Athi-Patra Ruga by WHATIFTHEWORLD

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The government of the Versatile Kingdom of Azania is a difficult one to categorize under traditional definitions... At best, Azania is a semi-absolute monarchy whereby most authority is vested in the reigning monarch. Historically, since the reign of the VERSATILE QUEEN IVY, Azania has been a matriarchy where the throne was occupied solely by a non-dynastic line of VERSATILE QUEENS.

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Each successive Queen was chosen by the previous monarch from the covenant known as the ABOHDADE. From time to time during this period of Matriarchy, Azania had a parliament whom derived their authority from powers vested in it by the VERSATILE QUEEN, powers that she could effectively restrict, expand, or completely take away and dissolve parliament all together.

Since the death of THE ELDERS, the realm now known as Azania has been ruled by a SACRED VERSATILE QUEEN (with only one exception when an ELDER ruled the country).

Today, as created through the SACRED VERSATILE QUEEN IVY, the monarch serves as the sole authority within the Kingdom. A Noble Conclave, seated by the various noble houses of the country, serves as a privy council to the monarch.

Since that time, the title has been maintained and passed on from one woman to the next, in a nondynastic line of SACRED VERSATILE QUEENS.

This title was bestowed upon the first SACRED VERSATILE QUEEN, Ivy, by Pope Francis, in the year 2014 .

Each house controls a territory within the Kingdom of Azania, and in the name of the monarch, rules over this local territory.

Stipulations at the time where that the SACRED VERSATILE QUEEN be not a virgin, and that this be maintained as the ruling Queen was to emulate that of the once powerful, Mother of the First Elder.

Land can be distributed and re-distributed between the houses at the ruling monarchâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s discretion. The exact and extent of the authority each noble house wieldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in their territory is also at the discretion of the ruling monarch...

Each successive SACRED VERSATILE QUEEN since the time of the FIRST VERSATILE IVY, has been chosen by their predecessor from a covenant of nuns known as the ABODADE, women devoted to live their lives as The Mother of the First Elder.

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The SACRED VERSATILE QUEENâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S power has, since the foundation of the Kingdom, been absolute.

It also exercises most of its power through the various ministers of the Royal Cabinet.

From time to time, the monarchy has bestowed certain legislative powers to legislative bodies, the last being a bicamerial parliament.

FULL TITLE OF THE SACRED QUEEN:

Today however, the monarchyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s power is absolute and the crown serves as both executive and legislative body of the Kingdom. Both Head of State as well as Head of Government, the SACRED QUEEN is the sole force steering the direction of the Kingdom. Among the crowns absolute power, the SACRED QUEEN determines and sets the domestic and foreign policy of the Azania, decrees laws, resolves problems arises in all levels of government, and grant pardons.

Her Royal Versatile Majesty,..............by the Grace of *** bleep sound *** , Sacred Versatile Queen and Autocrat of All Azania, of Saint Alexandria, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Sacred Queen of Maseru, Sacred Queen of Lobamba, Sacred Queen of Mbabane, Bhisho, Port Elizabeth, Bloemfontein, Pietermaritzburg, Durban, Polokwane, Nelspruit, Rustenburg, Kimberley, Saint Helena Isle, Ascension Isle, Protector of the Azanian Church, Keeper of the Prophecies of FUTURE WHITE WOMEN , Revered Mother of the sisterhood of ABODADE, Matriarch of the Noble Conclave, and blessed Mother to the Azanian people. The Sisterhood of ABODADE is a nunnery

In practice, the monarchy makes most decisions from the advice of a privy council, the Noble Conclave.

whose establishment was originally designed for the sole purpose of providing a heir

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for the throne. The sisters of the order model themselves after the FIRST MOTHER OF ELDERS. They are seen with great respect in the eyes of the populace. Sisters of the order can be distinguished by the veils which they constantly wear and are so thick that no one can see their faces. It is actually against the law to see a Sister’s face. The order is head by a DADEMKHULU of whom is the right-hand of the SACRED QUEEN and was historically the SACRED VERATILE QUEEN’S heir. However, since the SACRED QUEEN is now of a single bloodline, the Sisterhood’s role has changed. Though they still service the Queen, they no longer provide an heir for her and continue hold little power or influence within the New Azania.

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SAN FRANCISCO JOHANNESBURG VENICE All rights reserved, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, electronic, photocopying, or other means without the prior permission of the copyright holders.

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Printed in South Africa Design by Ben Johnson

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THE F.W.W.O.A SAGA EXHIBITION

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85 - 142

Unpicking the Azanian Seam

Fated to Pretend

Mary Corrigall 87 - 92

Natasha Norman 145 -150

A View from Here:Atlantis to Azania

When Sheroes Appear

Frank Smigiel 151 - 154

Missla Libsekal interviews Athi-Patra Ruga 155 - 166 XXV

2012

RF OB OR SC MA UR A G R A H A M STOW N

Performance Stills: Performa Obscura & Performa Obscura, Provost Jail Making Way exhibition, Grahamstown Produced in collaboration with Mikhael Subotzsky Site specific performance duration variable Photographer: Ruth Simbao

2010

C A P E TOW N

Performance Stills: Study I YOUNGBLACKMAN project space, Cape town 2010 Duration Variable

2013

T MA HE NI FE S

C A P E TOW N

Performance Stills: The Manifesto 2013 Performance with two performers, UV lights and installation. Duration Variable Photographer: Ashley Walters

2014

OF EL D AZ ER AN IA SA N F R A N C I S C O

Performance Stills: The Elder of Azania 2014 Performance withXandra Barra, Dia Dear, Monique Jenkinson, Brontez Purnell, and Mica Sigourneys, costumes and audio visual material commissioned by SFMOMA & Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts as part of the exhibition Public Intimacy Photography: Ian Reeves

‘THE ELDER O F A Z A N I A’

Animation Stills: The Elder of Azania 2014 commissioned by SFMOMA & Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts as part of the exhibition Public Intimacy

2010

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JOHANNESBURG

Performance Stills: X -HOMES Hillbrow Johannesburg, 2010

2013

T FO HE UN D MY IN TH G VENICE

Performance Stills: The Founding Myth 2013 Site specific performance, five performers, audio and props Duration Variable South African Pavilion, 55 La Biennale di Venezia, Venice

2013 / 2014

TH E FW WO A SA GA EXHIBITION

Unpicking the Azanian Seam 1 2 3 4 5

By Mary Corrigall

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state, where ideas of liberation, unity and equality became synonymous with Azania. This idea was concretised in the Black Consciousness Movement slogan “One Azania, One Nation.” 4

“Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined,” Benedict Anderson 1 . As with most nations Azania is both real and fictional. For the archaeologists of the 1930s (and today – Azania is the name of a journal dedicated to archaeology on the African continent) Azania referred to the remains of an ancient, pre-colonial society buried in the soil of Mapungubwe in the Limpopo province in South Africa. No doubt this idea is what fed Evelyn Waugh’s projections of a fictional Azania in Black Mischief (1932), an imaginative primitivist literary product engineered to demonstrate that “our twentieth-century civilization is a decaying corpse.” 2

This utopian dream that Azania presented might have ushered in hope for the future but its unattainability planted a seed of dispossession, a sense of deep loss for this absent place at odds with a reality governed by apartheid policies. This sentiment is captured in a collection of elegiac poems titled Azanian Love Song by journalist and poet Don Mattera. Reflecting on the titular poem Es’kia Mphahlele observes “the slow grinding pain in an African mother who raises children for a distant future far beyond her grasp.” 5 This sense of dispossession is not misplaced, but rather that Azania has become a shorthand for it.

