Solidarity in Practice – Part I

What does it mean to support one another as cultural practitioners, and what conditions need to be in place to foster this? For many artists, curators and practitioners, these nuances are shaped as much by notions of accountability, infrastructure, time and labour as they are by variable local conditions. Responding to the prompt of ‘solidarity in practice’ in their respective regional contexts, Kenyan publishing platform Nairobi Print Project and Johannesburg-based collective wherewithall assembled a panel of practitioners from Southern and Eastern Africa for two online conversations in October 2024. The following transcript of the first session draws upon experience from Darlyne Komukama, Sven Christian, Jamal Nxedlana and Sinethemba Twalo, each sharing knowledge and breaking down what solidarity means to them.

CHLOE REID
wherewithall, Johannesburg: 
Solidarity feels like a big word. I’d like to make suggestions for how it might be usefully applied to this conversation. In a recent lecture, activists and organisers, Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt Hendrix discussed how the term is often invoked but rarely analysed and poorly understood: “Solidarity is not synonymous with unity. It contains difference. It’s something that is made or built and has to be cultivated, and it can affect meaningful social transformation, but it can also serve to narrow rather than expand the space of inclusion.” 

I want to imagine that there are forms of interdependence – another useful word here – that do not carry the weight of indebtedness or a ‘tit for tat’ condition. Solidarity, like allyship, implies a precondition of adversity, an enemy or object of opposition. In some cases, this may be the only common ground between two groups looking to support one another. For the purposes of this discussion, I’d like to try to avoid honing in on the adversity that some or all of us face in sustaining our practices and where possible direct emphasis towards models for sharing and supporting one another, looking generously and openly at the ways in which we make do where funding and resources are scarce. Wherewithall is, for me, in part, a way to channel energy away from complaint, from ranting about the limited support for curatorial experimentation, for the difficulty of collaboration and how hard it is to sustain projects that are not market-driven in this environment and for the lack of recognition for the value of these kinds of projects for the entire arts ecosystem.

AMY WATSON 
wherewithall, Johannesburg: 
I want to reflect on two quotes from ‘Support Structures’ by Céline Condorelli and Gavin Wade, which serves as a kind of manual for that which gives support for that which stands behind: 

“He had gone barely half a mile when he met a lame fox and a blind cat walking together like two good friends. The lame fox leaned on the cat, and the blind cat let the fox lead him along so that no one knew who was helping whom. We do not work for gain, answered the fox. We only work to enrich others.”

“To enrich others, repeated the cat. What good people, thought Pinocchio to himself. And forgetting his father, the new coat, the ABC book, and all his good resolutions, he said to the fox and the cat, let us go. I am with you.”

So solidarity or allyship as depicted in the first quote requires that no one knows who is helping whom, or needing to know. It is vital, founded on mutuality, and doesn’t keep score. It’s structured not in forms of codependence and exclusion (which solidarity can be deployed for) but rather interdependence, enabling autonomy and inclusivity. We have all likely experienced a blindness directed towards individuals that work within institutions. Perhaps the blindness directed towards cultural workers is due in part to a feigned institutionality. This performed institutionality may be necessary in order to attract funding and present a reputable and sustainable entity.

But in doing so, we risk misrepresenting ourselves and our humanity as practitioners. How do we institute in ways that amplify our humanity while holding fast to the institutions that realise projects that are greater than ourselves? Is working to enrich others through projects and institution-building not something that enriches ourselves, that makes an arts ecology sustainable and something in which we can figure and project ourselves into? As much as arts and publishing organisations create communal spaces for others, it’s an imperative that we model and realise creative spaces for ourselves. 

Our work at WWA and the work of those presenting today supports artists, curators, writers and publics. What might it mean to ‘go it together’ – for organisations to serve as a wider support infrastructure to each other? How does the act of offering and receiving support implicate us in an economy of supply and demand? How do we allow for the act of giving and receiving support and the act of care to exist outside of a transactional, consumptive framework?

DARLYNE KOMUKAMA 
32 Degrees East, Kampala: 
When 32 Degrees started, it was the only place we could go as artists to meet each other, even if it was just to hang out. They had a fully funded residency program, giving people space to experiment, think and grow without any pressure to produce, which is a rare thing to find in this country where, if you’re trying to make a living off of making art, then you have very little time to do any growth through experimentation. You find the thing that works and you make that thing until you die.

So, when I think about 32, I think about relationships, cultivating relationships and community. I think that solidarity is love in action. In this position, I have access to places, people, other communities, art centres, funding structures. We can channel these resources to the people who need them or to the people for whom that access is hard. For me, that’s what solidarity is. I ask myself: in what way can I put myself in the space that will help my people? I try to not replicate the ways I see this world working, and to try to embody and build the world that I’m trying to see. 

