The ICA Podcast

Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview African artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works. 

Our fifth episode features an interview with Aika Swai about her performance lecture titled Uncharted Dialog, which she presented at the ICA Scholars showcase last year. In presenting this work she speaks about her approach to what she calls ‘languaging’ in her work and the value...

Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works. 

In our fourth episode of the season, artists Nelisiwe Xaba and Mocke Jansen Van Veuren speak about their work creating FAKE N.E.W.S, a multidisciplinary project integrating performance and digital art. The work explored misinformation, conspiracy theories and science denialism rampant on social media...

Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works. 

Our third episode features an interview with artist Bernard Akoi-Jackson who speaks about his site-specific work, DESTINATIONS - With Anthem for The Union (…and where, from birth, would they have berthed, should a dearth of destinations have prevailed?).

During Ghana’s independence from Britain in 19...

Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works. 

Our second episode features an interview with internationally renowned artist Gabrielle Goliath provides rare and compelling insight into the research and creation of her monumental and acclaimed work Elegy, which had one of its first iterations at the ICA Live Art Festival in 2017 . 

El...

Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works. 

Our first episode features multi-disciplinary artist Kenza Berrada about her work "Boujloud" (the man of skins) which was performed at the Live Art Network Africa Gathering at UCT’s Hiddingh Campus in February of 2023. 

Artist Kenza Berrada speaks about her work 'Boujloud' Man of Skins w...

“And that title, Reclaiming the Poetics of Indigenous Horns was basically just trying to bring together this art form I so much adore with these instruments I also have so much respect and love for, and also using those two mediums to like, redefine and re-elevate what these instruments were, are and can still be.”

Multi-instrumentalist and creative writer Kolawole Gbolahan reflects on his 2022 musical performance Reclaiming the Po...

“There's a school of thought that says indigenous knowledges need to be protected. And what that often means or implies is that it has to be concealed, and not shared in any way with anyone. And I'm not sure I completely agree with that. I see and I totally understand and appreciate the need to conceal. But [I] also understand that one of the ways of preservation is to increase access to those knowledges...”

Artist and cultural pro...

“How I came about that title [ukuNqula kukuThandaza] was, I was really very much interested in the phenomenon of recitation and prayer, within an indigenous ecology of knowing, that really focuses on sound as a medium and a technology to activate energy of umoya, but to activate energy in whatever sense… Then it was centralising that activation of energy through the process of reciting and prayer.” 

Performer and multi-instrumental...

​​"Ingoduko yamaNkazana, for me, became a conversation with myself and my ancestry. Because I wanted them to explain to me as to, when my body is brought home to its final resting place, whenever that day comes, how will the family and the friends and the rest of the world begin the conversation of speaking about this person's death? Who’s going to bathe my corpse? Are you going to remove certain things? Will you be ashamed of me l...

“We are everywhere is a performative explication of some of the theoretical concepts and how they found themselves as public interventions through last year. It was public interventions, not interventions in school. So it was important to be like, my practice is in the public and a public that goes beyond the institution. And it's also a practice of movement, like marching, that asks of the audience to move together from one place ...

"At the time, when people were talking about the land issue in South Africa, yes, I was for it. But it's only when it hits you personally, that you’re like, okay, how do we then talk about this? And how do I resolve this in my own personal space?... So that's always been an issue. And this investigation in this performance was an investigation of land, at home in the Eastern Cape."

In this second episode of Season 3, visual artist ...

"I saw this thing that was growing literally on gravel; this flower that had popped on gravel. It was the most gorgeous thing… And I use that metaphor, or that image of that seed growing on rugged [land], arid sometimes, but specifically concrete, and I kept on thinking about that. And I'm like, well, isn't this what we're doing as queer people and femme people, women in this country? Isn't this what we’re doing every day, when we ...

Welcome to Season 3 of The ICA Podcast!

In this Season – hosted by writer Nkgopoleng Moloi – each episode explores a performance featured at the 2022 ICA Live Art Festival. Join us over the next 7 episodes as each artist brings their performance to life, and reflects along the way on how their upbringing has shaped their practice. We'll be diving into:

• I AM by Tandile Mbatsha; 
• Between my finger and thumb by Asemahle Ntlonti; 
...

“The body remembers more than through the head. Nerve and vessel, artery and synapse, all carry information from point to point, suffusing muscle, bone and cell with a plethora of image and sound, a flicker of light, a scream or a touch. Sometimes we wish that a delete button might annihilate some of this information. But the body instead stores relentlessly, file upon file, bottomless cabinets of memory, individual and collective…...

“When my grandmother died, I thought about all the stories that she took with her in the ground, and I thought a lot about how, in Romania, you have so many people having such interesting memories and interesting pasts that are not archived… And I started to record things because I talk a lot with people – I think that's what makes me happiest, you know, to encounter people and learn from them and exchange things.”

Romanian interdi...

“Post 1994, it felt like you were being made part of a body national, and there was something slightly and softly violent about it... Utopia, balloons, zebras, multi colours – all of those things, for me, were used to be a very dark critique of the utopia that we thought we built in South Africa for ourselves. The one that we burn people for.”

Performance artist Athi-Patra Ruga takes us on an immersive journey through the sights, s...

“I just knew that I wanted the audience to be the catalyst, or driver, of the action. I don't know if it's from a particular type of training in theatre, but there's always so much pressure to do, and to fill the space with actions and sounds and whatever. And we find the audience doing the complete opposite. They're just like, sitting there quite still and quietly. And I knew I wanted to kind of flip that around.”

Winner of the 20...

“In the beginning, I began to think: ‘Okay, how can I save the world?' Now, I'm more like: ‘What kind of world do I want to live in?’ And how can my expressions become a language that begins these worlds. As a proposition of another kind – I think what Fred Moten calls ‘another kind of presencing’; another way of presencing yourself. I'm proposing a way of presencing oneself.”

Join us as we journey with choreographer and academic N...

“Associating Jesus with whiteness, associating Jesus with the upper class, the way that this person gets utilised sociopolitically – it's completely antithetical to everything that he was, and everything that he ministered. And so, I guess, I just needed to re-script that, and the way that I could re-script that was by projecting or taking my biography and putting it into the life of Jesus.”

Performance artist, writer and cultural ...