Conversely, this imagined pre-colonial state was revived and refashioned to form a staple part of liberation rhetoric in South Africa in the 1960s when the Pan Africanist Congress renamed the country Azania as a way of mobilising African nationalist sentiment and rejecting the “colonially imposed name.” 3 Through this politicised lens, Azania morphed from being an imagined ancient society into a model for a future

Some continue to refer to South Africa as Azania - conferring it with a seemingly tangible geographical position, however, Azania functions as a binding narrative about a nation that is yet to be realised in twenty years into the country’s democracy. It may never be realised, nor need it be to exist for as Benedict Arnold 6 87

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, New York: Verso, 2006: 6 Charles. J. Rolo, Evelyn Waugh: the best and the worst, The Atlantic (online), October 1954. https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/54oct/rolo.htm Thami ka Plaatjie, The PAC in Exile in The Road to Democracy in South Africa: 1970-1980, Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2006:17 Dwight N. Hopkins, Black Theology USA and South Africa: Politics, Culture and Liberation, Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2005:25 Introduction in Azanian Love Song, Johannesburg: African Perspectives Publishing, 2007:viii Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, New York: Verso, 2006: 6 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, New York: Verso, 2006::4

confrontation between the White Women of Azania and a group of men wielding traditional African weapons such as spears and shields from animal pelts, recalls historic representations of skirmishes between colonials and indigenous South Africans, causing an uncanny inversion of Azania and Azanians as the ‘natural’ citizens of this ‘promised’ land. This reading positions them as pseudo-colonials or neo-colonials, and perhaps ultimately as a displaced nation. It is this sense of displacement that presumably motivates an assiduous cultivation of rituals and cultural artefacts or visual rhetoric as it legitimises Azania’s existence and its inhabitants’ belief that they occupy and are part of this nation. Arnold 7 suggests that nationalism in itself is a cultural artefact of sorts.

suggests “nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.” Azania looms as this virtual tabula rasa on which the ambitions and ideas of politicians, writers, historians and artists project the future - or its absence. This is the paradox that haunts Athi-Patra Ruga’s reimaging of Azania in his White Women of Azania performances and in his objectbased work, where he confronts viewers with faux cultural artefacts derived from this state. Some are rendered in outdated mediums, enhancing this idea that they are historical relics from Azania, thus substantiating its long existence. A stained glass work titled Azania (2013) boasts what appears to be the official insignia of this state: a Zebra and a ballooned character dubbed The White Woman of Azania. Tapestries narrate pivotal historic moments of this nation’s faux history, compacting ‘the facts’ in such a way that they are transformed into the myth of this nation. In this way these pseudo museum ‘artefacts’ obscure its history rather than shed any light on it.

Efforts at making Azania real, however, are thwarted by Ruga’s mode of expression, which is defined by hyper-artificiality and parody. The White Woman (and Women) of Azania performances (2010-to date), which preceded the object-based works delineating the context and universe they hail from, set this approach. Their characteristic costume consists of bright plastic balloons tied together,

The tapestry Invitation… Presentation… Induction (2013), which figures a 88

Nontando Mposo, Twitter Storm over Zille’s Bodibe pictures, IOL News (online), March 18, 2014. http://www.iol.co.za/news/politics/twitter-stormover-zille-s-bodibe-2pictures-1.1662942#.U3CMLa2SxCM Political commentator Gareth Van Onselen refers to Mmusi Maimane, a leader within Zille’s party as “a hollow man” in a Business Day article (online), April 22, 2014. http://www.bdlive.co.za/opinion/columnists/2014/04/22/mmusi-maimane-the-hollow-man

obscuring the upper body while the legs of the subject are concealed by layers of stockings. This renders the body unreal, makes it appear cartoon-like. So while this character is super colourful, she (the stilettoes and stockings imply a female) is of an indeterminate race and the ‘whiteness’ referenced in her name implies a more abstract or ideological definition rather than one dependent on skin-tone – perhaps in Azania anyone can chose to be ‘white’ or maybe Ruga’s Azania is the imagined ‘whites-only’ state that guided the skewed politics of the apartheid era.

in the Western Cape, a province run by the Democratic Alliance, which is headed by a white woman, Helen Zille, who is often 8 mocked for trying to appear African by wearing traditional garb or partaking in any mores that are deemed to ‘belong’ to black people. This ridiculous looking character could also refer to black leaders who profit from fronting white capital interests, referred to as ‘coconuts’ or “hollow men” 9. Ruga implies that these displaced communities use Azania as a way of anchoring their identity in this constantly shifting fantasy, which has been crafted to counter the sense of alienation they might experience in reality.

Once again Ruga offers a multiple reading of Azania as a utopian state hailing from the past, with references to the colonial or apartheid era, and a future place sustained by black consciousness ideology. This paradoxical juxtaposition of realities naturally destabilises, if not cancels out, each of these opposing scenarios as the ambitions of black consciousness movement obviously conflict with those of a white-dominated society. Ruga parodies the notion of this future black homeland by implying that it is an echo of what has existed before and is ruled by the titular “white women” – this echoes the current political reality

Ruga presents a temporally unstable fiction. It is a fiction overwritten by other fictions and realities that constantly work at not only destabilising this utopian state and permanently displacing the fiction, but the characters in it. Who are they and where do they belong, if their sense of belonging is tied to this fluctuating state? Displacement is an overriding theme in Ruga’s performance art practice: since 2007 it has been dominated by ambiguous characters occupying public spaces with which they are seemingly at odds. This has personal resonance for the artist – he has grappled 89

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Paulus Zulu makes this point in A Nation in Crisi: An Appeal for Morality, Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2013: 65 Ashraf Jamal, Terror and the city. In: N Edjabe and E Pieterse, eds. The African Cities Reader: Pan African Practices. Cape town: Chimerenga and African Centre for Cities, 2010: 121 ibid “Purging” is the word that Ruga has used frequently in relation to White Women of Azania. The set for his performance in Cape Town in November 2012 boasted the word scrawled on the wall.

beautiful women and headless entities.

with reconciling traditional Xhosa customs practiced in rural settings with being part of a cosmopolitan urban community in Cape Town, as well as incidences of violence and prejudice in his youth, which have overstated his exclusion. This motif also has political and psychic significance. In reference to the title of Mark Gevisser’s 2007 biography of former president Thabo Mbeki, political commentators reflecting on the ruling party’s failure to fully liberate the country, refer to the discrepancy between unrealised aspirations and reality as ‘the dream deferred’.10

Dismantling, or puncturing the façade, the dream, is a significant component of the White Woman of Azania performances, which always conclude with Ruga and/or his performers violently destroying their balloon outfits by bursting them. This releases a coloured liquid inside, which serves as a residue of this ‘purging’ 13 of this façade. This conclusion delivers a form of catharsis that at first seems unexpected; yet it is in the letting go of this faux costume and its concomitant link to Azania that has become the outcome the audience anticipates and thus craves.

