To celebrate and commemorate our ‘Home Is Where the Art Is’ exhibition, which ends on 31 October 2021, ‘Something in Return’ will se an ensemble of musicians, including Esther Marie Pauw, Jill Trappler, Charles Palm and Hashtag_blacknoise (Jacques Van Zyl), and led by veteran Garth Erasmus, gather in the Zeitz MOCAA Atrium to engage with the acoustical characteristics of the space and showcase a special programme of structured, improvised music.
The musicians will engage in improvisation and a workshop followed by a FREE improvised performance with composer Garth Erasmus on ghorrah bow, overtone flute, saxophone and live electronics; Esther Marie Pauw on flute; Jill Trappler on the weaver’s loom (spinning wheel); Charles Palm on the analog synth and electronics; and hashtag_blacknoise on proto electronics.
Date and time:
Saturday, 30 October
Workshop: 2-5.30 pm
Performance: 6-7 pm
Cost:
Tickets are limited for the free performance at 6 pm. Click here to book.
Witness the live workshop taking place from 2 to 4.30 pm with your general admission ticket or purchase a membership here.
Participant Biographies:
Garth Erasmus is a visual artist and musician based in Cape Town, South Africa. In the Eighties, he made a name for himself as an anti-Apartheid artist with a major collection of his work in the Smithsonian Museum of African Art. As a cultural worker and community activist, Erasmus is a founding member of numerous community-based arts organisations, including Vakalisa Arts Associates, Thupelo Artist Workshop, Community Reflections and Greatmore Street Artists’ Studios. He is also a member of the Khoisan activist group Kho Khonnexion, who toured European theatre festivals in 2018-2019 with the production House of Falling Bones, based on the Namibian genocide of the Nama and Herero people by German colonialists. Erasmus has recently been appointed as a research fellow at the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University.
Esther Marie Pauw is an affiliate of the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at Stellenbosch University and a member of the Africa Open Improvising collective. Her artistic research focuses on curating music and sound connection to the geopolitics of space and decolonial music practices.
Jill Trappler has worked as an artist and craft person in various projects over the past 30 years, including Thupelo Art Workshop and Greatmore Street Artists’ Studios, both of which she is a founding member, and Bag Factory Studios. As a weaver and spinner by trade, Trappler explores the dynamics of colour-mixing, textures and surfaces, and has worked throughout the Cape Peninsula teaching various crafts and art-making processes to create employment opportunities.
Charles Palm uses light, sound and immersive multimedia installations to weave and project experiential narratives that include shadow puppetry, resonant low-fired clay installations, projection mapping and live soundscapes into ethereal performances. Palm draws inspiration from folklore at the historic intersections of African and Southeast Asian cultures affected by early globalisation and aims to deepen and develop these modes of storytelling to further contribute towards effective communication and negotiation between human and contemporary colonial phenomena globally.
In a profoundly unsilent world, noise stands in for silence. Amplified to a roar, stretched, compressed and filtered, it becomes a thundering black backdrop to how small experience becomes by having to filter out essential detail. On the other hand, black noise is a space – the negative roar left behind after the sudden ending of any continuous sound field or experience. It is not unlike the state sought in the practice of meditation but more immanent and beyond one’s control – and commonly only of short duration. hashtag_blacknoise (Jacques Van Zyl) is a performative investigation into these unsilent silences.