SVEN CHRISTIAN 
Villa Legodi Residency, Johannesburg 
I’m interested in talking about the temporal aspect and understanding how different organisations and people are able to work together in a context that’s not necessarily outcome orientated. Amy mentioned the cat and the fox who support each other without necessarily knowing. I think those talking today all do that, as well as those in the audience. We’re all part of a very small community that stretches far and wide, and we support each other all the time without us necessarily knowing it. That aspect of giving ourselves a bit more freedom to get things wrong, to have open discussions, to have fallibility in the exhibitions or publications we produce – not as end products, but as part of an ongoing process – and not putting the full stop at the end of a particular project. I always find that hard, especially in the context of funding models and projects where you have to produce something. When that runs out, what do you do? How do you continue to support or sustain that work? 

It’s often assumed that solidarity means to provide legs up into something. I think that’s the gatekeeping aspect as opposed to looking for alternatives, like Darlyne was saying, different worlds or different ways of being that aren’t about bringing people into a space necessarily, but about breaking down the dynamics that bolster that space and allowing us to find different forms. Farid Rakun of Ruangrupa said that it is only through making a ‘collective of collectives’ that we can get closer to something that resembles a random forest, a form. My question for today is how do we do that? 

SINETHEMBA TWALO 
NGO (now defunct), Johannesburg 
I’ll begin by making a disclaimer: Due to my own experiences of solidarity, I’m not sure whether I can fully account for conditions that allow solidarity to flourish. But I’ll begin by talking about my experiences within nothing gets organised (NGO) and then thinking through a philosophy of collectivity, which I’ve been writing on. NGO was conceptualized as an experiment in institutional forms. Part of its working ethos took into consideration the necessary nature of collaborative and collective practice in Johannesburg. Bearing this in mind, our initial intellectual preoccupations as a collective noted the limited support for young practitioners as well as the compromised funding possibilities for visual art making processes in South Africa. The space and platform sought to address these issues by providing an alternative to current institutional forms and proposed a different way of working, one which emphasized self-organising and slow labor as modalities. What began as a collective project to address some of the violences within our art ecosystem in Johannesburg specifically quickly devolved into reality of varied personalities where individual proclivities and assumptions overwhelmingly hindered the predicted intentions of working differently within our field. Our situation became no different to the circumstances we attempted to critique. As our name implied, nothing got organised. As I emotionally worked through the failures of our pseudo institutional form and tried to make sense of the ruins of our once close and intimate friendship, an issue that lingers in my mind is whether it was simply a question of method. 

So I’ll then move from that and just maybe think about the collective hum as a proposition. In her seminal text, ‘Listening to Images’, Tina Campt deliberates on the sensorial gravity of a hum as an effective gesture, stating that, “A hum can be mournful […] It can celebrate, animate, or accompany. It can also irritate, haunt, grate, or distract.” 

A hum can possibly materialise a chorus of voices, its sonorous release embodying a collective and cumulative sentiment. Simultaneously, a hum can possibly sound a turn elsewhere despite the insurmountable experience of life and ruins. Humming, as a felt bodily sensation, is associated with a host of healing properties. It is an effective stress reliever regulating nervous systems. If we think of the collective as a body and the nervous system as the various components that bolster and sustain its well-being, what are the possibilities of the hum as an emerging provocation for engaging contemporary otherwise? 

This rumination on the hum as a possible point of entry within which one might formulate a different understanding of collaborative practice is influenced in part by the more-than-human acoustic language of bees, as well as the pervasive humming of generators installed due to South Africa’s ongoing energy crisis. In particular, their gesturing to burnout and exhaustion as symbolic characteristics of the present. My intuitive fixation with the hum is broached in this context of the possibility to build a different philosophy of collaboration, one not foreclosed by an overdetermined form of institutionality, one might say. It allows one to reflect on collaboration as a space of effective encounter and or an affected laboratory of senses where the concept of becoming research is foregrounded. 

Having taken into consideration the failures that ensued within nothing gets organised as a collective, thinking differently about what it would propose as a platform in relation to conditions in Johannesburg, I began to turn elsewhere and one of those projects was the World Weather Network, where I then began working with Amy Watson in order to commission artists to realise projects within the context of Johannesburg and subsequently Cape Town. That was also a way in which to rethink what the institution would become, taking into consideration the conditions – or rather the failure – of our collaborative modes. I still don’t know how to broach the possibility of talking about collaborative practice and solidarity without also highlighting that, at times, what you envision or what you might want from collaboration might not necessarily yield what you’re looking for.