This ‘deferred dream’ gives rise to “a pervasive and variegated psychic seam” 11 that is rooted in a desire for “a sense of place … but recoils before its lack of substance” 12. Ruga articulates this unfulfilled condition by forcing this imaginary utopian future or skewed dystopian past through a stylised lens, which offers such an exaggerated and excessive fiction that its ‘lack of substance’ is part of its character. Azania is rendered in vivid colours (like the balloon costume), the abundant foliage in the photographic series A Night of Long Knives (2013) is artificial and it is populated by tamed Zebras,

This is partly motivated by a desire to see the identity of the performers, to discover what exists beyond this plastic wall of colour. When all the balloons have popped, however, spectators are confronted with performers covered in sweat who make a quick exit. As a result access to what lies on the other side is somehow denied or ‘deferred’. Beyond the dream is an unpalatable and perhaps complex reality that cannot be ascertained – it is not a hypervisualised reality.

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Marvel online database http://marvel.wikia.com/Supremacists_(Earth-616) 15 Ytasha Womack, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2013: 9 Ytasha Womack, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2013: 9 Mark Dery coined the term in Pyrotechnic Insanitorium in the article titled Black to the Future: Afro-Futurism 1.0. It only exists online: http://www.detritus.net/contact/rumori/200211/0319.html

Ruga trades in hypervisuality; his effusive and syncretic postmodern vocabulary, which draws from soap operas such as Dynasty, fashion spreads that perennially offer hyper stylised and clichéd interpretations of African style, and Black Panther Marvel comics that depict Azania as a state ruled by “the supermacists” who suppress the black majority until they are liberated by the Black Panther 14, firmly roots his expression in the realm of fantasy and popular culture. This aspect of his art evokes strong ties to what has been dubbed as Afrofuturism, a multidisciplinary movement that draws from science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy and Afrocentricity as a means of rethinking black identity and refiguring the past and future 15 . When the term was coined in 1999 16 it initially referred to speculative fiction or visual culture, such as black-written, black-drawn comics such as Milestone Media’s Hardware that references technology and a prosthetically enhanced future that specifically addresses AfricanAmerican concerns. Its vocabulary is described as “a syncretic crossweave of black nationalism, African and American 91

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ibid ibid

Azania is able to function as Ruga’s own psychic homeland, where he is able to revisit our past and re-craft our future, according to his own whimsy and thus play with his own nationhood and identity. However, as he has constructed a universe that revels in its own artificiality he plays this game with the constant knowledge that it has no substance. Like his balloon costume, Azania is supported by air.

religious beliefs, and plot devices worthy of a late-night rocket opera.” 17 One of the objectives of Afrofuturism is to break the white-dominated sci-fi genre and its “lock on that unreal estate” 18 . Fantasy narratives open up an imaginative space, which is denied to its creators in reality, allowing them to rewrite the past and the future. Ruga primarily views himself as a narrator, and even though his products are not textual he is continually in the process of (re)creating Azania; new characters and plot twists are constantly being added as he expands the storyline. Like a soap opera, the plotlines are slightly outrageous. It functions as an allegory in which South Africa’s past and future have collapsed, or coalesced into each other producing this kind of absurd fiction. Plotting this absurd Azania is a source of pleasure for Ruga; for while he channels historic associations with it, and parodies it, this Azania is of his own making. This allows him to introduce himself into the plot, such as in the tapestry Uzukile the Elder (2013), as well as other superhero-comic like characters that are able to accrue power that may be denied to them in reality. In this way

Mary Corrigall is a Johannesburg based art critic, journalist, art historian and academic at the University of Johannesburg.

The Lord is on the Hoof 2013 Wool & Thread on Tapestry Canvas 180 x 190 cm

The Versatile Queen Ivy 2013 Wool & Thread on Tapestry Canvas 180 x 120 cm

Uzuko 2013 Wool, Thread & Artificial Flowers on Tapestry Canvas 200 x 180 cm

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PREV PAGE: Convention...Procession...Elevation 2013 Wool & Thread on Tapestry Canvas 300 x 175 cm RIGHT: The Phoenix is a Chicken 2013 Wool & Thread on Tapestry Canvas 190 x 170 cm

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The Votive Portrait of Her 2013 Wool on Tapestry Canvas 130 x 190 cm

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PREV PAGE: Trust No Bitch 2013 Wool, Thread, Glue & Glitter on Tapestry Canvas 190 x 120 cm RIGHT: Uzukile the Elder 2013 Wool, Thread, Artificial Flowers & Spray Paint on Tapestry Canvas 200 x 190 cm

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RIGHT: UnoZuko 2013 Wool, Thread & Artificial Flowers on Tapestry Canvas 195 x 180 cm NEXT PAGE: Invitation... Presentation...Induction... 2013 Wool & Thread on Tapestry Canvas 300 x 175 cm

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The Lands of Azania (2014-2094) 2013 Wool on Tapestry Canvas 200 x 180 cm

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PREV PAGES: Thud of a Snowflake High-density foam & artificial flowers Plinth: 370 x 245 x 8.5 cm Flower figure: 140 x 210 x 42 cm RIGHT: Azania; 2013 Stained glass, lead, powder coated steel Edition of 2 + 1 AP 184 x 170 cm

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The Night of the Long Knives III 2013 Archival inkjet print on Photorag Baryta Edition of 5 150 x 190 cm

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The Night of the Long Knives II 2013 Archival inkjet print on Photorag Baryta Edition of 5 150 x 190 cm

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The Night of the Long Knives I 2013 Archival inkjet print on Photorag Baryta Edition of 5 150 x 190 cm

NEXT LEFT: The Future White Woman of Azania I 2012 Archival inkjet print on hahnemuehle paper Edition of 5 + 3AP 80 x 120 cm

NEXT RIGHT: The Future White Woman of Azania II 2012 Archival inkjet print on hahnemuehle paper Edition of 5 + 3AP 80 x 120 cm

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‘THE PURGE’

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Film Stills: The Purge 2013 Commissioned by Puma Films for Peace Duration 2.29 minutes

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READINGS

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Fated to Pretend 1

By Natasha Norman

I am introduced to the tapestry on the gallery floor and Ruga paces around it, twirling, sighing and drinking red wine. The tapestry is vibrating with colour and opulence and luxury. It depicts the character, The Versatile Queen Ivy, swathed in a robe and seated at a table. She holds a pen theatrically, as if to write. The image is about the fact that she is depicted as writing, it is not about what she writes. Perhaps she is thinking of Helmut Newton’s World Without Men (1984) or his first photographic essay White Women (1976) characterised by “luxurious uppermiddle-class decadence” as described by the publishers Schirmer | Mosel, Germany, at its re-release in 2009 2.

religion and politics (Latour 2002: 2627) the better to comment on objectivity as something residing within the rapid movement of one image to another, a type of image intertextuality 4. Ruga’s portrayal of The Versatile Queen Ivy references NeoClassical political heroes, Greek thinkers as well as Communist revolutionaries, such that she is a nondescript signifier of political greatness and intelligence undercut by the fact that the pen she holds has a cute fluffy feather attached to its end that also alludes to the Hollywood rom-com Legally Blonde (2001). To unravel the image economy is to risk finding a hollow void at the heart of its ‘medial game’ (Frey 1991:54) and this is something Ruga consciously exploits in his critique of the ‘real’. He fashions the signifiers of a mythical nation state and plays with the expectations of their sincerity. And he is flagrantly camp about it.

