How did you start working as a duo, and how would you describe your practice?

We met at university, and we shared a similar feeling. It just felt like there was a whole other art world beyond being at that university. It just didn’t connect with it at all. And so in a way, our initial way of working together was a very reactionary kind of thing,  and very much engaged with public space as well. And that shifted over time. I think the thing that’s stayed cool from that period has been this idea of working with the everyday and thinking about sort of everyday black life as a kind of locus of thought and intellectual production. So that continues… We both had jobs and, therefore, were able to just keep working independently. So we would meet every Thursday. We have done that pretty much for the last 15 years and made projects over very long periods of time. Usually, our work is very research-based, and it is very iterative, like a lot of our projects have many, many versions. And it has definitely informed the kind of way of working, in the sense that our work is very project-based. It’s often quite multi-modal —like we’ll have a large discursive programme, we will have sort of exhibition practices, and then we will have writing practice, all related to certain ideas. And that’s because we’re more interested in the exploration of ideas than necessarily developing pictorial representations that go on walls.

When describing your works, reference is often made to “practices of everyday life of black people in South Africa,” but also the defamiliarization with this everyday life. Can you develop more?

I think some of the art comes out from the disquiet we had with our arts education. So, almost feeling like our lives, and black life in general, was kind of underrepresented in our education […] and to have that feeling that what you’re speaking about doesn’t really constitute knowledge can be quite a damaging feeling. But also to have that legitimized by someone who’s nodding as you’re speaking and who has a similar kind of somatic and lip experience as you, and can interpret things that others may not be able to see, and begin to legitimize that as knowledge, I think, is again very powerful.

The way of working around defamiliarizing I think is to look at things that you see again and again and again in a slightly different way […] And so what our practice has really been about is actually taking very familiar practices to us and relooking them and going actually, “hang on, there’s so much more going on here than we ourselves actually even understand.”

An early text that also really informed our thinking is Njabulo Ndebele’s Rediscovery of the Ordinary. That text is kind of an early ‘90s response to kind of moving away from the notion of the spectacular. Ndebele’s critique is that anti-apartheid artistic practices tended to be spectacularizing: they aimed to represent either oppression—thus needing to display the blood and gore of violence—or resistance—thus needing to heroize. As a result, art was always driven by spectacle. Because of the political pressure to resist through artistic practice, ordinary life was not allowed to be explored; artists did not have the luxury of engaging with the everyday or the mundane. This “rediscovery of the ordinary” therefore becomes an effort to reclaim the ordinary as a space of power, depth, and beauty.

I think this notion of defamiliarization is also deeply connected to that, to our strong interest in examining the minute details of everyday life and then diving very deeply into them. For example, taking something as simple as your grandmother’s garden as a starting point, and then going deeper and deeper into it to unpack questions about group areas act, forced removal, photographic archives of Black life, notions of pleasure, and so on.

Belonging here.

You were selected by the South African curator Portia Malatjie to represent South Africa at the 60th Venice Art Biennale, which opened on April 20, 2024. Can you tell me about the work you presented in Venice, “Quiet Ground”?

Our work speaks very specifically to the notions of questions of repair and how we kind of lean on histories of South African land relationships to think about how we create modes of belonging, and repair our relationships to home. And thinking very much about relationships to nature and indigenous knowledge systems, and kind of using oral histories to make those connections. In particular, water. So this work really engages with infrastructures of water from two particular histories that we’ve been looking at.

So the way we’re thinking about water is very much as connected to the land and not as something entirely different from it. So we have been looking at two historical sites. One of them is called Dinokana, an area in the northwest of South Africa, which historically was a water-rich area and quite green. The people of the area often grew surplus food. In the early 1900s, there were successful farmers to the point that they could sell some of their produce […] The Bantustan [system] completely starved this area of the water, which they naturally had access to through two fountains by re-channelling them. So this village is now completely arid, whereas previously it had a close relationship to water.

The other site that we have been thinking through is an area in Mpumalanga which is the historical home of people called the Bokoni, who since about the 1800s have had quite a cycle of loss and removal and displacement from their land, but also have a history of returning to particular portions of their land, trying to begin to reconnect and repair the relationships to land.

So these are the two sides that we are kind of seeing as models for how we can think about repair, because our histories in South Africa of land have been very much about displacement. Even in the 1980s, there are still communities that are being displaced, but there are communities that continue to insist on their relationship with the land.

One of the things we resist in our work is the reductive way of treating South Africa’s history as the black-and-white image of apartheid. The cycles of violence and land dispossession we talk about are not purely colonial. And so these questions about cycles of reparations do not fit so easily into the simple black-and-white narratives in which South Africa can often find itself involved.

Can it be said that your work also refers to the relationship of Indigenous people with the land, or in some way, indigeneity?

