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.

Projections ( A Video Series)

The shack, as a type of residence, has always remained an epitome of depravity and a symbol of downtrodden hopes for shelter that many experience throughout life.

Its thin, corrugated steel walls are no means of isolation; they provide no astute privacy to the occupants and are crude in keeping one’s business concealed.

Sounds from the outside seep through, and as such, a myriad of lives can be related in the silence of the shack, secrets caged by eavesdropping tend to build each community of shack dweller.

With images of protesting residents of another squatter-camp projected on this shack of isolation during this global lockdown, this video poem is a meditative reflection on how isolation can make seeming exterior concerns of life cage and oppress those captured indoors during these times of forced introspection.

Projecting these incensed demonstrations by a populace in revolt, on walls of a single shack, becomes an installed representation with an express resolve to bear testimony to their righteous indignation with the status quo.

These projections become modes of externalizing internal conflicts, beyond acts of merely documenting conflict but remodeling abstractions that delve into elemental inner and outer worlds of man.

Volunteering confinement resembles a method of complicity with the tyrannical prospects of surveillance, but does one interrogate their confinement in such unprecedented times?

And while contradictions between isolation and incarceration might exist – this period conjures up all abhorrent issues of our decaying society, which in turn forces artists into an irreverent view of life’s continued pulsation.

Through this subtle layering of disparate images to create new visual representation of the soul’s conflict with itself, when faced with prospect of immortality through either violence of the state or the virus, a debilitating attempt at reconciliation with fate is achieved.

Any township with its ‘not-so-temporary’ structural decorum of shacks radiates a claustrophobic air of poverty, contorted dreams and unsavory dilemmas of morality for our survivalist needs. The innocuous inner turmoil experienced often by those who reside here, is eventually externalized in other forms of violence and abandonment.

For artists immersed in this existence, there tends to develop a personalized architecture of inner conflict, which then informs the art used to reconfigure all their creative output and responses to crisis.

These video poems are visual reclamation technique of exposing my isolation, as interpreted through creative methods my skill allows.

And as with all transient experiences, this chapter of projected rage, longing, solitudes and awe, remains a testament of a productive idleness in praise of confinement and introspective isolation.

About Fear: PROJECTIONS

Of the many emotions flooding my present state of being, I find fear to be most intriguing to tackle as any character lost on life’s forlorn stage or reality screen.

The expression of unadulterated dread, an existential fright that borders of numbness of a comatose somnambulist, as often a short-lived experience in performances, it is an overbearing weight collapsing to any soul.

Yet, like with those characters on stage or screen, these expressed liminal tensions often require mastering, demanding that a thespian possesses a lasting stigmata, that of a specific momentary scream or mutehood which becomes legend, short and often in cameo, this fear I feel is full of power and abandon.

I recall a fear possessing that character who was forced to rape a prostitute in a film titled SEVEN; which was haunting, because it’s undeniable that the actor’s performance bore more weight than what is often credited and lauded as spectacular.

But these performances also bear something reflective of that innate human scepter, or rather inextricably human responses to sources of fear – in that they often rely of mirroring our unknowable reactions to horrors immaterial.

Why The Series

This series of video poems emerged from this sense of immense fear; an uncanny surrender of a comatose sense of self-preservation; more so when seeing that I am not alone in the lonesome fate.

And as our many lives glare at the maw of an eternal abyss, humanity straying towards an extinction of hopes and crafty solutions, these films are my performative acceptance of isolation at hand.

What are reflections if not recollections of time past within the confines of a presence, alone, oppressed by a force immaculate and innocent, yet unbearably torturous to man.

The sheet, a symbol of such an anomalous nebulous enemy that suffocates any pulsating rhythm of life, this virus has become.

And through this act of invading projections of recalled memories, is a form of morphology, where I as the experiment in isolation attempt to piece through the veils into a reality discarded with the outside.

The squarely framed portal to a life of strife and protests, this window to other consequences of greed and rage as epitomes of human kindness, these are moments for which the struggling shadow beneath the covers is yearning, panting to reach and hold again.

A metaphor of the many souls caged with their demons not embraced, a story that mirrors the eternally solitary strife within all, translated in external efforts of defense, especially when assailed by an unknowable and daunting peril.

With these pieces, the artist articulates his own fears in a daunted final dance that piously accepts death and its finality.