On The VOCAL MUSEUM

There is something unorthodox about the combination of the word VOCAL and the word MUSEUM, because one would associate museums, like libraries, with bastions of silence, and museums more specifically, would inevitably be houses of the unspeaking pasts and encased silent narratives.

And there is something liberating about the paradox induced by the analogy of a non-silent museum, an outspoken and vocally responsive space where history speaks to the present in voices disguised as those of our contemporaries.

But, I often wonder what voices would stolen artefacts be emitting in foreign museums for instance? Would they be lamenting a desire to be returned, expressing a sort of nostalgia for retuning?

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Recently having explored the European artscape through a project that hosted her in Cologne, Germany, I wanted to find out from Masello about her sustained exploration of notions of the Diasporic flow of African art and the transformation of dynamics of cultural relations between regions made distant in the past due to colonial expropriation of African poetic expressions.

I wanted to know if, her journeys are partly an exploration of other silent museums, thus positioning herself to become that voice that brings together ideas of explorative collaborations with other voices (artists), in the creation of museums of sounds?

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Masello Motana continues to carve a niche, as both a social commentator and language historian who has been advocating for the exaltation of the so-called “indigenous languages” of African descent.

Using her craft as a musical experimentalist, she contuses her expressing with various disciplines such as music and action painting, to challengeperformative intervention; question contemporary political dissonances and entrenched obscuration of popular sentiment for the gratification of a privileged few.

An array of parallels she has drawn from the work of renowned artists such as Lefifi Tladi and many SePedi Poets and singers who in a way articulate a close affiliation to African traditions beyond her immediate surrounding. 

There certainly exists a potential insertion of global dynamics of popular mass cultures into contemporary African art, without the categorisation implying an “othering of African artistic practice”.

The performative political reflections that characterise Masello’s Vocal Museum are an unruly venture into the circle of Black Existence, exhibiting how long and antiquated languages can force articulation through an artist, thus find a voice from a distant past that echo within the walled nightmares of contemporary minds.

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But what have the feathers she raffled written home about? Do they find her art as censorable insult to the system? 

Her often vulgarly ostentatious depiction of Malema, Ramaphosa and other political figures should have pissed someone off.

But, she continues her activism with a variety of movements that employ modes of dissidence which are nevertheless irreducibly entangled with realities experienced at grassroots level.

These caricatures of mock affluence, though localised by depictions of mainly South African political iconoclasts, propel new meanings into symbols of history’s icons and their gluttonous self-enrichment projects, dissecting their inflated personages to tell of a contemporary story indistinguishable from the lived and actual situation for many Africans.

Often verbose and extroverted, she often upsets many with her provocative ideas that bother comforts of contemporary morality, she recalls the thespian arrogance of one who commands every stage she struts head wrapped in protest and feminist vigour.

Through stringently scripted monologues, Ms. Motana invites her audiences to reflect on cycles of botched promises, all complimentary exploitation exercised through greed and pillage, and daily consumption of media creeds as evangelical truths about a world realities.

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Forcing the mind to reconsider preconceived ideas of socially constructed falsities, is the evolving role artists like Masello accept in today’s infiltrated social psychology, to be creators of revolutionary and transitional narratives not bound by tradition, calling off the shackles of decency that respects the corrupt and vain.

Her interrogations of how vernacular experiences are communicated through languages, fostering dialogues around colonial vestiges within the sanctity of language systems, these and other barriers she continues to confronts with the lucid tongue of one intent on not only preserving but continuing to affirm misrepresented histories.

In a way, her art seems a “Decolonisation of European Languages” in both methodology and praxis, finding modes to deconstructing for instance, English, to suite and articulate localised realities - thus building a bridge between European artistic communities and the African Diaspora experiences.

And in this way, her readings of local socio-political histories, often become an immersive dissemination of knowledge so dense that at times her hour long performances often leave the viewer with a nostalgia for returning to these imaginary abstractions of flawed realities.

And in my attempt to engage with the nature and outcomes of her artistic practice, whence her opinions are emancipated from the artists herself, I asked Masello a couple of questions with the hope of uncovering more of what is beneath her expressive demeanour.