JAMAL NXEDLANA
Bubblegum Club, Johannesburg: 
Bubblegum Club has three divisions. We’ve got a digital publication, which is what we started out as, reporting broadly on arts and culture from South Africa, the continent, and also the diaspora. Out of the digital publication, a creative agency emerged. And this is essentially how we fund the whole cultural organisation through design or through content and visual communications. And then, we have our foundation, which is the US division. It’s a public benefit division of the organisation focused on supporting and developing the creative sector in South Africa and beyond.

While thinking about solidarity, one of the things that kept on coming back to me was this idea of mutual benefits. I feel like it’s a really important factor for collaboration to happen. How do collaborations serve the goals and objectives of the respective organisations who are cooperating? Part of this idea of mutual benefit is alignment. For example, are there similar or shared values or aesthetics? Is there a similar audience that we’re trying to speak to? There also need to be terms of engagement. The situations where there was successful collaboration was in instances where the terms of engagement had been set out.

Obviously those terms depend on what the project, or what the collaboration would be. Setting out the roles and responsibilities, usage terms and copyrights have been very important in successful collaboration for us. Setting out these terms helps with accountability, which I’ve often found is a challenge when working at a less institutional, more independent level.

I think it’s very important for organisations to know what they want from a relationship, from collaboration and to be able to communicate this with other organisations that we’re collaborating with – to have an honest conversation to establish whether we are in this relationship for the right reasons.

NIKLAS OBERMANN
Nairobi Print Project, Nairobi: 
I want to circle back to accountability and gatekeeping. Often when you work in an independent format, you work with an interpersonal level of trust and faith, sometimes not acknowledging power relationships that are still there. With this in mind, the question would be: who are you accountable to? How do you create structures within your organisations that make sure that you’re also responsible to each other and have checks and balances?

DARLYNE KOMUKAMA: For us, it’s made a little easier because we have a membership model where members pay nominal fees. We have these monthly meetings where everything that gets decided or done at 32 is done at a group level. So it has to be more than just the staff in agreement. We’re going into residences next year, so we’ve put out an open call, but the selection committee will be made up of previous artists in residence. When we were doing the building, even for the architectural plans, we had a committee made up of members who came in and talked about what they would need as artists and as people using the space. The accountability is built in. There are some times when we do take an executive decision, but when that has happened, it’s because a funder is asking for too much, then it is not worth it. Let’s just give them back their money.

CHLOE REID: Accountability requires a consistent checking in on ‘why are we doing this?’ Often this is brought on by the challenge of trying to run something without any funding or support, because it really doesn’t feel great when there is no support for something and you’re also not sure if anyone even wants what you’re doing. With the publishing side, with each round we try to get better at working out what writers need, or the kinds of opportunities that writers and editors don’t get. Something that comes up constantly is: who is this for? And I come back to: what do I think is missing as a practitioner myself? What would help me, and what would help my peers? 

AMY WATSON: We’ve had projects where we commissioned artists and curators and things might have gone awry. And so we would initiate a debrief. It’s three very simple questions that are non-combative.They’re not about assigning blame. They’re about understanding expectations and where we might have let each other down. Answering these questions brings about self-reflection and invites an opportunity for repair: What did I expect? What actually happened? And what would I do differently? Very simple questions that everybody answers together, and prepares for ahead of a meeting. It’s been really, really helpful in reflecting back on the institution, allowing it not to be a static thing, but something that’s constantly reflecting on itself and evolving its own methods and approaches.

SVEN CHRISTIAN: I’ve found myself noticing over the last year that my understanding of accountability has shifted. The artist is the first person you’re accountable to in the residency context and then it’s your team, it’s your family, it’s the people in your immediate vicinity. But there’s something about having to push back against something that comes to mind when we employ the word solidarity. There’s more of an inherent kind of struggle. I think Françoise Vergès was the person who said that solidarity is imagining the connection with other worlds or people that we will never meet, that we will never know, but with whom we feel a total connection. 

SARA HALLATT (audience member): I’m curious in light of some of the pressures everyone feels in their positions and the self-sacrifice we’ve spoken about with the kind of work that we’re doing. Have people found successful strategies that have worked for them, to counteract some of those issues? 

DARLYNE KOMUKAMA: This is interesting for me because I’ve only been at this job for a year and I consider this position right now to be my self care. This is me finding a way to do the work that the world so desperately needs. This past year I’ve felt so grateful to have a place to show up every day and do something, to put a break in this world that we’re trying to build while the other world burns around us. Thankfully, the job itself is not taking advantage. You have to take your time off. I have ADHD, and I was used to working on a project and finishing it – this idea of powering through until I’m done, and then I’ll rest. In my first few months here, I had to realise that at 5 PM I close my computer and I come back the next day. 