Yeah, I mean, I think the sort of side of repair is definitely much more the emphasis, and I don’t know if we talk about indigeneity, but definitely speak to notions of kind of indigenous knowledge systems. So, I’m thinking about where a politics of epistemic power emerges. And thinking also about how relationships to the land sort of span this spiritual, economic,  technical, or scientific, and these kinds of crossings, and grade points, or undisciplined ways of approaching knowledge systems. And definitely kind of thinking about how we might reclaim some of these. So we’re looking through the sound archive in particular to unpack some of those complexities.. I think our work is not so concerned with what constitutes the Indigenous per say, and in part because one of the things we’re also resisting a bit in this work is that the work that we’ve done particularly around Bokoni, but in Dinokana as well, these cycles of violence and land dispossession are not purely colonial […] And so those are kind of like internal displacements […] they’re not the sort of black and white apartheid removal sort of image. And so these questions of cycles of repair don’t fit all that easily into simple narratives of black and white that South Africa can often find itself engaging in.

So the artwork is a sound installation…

So we really have worked in a very multi-modal way, but we’ve also worked in a way that’s very undisciplined. So, the core of our practice is actually driven by the exploration of the ideas, and however that is expressed for us really isn’t always a huge hang up […] But sound has always been something that we have been interested in since 2012, but not so much when we started the “Non-Monuments” project, a kind of oral history, working with archives and going into sound archives. The sort of composed sound is something that is quite new, and somehow people now mistake us as sound artists, which we aren’t. We’re just undisciplined. We just move about where the ideas carry us. That’s where we go. So the “Non Monuments” was about people engaging with underrepresented histories, which were just captured in a sonic way.

We’re looking at Beti and Tswana songs because of the two places we’re working from. If you’re South African, you know the songs immediately. You can sing the songs you know, and you know what those songs mean. You know the politics of those songs. Immediately  […] And yeah, I think if you know those sounds, they also make you feel in a very particular kind of way.

A sound installation, with references to sound archives, that uses Bantu languages, with strong references for those familiar with South Africa.. How do you think “the other” can understand it [in Venice]?

I think, particularly with that work, we didn’t really need people to understand; we needed people to feel. And what we found is that people who wanted to feel, they felt.

What excited you and what concerned you about Venice?

I think what excites us is to do, again, a deep dive into the work we’ve started. This is something we’ve been doing for the past seven years, and the research we’ve been doing for that time has led to multiple projects in the “Project Ejaradini” and the Documenta work [“Mafolofolo”] to a film work that we did [“Menagano”]. And I think what excites us is to explore the potentials of sound, and then that sort of affective response that a lot of people had to our work. We want to explore that a bit further and see what the logical conclusion of that might be. It’s something I think we’ve been working on for the past 14 years,  to try and get beauty and affection into conceptual work. And what happened with “Mafolofolo,” I think, was beautiful because of that, so I wanted to see again how much further we can push that.

I think in terms of a thing that concerns us [ …] is that usually our work is not just an exhibition. Usually, we would enable more discursive engagement, and like we would often try to connect with the local context in some way, meet with people interested in similar themes, and run programs and engage with them. And for various reasons, that’s kind of not looking possible […] It’s the nature of Venice. It’s, I suppose, very much exhibition. So that feels maybe a bit strange for how we usually work. It’s not a big concern; it’s just maybe a bit different. But the intention is very much for this work to come to South Africa and to be shown in South Africa. So I think in the South African context, there’ll be much more capacity for that.

Any expectations?

The expectation is to make it good and then bring it home. That’s what we’re most excited about. I think people think of us a lot of times as just exhibition artists doing large-scale installations, which is nice. It’s one part of our work. But there’s also this very discursive part of our work, which I think in South Africa we’re much more known for. And the work that travels doesn’t always get to be seen here because of the economics of things. We’ve been able to show like two major works, two major works in South Africa: “Ejaradini,” at Johannesburg Art Gallery [JAG], and “Corner Loving” at the Goethe project space.

We do work here a lot, but then it’s often the cheaper stuff that happens here. The work we do here [ South Africa] is experiential, discursive. Kind of convening work. But in terms of actually showing our work, work like the Documenta work, we wanted to bring it home, but we didn’t manage. We’ve done some listening sessions, but we’ve never brought the work back. And that’s purely because the South African scene is so defined by the commercial sector, and the only kind of work you get to see here is stuff that is commercially viable, which is not our case. It just means that it’s really difficult to show anything here that is pricey for us to make. Even just in terms of where you exhibit things, it’s quite challenging. There are not a lot of substantial exhibition spaces that you can show in. We did a work at the JAG and we did it ourselves. So yeah, I think it’s really important for us to finally be able to bring something back because all the work we make is for South African audiences.

We think about our work as sort of operating on many layers. So you can enter into the work at a sort of initial entry layer if you’re from another place and you don’t speak the language or whatever. And the more you know about the context, about the language, about the references, the more you have access to the multiple layers, and, inevitably, the deepest layer is a South African audience. And yet we don’t get to show our work yet. So I think it’s really an important thing for us.

To bring this back and have people listen to the work as intended would be very amazing.

Yeah. We’re learning some lessons from Documenta. We’re even building the islands in such a way that you can unpack it. It’s like IKEA furniture, so you can put it back in a box and bring it home!

It seems like an excellent way to use Venice…