She is the image of an Exile and that seems more important here. The way her imaging functions in an era of Late-Capitalism as part of Debord’s (1967) spectacle 3 or Latour’s (2002:33) economy of images. Latour re-appropriates the Byzantine understanding of ‘economic’ to mean the long and managed flow of images in

To return to Sontag’s musings on the sensibility, camp “revels in artifice, stylization, theatricalization, irony, playfulness and exaggeration rather than content” (Sontage 1966). It is to hyphenate things so as to displace their state of being (Sontag 1966; Buys 2013:82 paraphrasing Jameson). In Ruga’s work

In the exotic, the beautiful, Marrakesh the exiled Future White Woman of Azania writes her manifesto.

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With reference to the song Time to Pretend by American band/duo MGMT released in 2009. Ruga visited the Helmut Newton museum on a visit to Berlin in 2013 as part of the Between the Lines symposium. Guy Debord was a French Marxist critical theorist. His book The Society of the Spectacle (1967) is a critique of post-war consumer culture and the function of mass media, which he foresaw to be replacing social engagement with representation to serve late-capitalist agendas. The term ‘intertextuality’ was coined by Julia Kristeva in 1966 in relation to literary theory and the notion of discourse such that a single text is understood to maintain a dialogue between itself and the history and context of other literary texts. 5 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, New York: Verso, 2006::4

the Future ‘White Woman’ is a camp gesture. Her title is visual decoy to seduce the viewer and then confront their expectations in Ruga’s medial game of popular culture, Hollywood, art historical and socio-political referents that function to direct the viewer continuously onward in the economic flow of images. But this is not done without the critical gaze of the artist.

Azania is a utopia in all its incarnations: a place that is a no-place (Greek outopia). Referencing the myriad historical versions of Azania from Pliny to the BlackConsciousness Movement, Ruga’s Azania is characterized by his creative process that fashions characters. So far we have met The Versatile Queen Ivy (still only conceived in the medium of tapestry), The Future White Woman of Azania, The Flower of Azania (who have both appeared in performances), Miss Azania and, now, The Elder. Ruga’s characters embody his artistic concerns that are then realised in the mediums of performance, sculpture and tapestry.

In a current tapestry in progress, Ruga images himself as the Elder (the Seer) in a family portrait of the Azanians in Exile. Ruga as the Elder is narrator, survivor of The Purge (“of the old guard but a ghost”) and the holder of the ‘truth.’ A conscious self-portrait of the artist (for is not all creativity a self-portrait of some kind?) fashioned as a means of introducing the audience to his greater narrative - the nation of Azania. Conceived in the dates 2014-2094 the mythological timeline of Ruga’s nation-state alerts us to the first of many truths about its function and formal links to the ‘real’ – a parallel lineage to the post-Apartheid South African nation (1994-2014).

Ruga’s incorporation of ‘craft’ in the medium of tapestry is socio-political in intention. He appropriates the role of tapestry historically in communicating ‘nation’ where the baldachin - canopy of state or cloth of honour – was hung behind or above the throne to indicate an authority in the Medieval and Renaissance eras, but I feel he also references the way that the craft of tapestry as industry unites communities (from cotton growers to dyers to weavers) in an economy. Citing this industry of the tapestry ‘craft’ is embedded in Ruga’s studio practice

“You never get to Zion, ” Ruga remarks dryly. “It’s all just Utopian bullshit.” 146

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Presentation by the artist at the Between the Lines symposium held in Cape Town and Braunschweig in 2013 (see http://michaelis.uct.ac.za/betweenthelines/) Seminar held at the University of Cape Town on the work of Cedric Nunn a photographer who was particularly prominent during the resistance years of the 1980s in South Africa.

where a team of embroiderers work with the artist who first draws the designs by hand directly onto the fabric. Ruga also embroiders the more particular details while assistants do the handwork on the planes of colour. The term ‘tapestry’ is a bit of a camp notion here too as Ruga’s tapestries are not woven in the European tradition so again, in the game of visual intertextuality (my apologies Kristeva) he also references the characteristic ‘woman’s work’ of the domestically confined noblewoman. In Ruga’s economy of visual references class, gender and nation-building coalesce in his medium.

of our own country’s story of nationhood. The displays of nation that Ruga identifies in his narrative are iconic sagas common to most nations’ history: The Skirmish, The Exile, The Triumphant Return and The Jacobean Culling. He first introduces Azania with a procession by the Future White Woman of Azania on the streets of Johannesburg and Grahamstown. She is swathed in balloons that burst and leak her mark all over the landscape - up against ivory towers of economic inequality, up against the monuments to a South African colonial history and inside the politic of the white cube gallery space. In the Monarch of the Future White Woman of Azania’s Exile, it is her luxury that we must consider. The legitimacy of the Exile status in current South African politics bears remembering here. Ruga recalls a remark at a seminar on the work of South African photographer Cedric Nunn 6: “Don’t tell me there wasn’t cocaine in exile!” The agony of an exclusion from homeland is also an opportunity for new lifestyles. These complexities of the Apartheid exile is a theme that seems to be entering the post-Apartheid rhetoric as actor and playwright John Kani recently explored in Missing presented at

Ruga has also described his tapestries as a “still-place.” In the labour of this medium the artist finds the place to generate his narratives, to conceptualise his performances and bring his characters ever closer into being. Ruga has spoken about the way his characters evolve through the process of his art making5 . He identifies that they improve per work in their coming-into being. “My characters don’t like the world they live in but they accept their destiny,” Ruga remarks staring off into the middle-distance. And their destiny is the cathartic unravelling 1 47

the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town this year. But the legitimacy of a returning exile, the sainthood of their trauma is something Ruga wishes to criticise here.

suffix suggests, our current experience is heavily conditioned by that historical event. Ruga’s Azania is at its most psychic core a catharsis, a space of myth as a place to try to commit to memory a trauma of history such that its horror is not relived indefinitely in the present moment.

As he talks I am distracted by a defining mark on his face. A small scar that halfforms a semi-circle from eye to lip. It is bewitching on such a photogenic profile and speaks to my imaginings of another more personal context.

