals of self-proclamation. The digital sphere is filled with individuals glued to devices, yearning for connections that go beyond the normative.
Creative practioners are dissecting societies now confined in isolated spaces, they, like surgeons or psychologists are conducting experiments on a populace feeling the pangs social exclusion. These experiments are intersectional, in that a plethora of disciplines are used to interrogate interlinked situations within a transformed public life.
And seeing how in the course of approximately three years, a pandemic has brought devastating socio-economic changes across the globe, it has become pivotal to find methods of transforming anxieties into fruits of research and artistic practice, where the widespread suspension of social and economic norms also opens up a space to rethink our values and ways of life.
This period has also resulted in an experiment of video poems I have dubbed Projections Of/In Isolation, which entail a variety of visual compositions projected on corrugated steel wall of shacks that are common forms of residential architecture for vast communities of South Africa. During the pandemic, most of the visuals projected entailed service delivery protests as symbolic of an expression of resilience for squatter camp based peoples from various walks of life.
And being always engaged in enquiry that interrogates the interwoven nature of art and its sources, I wondered what symbolic resonance would be felt through projecting these images of squatter camps on walls of a European Metropolis such as Leipzig or Berlin.
In my neighborhood, people have discovered that art can heal us in these sordid times, and know that creative practitioners are devising practical responses to this pressing need to rethink relations in the world. This awareness has allowed many to marvel at some of my Projections, even though the concept is undeniably foreign to many people.
But, in this same environment, isolation is felt and expressed in a variety of ways. Isolation from economic activities and therefore exclusion from social affluence has left many venting out extremist sentiments which have simmered even more excruciatingly during lockdowns.
These video poems are an interrogation of what emotional impacts does isolation have on a society whose places of residence allow not for luxuries such as social distancing and sufficient health care. The projections are both testament of a cluttered life forced into smaller spaces that confine and hinder our projections of fear, awe and mere discomfort.
And in reflecting on my participation at the Radical Film Network Berlin Meeting, as well as the Quarantine Residency, where during this highly engaged period within a global art world isolation is a topic of much consternation, I feel that I have indeed been afforded an invaluable opportunity to participate in a collective exploration of confined persons in often impersonal spaces, or rather de-personalizing spaces such as crowds of protesters.
During the course of the residencies I have engaged in discussions with renowned artsist working at the fringes of radical expression that merges all disciplinary aethetics, and they all echo a deviousand curious poetry that should be the sound and sight of our paralyzing present futures.
As a video poet, therefore, I intend to continue crafting more projections of new imaginings and video compositions, most of which are already being created quietly, and evidently slowly due to national lockdowns and quarantine protocols that govern our present social and artistic activities.
Through this introspective gaze into possibilities ushered by exposure to people confronting transformation within their own isolation, persons coming to terms with their inner voids elsewhere on the planet while I am confined by some existential powerlessness, yet another journey commences.
This journey is an inter-disciplinary approach to producing video art, which will remain my fundamental method of expression throughout this new journey, and this chosen line of enquiry is about the permanent effects on isolated persons within a collective model of a nature that has indefinately rendered all of us useless and yet radicalized towards extreme reactions to our rages and surging anxieties.
The forth-coming series’ clinical approach will allow for chance operations that will be improvised image manipulations and reintepretations of inner turmoils of selected persons projecting the hostage nature of their situations. These bizzarely video activist interventions from a vantage point of individuals shuttering an age of decaying decadence, will form a narrative exclamation of a reclamation of humanness in the face of disconnection.
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