JESS ATIENO (Nairobi Print Project): I have a related question. What small organisations do, especially within the arts, is extremely important in creating space and resources for people. Someone talked about burnout – there’s so much to do, with so little money, it’s overwhelming sometimes. So, how do we practice self care within a precarious field? 

SINETHEMBA TWALO: In terms of self care, I dis-identify from experiences where I feel instrumentalised in some form. But in working within the context of an academy, there are certain violences that one has to negotiate within that institution. So despite thinking that universities are the possible space for one to be able to undertake slow labour and have a moment to reflect more intensely on their research, you’re still beholden to the demands of the institution. So I can’t really answer that question. I can just say that it’s contingent on one’s individual experience.

AMY WATSON: I think there’s a lot to be said for saying “no” or “I prefer not to”. I’ve been practising that for the last four months actively, and I’ve found it hugely empowering to just say no. I’ve had to practice saying no, because my instinct is to serve others. I think I derive a lot of my sense of self worth through helping other people. I think I’m perfectly suited to be a curator because bending over backwards for other people is supposedly how I derive joy! It’s kind of a form of self harm? In Kim Gurney’s book, ‘Panya Routes’, she speaks about organisations that have fallow moments and don’t programme back to back. Suddenly we’re feasting and we’re programming furiously, and then we’re in famine and our fields are fallow, and we’re quiet and withdrawn. Maybe that structure is how we’ve come to cope with burnout. But I also recognise there’s a certain privilege in that. Sometimes we can only say no because we’re able to, because we have what’s known as a “fuck you fund” that we keep for ourselves that protects us from having to be exploited by others or having to take on work we don’t want to do.

SINETHEMBA TWALO: Withdrawal can be generative also. It’s not a wholly negative thing. 

NIKLAS OBERMANN: I’ve always had that mindset of, like, you can only produce great work when you’re in tremendous pain. So I start with the pain before I actually do work, which is not helpful!

NAADIRA PATEL (audience member): Could some of you go a bit more in-depth into thinking about hierarchies in collectives, or in collaborations, and how decisions are made collectively or individually? This question comes from having been in a collective that fell apart, and finding myself thinking about how we try so hard to undo institutional forms of working that are often too structured. 

DARLYNE KOMUKAMA: You sort of have to rewire your brain, to rewire how long it’s gonna take. Everything takes so long, and that’s okay. Just trying to find a day when all of you across a million time zones can meet at a time that isn’t too late for someone or too early for someone. A lot of it is just to allow this time. Speed is capitalism.

SINETHEMBA TWALO: Allowing people to function or do what they are best at as opposed to having expectations for them to fulfill things that they don’t necessarily want to do or have the capacity to do. I was also thinking about institutional forms, taking into consideration what Chus Martínez proposes in the ‘Octopus in Love’. She thinks of the institution as taking on the characteristics and physiological makeup of an octopus, in that its tentacles can function independently of the others. And imagining an institution as decentralised or a collective that can function autonomously, but also be responsive to what the rest of the body is doing. Another possibility is thinking through Bernard Stigler and his concept of trans individuation as opposed to the individuated ‘I’, or the collective ‘we’. Being in a constant process of negotiation and conversation with each other, as opposed to expecting yourself to collapse fully into collective sentiment or having your individual proclivities overriding what is needed for that collective. 

NIKLAS OBERMANN: [Reading question from the chat] Is there a contradiction between working in a more traditional structure and still doing politically and aesthetically challenging work? 

SINETHEMBA TWALO: Not necessarily. I think you can work experimentally, while also being conditioned – due to funding opportunities or various other things – into imagining yourself in more conservative modes. You keep working it out as you go along. At times those traditional modes of working can actually be quite generative, allowing for you to engage your practice as an artist.

DARLYNE KOMUKAMA: We’re really well placed to do this as an independent organisation. So many of the arts institutions that we’ve been holding up don’t actually have as much power as they claim to. The people who work in them hold a politics that is at odds with the organisation itself. So, as independent organisations, we can actually say the things that we want to say and do the work that we want to do. I can do the work I want to do and find the funding that will let me do that. And if there isn’t any, then we can pool our resources in a way that allows me to still make space for my artists and my community to do the work.

‘Solidarity in Practice’ took place as part of our OtherNetwork’s 2024 season of local productions, and was initiated by was produced by Samantha Modisenyane. The above transcript has been edited from its original form for length and clarity. For a version featuring additional commissioned interludes, visit Nairobi Print Project.