And so, to prequel: Athi and I start our conversation in a gallery space filled with someone else’s images. We gravitate to two rectangular white plinths that we appropriate as stools, set apart from the artworks, and we begin with the spectacle, the procession, the characters and the tapestries. I am drawn in. I too am fated to pretend.

Azania is Ruga’s alternative world but it is intimately linked to his context as a South African born with a black skin in Umtata, a Bantustan engineered by the Apartheid government to render him a non-citizen of the white nation-state. I have always noticed the physical violence inherent in Ruga’s works: bursting balloons that bleed a liquid or a powder into the performance space, long endurance walks in high heels and the artist’s body thrashing in the spaces of the white cube gallery against walls (The Body in Question IV: La Mamma Morta (2010)) or the body of another performer (…ellipsis in Three Parts (2012)). As a nation, South Africa is desperate to try to forget its trauma in an attempt to move to an imagined future utopia - that elusive post-Apartheid state. But as the

Natasha Norman is an artist, writer and educator based in Cape Town South Africa. She is a regular contributor to artthrob.co.za and Art South Africa, South Africa’s leading contemporary visual arts publication.

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Buys, Anthea (2013) ‘Alleys, Ellipses & The Eve of Context: On Fielding Some Early Misconceptions About Athi-Patra Ruga’ in Athi-Patra Ruga The Works 2006-2013 Whatiftheworld gallery: Cape Town.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Debord, Guy (1967) The Society of the Spectacle translated by Ken Knabb (2014) Guy Debord: The Society of the Spectacle, Bureau of Public Secrets (online) available: http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/index.htm (Accessed 31 May 2014). Frey, P (1991) ‘Dialogues, Teachings’ in Parkett, 29(1): 52-54. Kristeva, Julia (1966) ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’ in Desire in Language (1980) Columbia University Press: USA. Latour, Bruno (2002) ‘What is Iconoclash? Or is there a world beyond the image wars?’ in Latour & Weibel, Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, Centre for Art and Media, MIT Press: Germany and Massachusetts, p14-37. Newton, Helmut (1976) White Woman, New York: Congreve. Newton, Helmut (1984) World Without Men, New York: Xavier Moreau. Sontag, Susan (1966) ‘Notes on Camp’ in Against Interpretation (1980) Farrar, Straus & Giroux: USA.

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A View from Here: Atlantis to Azania By Frank Smigiel

childhood cartoon about a lost Atlantis fallen but surviving under the sea, via a glass dome, I thought I’d eventually hit that invisible wall sheathing and protecting this city. Protection. 3

Living and working in San Francisco, one is quite aware of this city’s perceived exceptionalism. Perhaps like New Orleans, San Francisco can feel like no other place in the United States— everyone calls it Mediterranean, or just European—anything but the White AngloSaxon Protestant business-as-usual ethos undergirding our other cities.1 The city holds its eccentricities hard, even as the current tech boom tries to bleach us and that history out. Our self-declared 19th century patriarch, the Emperor Norton I, created his own currency and lived on that fake cash until his death. 2 Our waves of seekers, from Gold Rush miners to Beats to Hippies to new Queer communities, have created fraught gardens of opposition, greed, and lust, but also fraught gardens of experimentation, fellowship, and advocacy. Don’t be surprised that the rallying cry against our representative to the Congress here, Nancy Pelosi, is that she holds “San Francisco values”: values not American. For San Francisco has, in our history, created its own Atlantis. The city thrills to things exceptional and unique, and it enjoys its own microclimate and archipelago of people like nowhere else in the States. On my first visit in the 1990’s, remembering a

I also thought I’d never discuss AthiPatra Ruga’s growing Future White Women of Azania saga in terms of this kind of “protection,” but I’ve changed my mind. I recently worked on a show in San Francisco about contemporary South African art, Public Intimacy: Art & Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa, 4 which developed out of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s growing collection of South African photography. From historical apartheidera photos by David Goldblatt and Thomas Cole, to contemporary work by Sabelo Mlegani and Zanele Muholi, the show jumps across time to look at recent works in photography, publications, and performance. I’m pleased that my Atlantis has, for the last few months, been populated by a singular image of Athi-Patra Ruga, as a rainbow national, balloon-clad Future White Woman of Azania, strolling or strutting the streets outside of the Grahamstown National Arts Festival. 5 This figure adorns buses, 151

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I’ve recently taken to calling San Francisco a “less beautiful’ Cape Town, given our cities’ similar geographies and perhaps sexual histories. Born in England in 1819, and raised in South Africa, Joshua Abraham Norton arrived in San Francisco in 1949. After a failed business venture here, an exile, and a return, he declared himself His Imperial Majesty Emperor Norton I in 1859. He took on additional duties as the self-proclaimed “Protector of Mexico” as well. After his death in 1880, tens of thousands of San Franciscans celebrated his life and mourned his loss. Memorial services at his grave began in the 1970’s and continue today. See the fun Wikipedia entry as a starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton. The San Francisco-based writer Rebecca Solnit has often described the city as an island ecology, one cut off from the mainland U.S. through its geography and culture, and so one that can offer unique opportunities for strange creatures or ideas or communities to develop and thrive: “Protection.” The exhibition was on view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from February 21 to June 29, 2014. Archived details are here: http://www.ybca.org/public-intimacy. Athi-Patra Ruga, Performa Obscura, in collaboration with Mikhael Subotzky; commissioned for the exhibition Making Way, Grahamstown, South Africa; photo: Ruth Simbao, courtesy Athi-Patra Ruga and WHATIFTHEWORLD/GALLERY

What I didn’t exactly know at that time, though I did through subsequent research, is how much Azania could be still: how it could and can be chthonic.

street banners, and a huge sign outside of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where the exhibition has been housed. Azania inhabits Atlantis, and I’m not sure what such a visual fact means for the Atlanteans here, yet, or for the new boomtown rats replacing them. I just know that the Azanians exist in our midst.

Some things birth in silence and in the dark. Some things don’t. I was initially attracted to Azania’s full-on movement, a procession that great writers on Ruga’s work, from Anthea Buys to Mary Corrigal to Fiona Siegenthaler note. There’s something about the full-on sunshine of the processions in South Africa that ups the stakes for all involved. What are these characters from dreams, or clublike dreams, doing on a city road or in a bustling marketplace? Why invade the day? Daytime drag and dreaming droop in the sun—a condition oddly perfect for the chrysalis condition of the Future White Woman’s armature. It needs to droop, pop, and leave its mark on the landscape. That fact changes conditions on the ground. And so the power of Ruga’s Grahamstown procession, and his work for the Making Way show at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg.7 But I knew: not in Atlantis. We’ve made the days safe for the nights, and everyone, in our dream bubble, can participate, or thinks they can.

