DEATH IS PART OF THE PROCESS

DEATH IS PART OF THE PROCESS
6 channel sound installation, video, crochet textile, risograph poster
26:10 min 

DEATH IS PART OF THE PROCESS is an installation informed by a research project with various collections in the Mayibuye archives; a historical archive that depicts multiple facets of the resistance struggle waged against Apartheid, both within and outside the borders of South Africa.

Primarily an engagement with the audio, oral history and photographic collections, this project draws in ‘the researcher’, ‘the historian’, ‘the artist’, and mostly notably, ‘the history teacher’ to consider the various slippages and tensions in the ways (contested) histories and unfreedoms are told, remembered, packaged and narrativised by different stakeholders. A central part of the process of creating this work was the facilitation of workshops alongside Hannah Carrim, with high school history teachers and educators who themselves train teachers how to teach the past. In this workshop, we asked what comes in the wake of catastrophe; How might we work with difficult sources? How might we choose material that facilitates both an intellectual understanding of the past, whilst also privileging an emotional reckoning with it? How might sound help us (and students) grapple with the remnants of such catastrophe? What are the ways the archive foreshadows the present?

The project, and indeed the installation considers the chronopolitical; the politicisation and control of time — how we reckon with the past, present and future, and what is at stake in this process. The project asks what it means to reckon with both the grief in the archive, and the grief of working with painful histories that cannot be neatly fixed in the past, but are very much ongoing. The grief of suspended potentialities. This work explores what it means to be “in struggle”, and grapples with the disjunctures enmeshed in the archival machinery that speak to this condition of the simultaneous “fleeting freedoms” and the “not yet free” of the present.

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Informed by a theorisation with the necrographic, DEATH IS PART OF THE PROCESS is a sonic experiment in escaping dichotomies — interiority/exteriority, self-determination/affectability, temporality/spatiality — and the claims historical Time makes for archival transparency. It is a refusal of transparency. The installation is a meditation on the ways in which anarchival work is both a sort of death-work to follow from Saidiya Hartman, and also wake work to follow from Christina Sharpe. It is a “plotting, mapping, and collecting [of] the archives of everyday Black immanent and imminent death”, a negotiation with the horizons of death, and also a provocation for the insistence of life. Death is not the end.

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The voices that appear in the original recordings are mostly those of ordinary South Africans who found themselves on various axes of what it meant to be ‘human’ under apartheid law. Throughout the installation we hear from school children, university students, cultural workers and political activists who were in exile, members of the apartheid defence force, as well as those who were part of the armed resistance against apartheid. The images that appear in the poster and the video work, whilst they may look like images taken at protest rallies, are in fact images of mass funerals, which were often banned or heavily militarised by the apartheid state.

To sit with grief is to be in struggle.

It is important to note that the core collection of the Mayibuye archives was initially donated by the International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF) — a fund set up during the Treason Trial of 1956 to support those 156 political prisoners accused of treason for protesting against apartheid. (It is some of these prisoners that appear in the back of the van in the takeaway posters in the installation). The fund paid all legal expenses and looked after the families of those on trial, and went on to set up additional international solidarity campaigns, research and publication operations abroad. Over a period of 25 years IDAF smuggled £100 million into South Africa to support the defence of thousands of political activists and to provide aid for their families while they were in prison. The photographic and sound material that found its way out of South Africa, into IDAF solidarity publications and campaigns, and then subsequently back into what is now called the IDAF collection in the archives were initially smuggled out of South Africa along the same routes that were used by the armed resistance and those who went into exile. 

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Whilst the installation hinges on audio and visual material from apartheid South Africa, it is also a reminder of the ways in which apartheid was and remains a global project. Indeed the past and the political present remain deeply intertwined.

DEATH IS PART OF THE PROCESS is dedicated to the thousands of South African political prisoners whose stories we don’t know, as well the thousands of Palestinian political prisoners, and their families, who continue to face the brunt of the Israeli occupation.
Struggle, too, is a global project. 

* DEATH IS PART OF THE PROCESS takes its title from the novel of the same name written by H. Bernstein

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Archival material courtesy of the UWC—Robben Island Mayibuye Archives 
Composition, research, workshop facilitation & vocals: Zara Julius
Workshop & research collaborator, vocals: Hannah Carrim
Guitar & vocals: Mpumi Mcata
Mix and mastering: Richard Rumney
Sample: ”Breath and Synth Experiment” by Thandl Ntuli with Carlos Niño
Performed by Thandi Ntuli with Carlos Niño
© Ndlela Music Company and Third Side Music Inc 2023
®2023 USA
Under exclusive license to International Anthem Recording Co for the World excluding Africa

Click here for the full archival reference list