Rechewed

1.3.2012

"Rechewed", is a project by The Center for Historical Reenactments (CHR) which was a second installment in a series of research ‘appendixes’ emerging from "Xenoglossia, a research project" (November 2010-September 2011). "Rechewed" featured a film by Andrés Carvajal and Sandra Gross "Veejays, The Movie" (53 Min) alongside an exploratory installation and performance by Mbali Khoza titled "Chapter1: A Carnival."

Developed as a series of process-based investigations, actions, presentations, and conversations "Xenoglossia" focused on language as a domain of contradictions and misunderstandings, a space laden with tensions and a sphere of transformation. It gathered processes that investigated historical tensions and spaces of mutual understanding referenced from artistic practices, academic and literary writings, politics, and the media. In September 2011 the project was included in "A Terrible Beauty is Born", the 11th Lyon Biennial.

"Na Ku Randza" (September 2011), the first ‘appendix’ was a result of Xenoglossia. This project emerged as a series of site-specific public interventions that took place in locations seen through the CHR window in Doorfontein, Johannesburg. With "Na Ku Randza" – (which means “I love You”) the question of languages: the possibilities, impracticalities and tensions existing within them was extended to public sites bearing memories of conflict and performed through acts of love. The project featured commissioned interventions by Nothando Mkhize, Keleketla! Library, Breeze Yoko and CHR member Kemang Wa Lehulere.

Rechewed is a concept referenced from Brazilian concrete poet, critic and translator Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003). It is based on the notion that translation as a process goes beyond shifting a text from one language to another. It is rather a passage enabled by an imagined secret formula for the creation of new meaning - a space in which the value of the original is reassessed. What de Campos advocated for is the critical reading of histories; an approach towards a poetic rewriting; a rechewing being an operation that can be generated through appropriation, de-hierarchisation and deconstruction.

In the film "Veejays, The Movie" Carvajal and Gross have captured the Dar es Salaam Veejaying scene; a movement of translators who reinterpret pirated foreign movies into Kiswahili in front of a live audience. It is a movement that enables an impossible yet necessary search for equivalence between the foreign and the local in which the bodies, voices and actions of the Veejays endeavor to open up a space of mutual identification.

Khoza on the other end engrossed herself in various investigative missions into the impossibilities of sifting through the work and legacy of an artist who self-proclaimingly admitted his inclination to disagree with everything and everyone, the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera (1952-1987). In the same mode of disassociation, Khoza entered into an unending reworking of concepts. Probing obsessively and sometimes in the most awkward places for information, connections, knowledge, Khoza encountered dead-ends and historical edges which she traversed in order to create ‘new’ meaning. She digs herself into a big hole, she collects and discards and is led to other references, notably that of the South African writer Lesego Rampolokeng (aka Papa Ramps). What remains is an invitation, a series of propositions, doubts, questions framed by references from film characters, music and literature.