Let me be clear, though: the Azanians occupy public, visual space, but they do not occupy public space as live performers. Such was initially a concern: at first glance, who doesn’t want an Azanian invasion, especially in this fraught garden? As I explained to the artist, the sight of fantastical characters in fishnets and heels might be any given Saturday or Sunday here. The power of Azania’s occupation of the South African landscape could be lost in a general merriment, in my occasionally most celebratory of towns. 6 My Atlanteans would just join in the parade and pair off at the next bar—possibly leaving us and never taking the party back to us. So I warned Azania. How do its people assert their rights here? How do Azanians travel? Do your passports work in our post 09/11, newly present Iraq & supposedly winding down Afghan wars? In The U.S. land of Homeland Security? 152

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Google our Bay to Breakers race, Carnaval celebration, Lunar New Year or LGBTQ Pride parades for details. A look at “Contemporary Art from South Africa and China,” and curated by Ruth Simbao, the show was on view from January 30 to March 28, 2013. See Susan Sontag’s “The Decay of Cinema,” The New York Times, February 25, 1996: http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-cinema. html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar%2C%5B%22RI%3A10%22%2C%22RI%3A18%22%5D.

Here we go.

So what about the night? Ruga’s great critics often also note his immobility. From the first appearance of the Future White Women of Azania in the Johannesburg-based X-Homes project (2010) to her appearance in Ruga’s studio with a second Future White Woman in Jay Pather’s 2012 Live Arts festival in Cape Town, the figure has faced us. Still, and in the dark, with all the magic of the sunlit walk declined. She has been confined in a basement, or in the artist’s studio, and illuminated by candles or UV lights. She gives herself up to our look. And we can look and look and look and get bored and leave. She stays put. And in those undergrounds or enclosed, street-level spaces, she changes again. The street encounter recedes for the ritual space. Enter duration, focus, and transport. Enter Theater. Susan Sontag once spoke about a world-wide cinephelia, a love of the cinema, and its concomitant “rituals of the dark.” 8 What does it mean to settle into that dark space, in third row center, and to let dreams take hold? Ruga’s new work is only partially projected but also live. I’d say here that both scenarios—film and theater—create dreams in the dark.

In The Elder of Azania, produced in San Francisco for the Public Intimacy exhibition in February 2014, Ruga’s vision finds those rituals and that darkness. In an enclosed theater space with a large and littered playing field (from the dress rehearsal the night before), we see the detritus of Azania’s transformations and a huge backdrop modelled on Vladisav Nijinski’s Afternoon of a Faun. Ruga’s voice, accompanied by animations by his collaborator Ben Johnson, outline Azania’s genealogy of rulers, government structure, and changing bloodlines, all born from the Versatile Queen Ivy and the Elders who preceded her. Ruga lies on-stage as the Elder, part father of the nation, part trickster god, part Greek Pan, Xhosa goat king, and Nijiniski’s faun. Like the latter’s piece, two Future White Women enter to our unknowing inhabitant, but they begin to change in a kind of combat (slamming into and popping their blue and green, liquid-filled balloons). A third enters and sheds her white-powdered armature in a violent self-eruption. Not unlike Nijinsky’s piece, the three disturb the Elder’s slumber. He rises and encounters the group. The first two are chosen to his company, reimagined here not as a sexual 153

Our American myopia meant that none of us, including this curator who had worked with the artist, knew much about ritual white-mask as a sacred and transformational color and state.

overture, as in Nijinsky, but as a spiritual one. The third wants to join as her sisters enter a kind of rapture; the piece now becomes her story. As a supplicant, she will join the new triad—she will game for the Elder’s Azania. And she too finds that place, in the end. New Future White Women enter, change (in a comedic encounter with silver and gold confections), and welcome her arrival. The group begins a triumphal procession out—now with all Women on the road to ascendance.

block or open these questions? I won’t foreclose these questions; I will only say that by returning to the theater, to its roots underground, and in magic and ritual, Azania creates new places for its existence. Not every place needs its sunshine streets. Some, in fact, need its deep dreaming, where we can ruminate and understand our own positions in the dark. Protection—think that dreams open great doors when we are presumably safe, in sleep. Because Azania is a kind of South Africa, but it’s also a myth, like Atlantis. And so it offers not just reporting on the ground where it was a born, but an exquisite machine for understanding many places. Like Sontag’s cinema, like any theater, like dreams, go into the dark. There you can learn, aspire, be scared, or fall in love. Perhaps a new world is always a dark world away, even if such a thing is a curtain drop away, and especially and even if its realization is still a very far, far call away. Altantean bubbles of fantasy meet the fiercely changing peoples of Azania and who knows? Like the Emperor Norton here, The Elder issues new currency. Pick it up and pay your way.

Of course there are questions here. In San Francisco, the Future White Women were played by five very important local performance artists: Xandra Barra, Dia Dear, Monique Jenkinson, Brontez Purnell, and Mica Sigourney. Each works across key issues in dance, drag, identity, and emerging forms of oppositional politics. Sigourney was instrumental in forming the troop. And so the questions, beyond just logistics, began. Barra wondered why a Latina artist was asked to become a “future white woman.” 9 We all wondered about the patriarchy of it all: was The Elder now subsuming the Women? Does the piece read as queer enough for local audiences, or will it default to some exotic American idea of South Africa? How can we

Frank Smigiel is the Associate Curator of Public Programs for the Museum of Modern Art San Francisco 154

When Sheroes Appear Missla Libsekal interviews Athi-Patra Ruga

What is it that carries performative practice into the domain of the radical? There are numerous equally plausible answers. During my conversations in May 2014 with performance artist Athi-Patra Ruga he spoke of grace. Art historian, critic and curator Rosalee Goldberg asserts that “Performance is a much more aggressive way to get work out there in the world. It remains radical because it is live and demands attention.” 1 This very aspect led me to ask Ruga what he thought audiences needed in order to engage with his work? He replies “to be open, to experience and share”, the symbiotic yet unpredictable relationship between performer and audience made possible through grace. The core medium in Ruga’s practice is his body, a tool that he rigorously designs as much as any other material within his vernacular. With it he choreographs performances and residual artefacts to communicate on politics and pressing matters born out of his personal history and geographic experiences. His extraordinariness may indeed come from his ability to induce perceptual shifts and self-reflection, when mundane ebbs are cloaked in absurdity and seeming eccentricity. His fictional characters, avatars as he often refers to them, such as Injibhabha 2007-2008, Beiruth 2009 Ilulwane 2012, and now more recently the Future White Women of Azania 2013 are gender ambivalent beings that evade categorisation. They are beings bent on blurring the lines between witness, actor and acted-upon. Through them the unspoken is manifested, transgressed and shereos 2 sometimes appear.

Goldberg, RosaLee. “ Rosalee Goldberg in Conversation with Shirin Neshat and Wangechi Mutu” Performa 11. New York Public Library, New York. 5 Oct. 2011. Lecture. 1. A woman or man who supports women’s rights and respects women’s issues 2. Female hero An etymologically unmotivated analysis of hero as he-ro. (hero is Greek; ‘he’ is rooted in Old English). Many consider it redundant, as hero is the gender neutral term; heroine the gender specific term.

M.L You’ve used the phrase “counter penetration” to title past works and describe your practice. It sounds militant and erotic, and naturally piques curiosity; can you elaborate on what it means?

shape in the performance and photographic work Even I Exist in Embo Jaundiced Tales of Counter Penetration. That work was an antagonistic reply to a clearly xenophobic poster from a SVP [Swiss People’s Party] political poster in 2007. It had a displacing effect on minorities contrary to the utopian stereotype. Also it goes to the extent that in my backyard is this two-way ideology of the utopia - an alternative nation somehow. The title is a nod to Nicola Poussin’s Et in Arcadia ego [Even I Exist in ARCADIA]. Embo is the original nation of a Bantu.

A.P I used that term in reference to what formed the core of my early performance works. Initially, I was fascinated with doing these nonsensical rituals of clearing the air in places that come with some pre-conception. This was in downtown Johannesburg around 2005, and the world cup had just been announced, spelling a series of forced removals and controlled rent schemes. It was at the height of President Mbeki’s AIDS denialist phase. It felt foreign to people, including me. So my goal was to insert myself into these spaces that carried some prejudged story.

M.L This insertion into inbetween spaces is typically hard yet rewarding. Can you talk about your experiences, given that your practice exists between different aesthetic traditions such as fashion, performance, neo-classical and pop art...? A.P I think it boils down to having the will to dematerialise the respective media, maybe tools is what they end up being. I still have what I think is the core of fashion, which is to simplify a complex idea. Design is the tool I take from that. Scale is what I’m into at the moment; it also

M.L Some years back we spoke of art’s capacity to bring attention to grey areas in power dynamics. Which character within your practice set this trajectory? A.P Miss Congo was the first character to do this, but it took incredible 1 55

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able to transcend with the characters I make, to places that are ideas of utopia and heaven that are acceptable to me; sometimes they betray me revealing my own prejudgements. It also provides the opportunity to create from scratch new identities that create a democratic space for interpretations by the audience.

happens to be the element that is common in design and important for the narrative The Future White Women of Azania. M.L What connects the trajectory of your performances and themes, particularly as your early performances developed with singular avatars whereas F.W.W.O.A. has several characters? A.P Since Injibhabha, in retrospect I can see an obvious tale of imaginary environments - bringing to mind a need to insert myself into space. Yeah it is sexual - it’s also transgressive. I like to focus on how a performance can be transgressive, the outdoors and the audience help a lot. The art if indeed it is... comes from the clash in memory.

Owing to his urban interventionist roots, Ruga’s quality which I see as being cleverly guerilla-esque is about the act of intervening into stifled/inert political spaces be they the white walls of the gallery, the hills alive with the so called sound of music or where he is perhaps most at home, the street - where chance and chemistry with the audience can collide to become most potent. Tomfoolery and the seemingly eccentric are his Trojan horse. Ruga dons his uniform of sorts - a pair of heels, coloured tights, leotard and the finessing other elements that make each character razor-sharp, specific and unique. As Injibhabha [meaning hairline in isiXhosa crafted from bundles of synthetic afro-like hair pranced on Swiss alps, lounged on carousels and peered into fancy boutiques lining Zurich’s boulevards, the figurative black sheep that the Swiss People’s party xenophobic campaign was literally trying to kick out and elide was becoming much like a hairline fracture - present, sharp and unrelenting. Ruga’s latest performance the Future White Women of Azania, first revealed in 2012 unfolds an epic fable about a nation in waiting: its ascent, climax and possible demise. This ambiguous saga riffs off an idea closely tied to an apartheid era South African movement and political ideology - the dream of an idyllic African state. It is his most ambitious work to date; a narrative with five characters, a national flower, crest, and animal including the rainbow coloured balloon characters, which he describes as “cute”, then laughs He reveals that one of his goals was to make a myth accessible even for children. A cute figure that has the capacity to be festive, create fanfare yet become disquieting when it violently pops and bleeds.

M.L Trauma, purging/catharsis and healing are some of your thematic preoccupations; how do you situate your art making as a means to understand the history of popular image making?

Departing from Ruga’s experience growing up in the rainbow nation, post-apartheid and post 90s era South Africa, Azania is a journey exploring this notion of a merry Africa which vacillates between dream or nightmare, depending on your perspective of course. Enticing and grotesque, if F.W.W.O.A. is indeed successful, it will be because we are left with space to think about what human existence is like.

A.P By bearing witness to the times I live in. One of the tools I am able to use with narrative is to create a displaced satirical subplot. It is interesting to be 1 57

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M.L Is loneliness ever part of your journey as an artist a performer and a spectacle?

The Toyi--Toyi is a popular protest march here in South Africa. The march on the Bastille. The Russian constructivists lifted it up to something god-like. It is also cathartic and is literally a non-verbal way that convinces one of a bond.

A.P Indeed, all the time. The antidote to that comes in maybe creating these nation states and fictional characters to go with them. There’s a democracy that hands a fantasy to the viewer of the Azanian saga. Inserting The Elder of Azania is me exploring my space within Azania. Also it serves as a revelation of my personal/geographical dynamics.

In the F.W.W.O.A. along with the cathartic nation-finding tool of pageantry/ procession you see a figure carrying out a humanist act of firstly purging the weight of the liquid or substance in the balloon vessels that the figure is confounded and choreographed by and secondly by the revelation of the airy, latex identity of the performer, through the popping and sacrifice of the balloon armour

M.L It’s interesting that you often refer to “procession” in your work. In contemporary times we perhaps use the words protest or parade more commonly.

M.L The responses that appearance/costume and materiality elicit are fascinating.

A.P Procession is people moving with a subject, or with a complaint or a goal, a collective desire that is standard in people moving from one space to another. I am also obsessed with it; particularly as performing is also a lonesome thing.

A.P It’s a skill. I think that is where costume comes in. It is this ability to seduce or repel, also confront. Most of the time, I think people are wondering what gender I am with this character, because there is the leotard underneath it, there’s the heels this covering. That wondering allows me to escape, to be anything that I want to be.

M.L In what capacity is procession a part of the F.W.W.O.A. ? A.P Procession is a motif that symbolises eminent change or revolutions. 1 59

M.L You performed this piece on the streets of Johannesburg, when something unexpected happened as you entered the final leg of the procession, when the ballooned characters tried to enter the gallery through the revolving doors?

A.P They are part of my response, technical but also material response to the actual area and the stories I want to execute. Is it going to be bleeding or is it going to be fanfare! There are these two effects that I can now have with them which also communicates different emotions, that I want to use to try to make my character more round.

A.P [Laugh] it just threw us out. It just puked us out but when we got in, we started popping these balloons and making a beautiful powdery mess; which was fabulous. That was a beautiful story about nation-finding and actually probably the history of South Africa and where we find ourselves... from The Treason Trials, liberation and this period of principles that founded the spirit of this new nation South Africa - but on the parallel of Azania of course and when the procession goes to capital which is basically where we find ourselves now in South Africa or this post 90s period.

M.L What would you say is your “it”, the element that moves audiences to democratically find their fantasy / interpretation? A.P My “it” is the grace shown by the audience, passive or active. We are usually in a space that makes the mundane seem silly by restaging actual rituals, but made into nonsense. This involves entering into conversation during a performance as to why the work is being performed.

M.L I see a specific intent in terms of material resonating with a given location i.e. what spills, flutters and even stains out of the balloons. How do you choose this materiality?

M.L Each performance however planned is also organic, when the lines between witness, actor and actedupon blurs: where sheroes sometimes appear. Is there one from this saga to date that stands out?

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A.P The route for that Grahamstown procession was pre-planned. There was a space that was described as a township, it was something beyond me what the situation required. It was the first time in 8 years since I began performing, that I returned to the township to perform in a camp space. I was beaten up, spat on, kicked as a camp kid. So I thought of it as returning to the scene of the crime. In this return, I wanted to clean up that space. I began to cry, the weight of the balloons was Herculean, painful... but as I walked they were popping, lightening the load. As I thought I would I be spat on, I began to cry - so hard. In this moment, I saw an old man walking with a child, perhaps his grandchild. He came up to me as I was busy balling my eyes out then asked me why it was that I was crying. It wasn’t the simplicity of the question; it was the grace of the gesture.

Following his most recent performance The Elder of Azania at SFMOMA and his oral presentation at South Africa’s seminal design conference, Design Indaba, I had the chance to catch up with Ruga in March 2013 at an art gathering in Cape Town. As one of the hosts, he concocted a cocktail for the affair, The Azanian Clusterfuck. If the name didn’t give it away, the ingredients a medley of bourbon, rum, chartreuse, bitters, Jagermeister and tequila [the later being optional] certainly did. He offers me one, which I politely decline; Ruga is a trickster, living and breathing his art. As with this cocktail and his formal artworks, the tapestries, photography, fibreglass monument, short film and stained glass window Ruga is intent on sublimating Azania into this world. Art critic Mary Corrigall astutely wrote, “ His interest is in the visual rhetoric that reproduces fantasy (like the fashion, art and religious machines).” 3 His choice in media and visual language reads contemporary, yet they are the age-old iconography that makes history [and our part] in its making tangible.

M.L This body of work is much grander scale compared to your previous narratives - from a singular avatar to a nation, Azania, with all its nation making accoutrements. As each of your characters were born from personal departure points i.e. to screw with gender roles and power where did F.W.W.O.A. burst?

self worth. You can say that Beiruth is the spirit leading this work; the F.W.W.O.A. and Beiruth share this confrontational streak. However now with the F.W.W.O.A. I wanted to continue the emotional range of the full narrative. The cathartic action that fit perfectly with a character was an obsession of mine while creating the framework and the ethics of the story. So the balloon character came to represent what the F.W.W.O.A. was about. The story from that christening of the balloon character always felt larger than me, as it was a story that could bind people together and dare I say form a new nation ... BOOOM ... Nationhood. That is what the narrative would base itself on.

A.P When I started toying with F.W.W.O.A., I wanted to create a story that could be told or add to a toddler’s indigenous library of myths and legends; with all the elements of a story - above all some moral argument about beauty and 161

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Corrigall, Mary. “When the Party is Over: Athi-Patra Ruga.” Incorrigible Corrigall, 17, Dec. 2013. Web. 24 May. 2014.

M.L Most of your characters Beiruth, are masked ( Ilulwane, Injibhabha and now the F.W.W.O.A. ). Is it the first time that you’ve revealed your face, your likeness in the work for example in character Uzukile the Elder ?

introduce recently in F.W.W.O.A. i.e. the visual rhetoric that makes the Azanian fictional nation “present” and tangible. For instance increasing the scale of the tapestries, or introducing monuments and stained glass. What was your intention?

A.P The last time my character revealed my face was with Miss Congo. The subsequent ones were intentionally covered, for many reasons really ranging from self-preservation to a fine-tuning of my Azanian library i.e. masking whether it be paint [Miss Congo] or masks and brutalist use of materials [The FWWOA / Injibhabha]. Beiruth’s mask resembles West African ritualistic masks; this is a tool I’ve kept up to now with The Abodade who resemble the Eyo masquerade of the Yoruba. Uzukile [ Man - Grace ] is the third of a triptych I did alongside Nozuko [ Girl - Grace ], and uZuko [ Miss Azania - Grace]. The elder of Azania is uZukile by name, and is the only male figure in the piece. His face will be showing a lot, as he is the narrator.

A.P For the creation of the F.W.W.O.A. and of a recreation of the land of Azania, I chose media or tools that were grand in scale, neo-classical in their messages of revolution and morals. I find with stained glass you have this object that is public and highly accessible, along with the scale of the tapestries that suggest in depiction a screwed up narrative of Azania. Lifelike sculptures etc. are the tools that I see that are used in identifying a nation period. Performatively, I am drawn to using the processionary element of statemaking/building, from the F.W.W.O.A.’s durational processions while popping to the inclusion of a beauty queen in the form of uZuko [ Miss Azania ]. M.L Azania is beautiful and screwed up as it were; the utopia has problems!

M.L There are numerous expansive rich elements that you’ve 163

A.P Of course! Because as I am creating it, there is this whole thing that I want to actually speak about. The lifeline of a revolution. The lifeline of an empire. How it rises, prospers and how it falls. So I need for those problems to be there. The objects that Azanians collect, or the portrait as a performance of sorts. Those will be the clues that carry the story, and then theatrical works will also create the beautiful arches that connect the story.

are mapped to augment some pretence of heritage. M.L Poetry indeed. You mentioned there are numerous sagas/ chapters in development for this young nation. What else is in store? A.P I am exploring the idea of exile; South Africa idealises and glorifies the idea of exile. I am interested in the decadence that happens when people have gone into exile. Taking from art history, Duchamp, Man Ray, Le Corbusier as well as political artists who moved to America etc. from South Africa. Was there any sex, drugs, and rock and roll? [laughs] I want to deal with them going into exile and their return to take over. So there will be a period of a revolution, there will be more war tapestries and battle scenes.

M.L Beyond the evident craftsmanship, satire is clearly another tool. The names of the nations charted on the map, the Lands of Azania (2014 - 2094). Isn’t Bubba-Kush [what is now known in modern times as Ethiopia], a popular strain of marijuana? A.P I had so much fun; the map series is proving to be quite awesome. I am on one level intervening into history and the power plays involved in nationhood. The changing of the names is a purging, a reimagining of the world I want, Azanians want. The act of renaming Uganda “New Sodom” and writing it into an everlasting tapestry record had some poetry. LOL. I think I am fascinated by how migrations

M.L What propels you, makes it consequential and worth it? A.P To be able to tell the story in its entirety is what gives me stamina because there is still so much to tell and perform out of the story, of the Future White Women of Azania. The audience’s 164

response is something that gets me through it, because that is when I can gauge my accessibility. M.L Lastly, referencing the stained glass piece, can you divulge what is the noun for someone who should have known better? A.P

Azania of course!

Missla Libsekal is an independent publisher and writer based in Vancouver. She is the founder and editor of online platform ANOTHERFAFRICA.NET, a journal dedicated to contemporary art and cultural practices. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The arts are not a first-world luxury, Another Africa is intended to be a constant reminder of this.â&#x20AC;&#x2122;

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