Know

What…

Why

Know…

donna Kukama <in living memory>

what can one
write for a world that seems only interested in reading your obituary?

                                                                       
                     
                     
Saul Williams

posted on Instagram, November 2024

donna Kukama’s immaterial, alphabetically
unchronological the history book for those who absolutely need to be
remembered ‘exist’ without the spillage of ink in ways we have come to
understand the physicality of history books; first as drafts that become texts
that can be edited, proofed, issued an identifying number, printed, published,
(peer)reviewed, sited…  donna’s history book goes against the grain of how
knowledge is perceived, constructed, disseminated, received and processed. By
performing a history book donna performs the unknowable art of doing
history.    

The book  is a series of performances
that began with TO BE ANNOUNCED in 2015 in Berlin followed in 2016 by a
performance of the same title in Johannesburg. Both years are significant in
the recent history of South Africa, they gave birth to historical major student
protest movement hash tagged #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall respectively.
The two ‘chapters’  can be regarded as open interchangeable prologue and
epilogue to a series of alphabetically identified chapters. donna is aware that
writing, of any kind, is an act of bearing witness to history in the present.

Chapter C, A and B took place in São Paulo,
Brazil in the context of the 32nd Sao Paulo Biennale titled “Live
Uncertainties.” They were choreographed site specifically to be in dialogue
with historical sites located in the city; a burial ground and first necropolis
of the city the Consolação Cemetery, Afro Brazil Museum (now Afro Brasil
Emanoel Araujo Museum), a historical dedicated to the research, conservation
and exhibition of works and objects related to histories of black people in
Brazil  and the Ciccillo Matarazzo Biennale Pavilion, the site of the São
Paulo biennale .

The Consolação Cemetery was founded in
1858, thirty years before the Empire of Brazil officially ended the trading of
Africans for enslavement. The cemetery had previously been a burial ground for
the poor and the enslaved – whose bodies were exhumed and buried at the
Cemetery of the Afflicted (also known as the Cemetery of the Hanged) in a
different part of the city, today ironically known as Liberdade (a place of
Freedom). Consolação Cemetery became a site for Chapter C: The Genealogy of
Pain in which donna together with Diane, a collaborator, painstakingly
counted all the years since the colonization of Brazil, thus performatively
translating the total violence of slavery and giving it form as an unpayable
debt. Chapter A: The Anatomy of History at the Afro Brazil Museum was
enacted as a history lesson using  the site of the museum as a historical
reading of its collection focusing on bodies that went through physical and
systematic violence. Chapter B: I, Too at the Biennale Pavilion
functioned like credits at the end of a film in which an endless list of names
of people who have endured discriminatory acts of hate and violence were listed
in no particular order until the doors of the Biennale were closed to the
public for the day.  

In October 2016, a month after the series
of performances took place in São Paulo, the classrooms and the entire
University of Witwatersrand erupted in protests, tagged #FeesMustFall to demand
a free, decolonial, quality education. Through the unfolding of these protests,
which spread to other institutions of higher learning across the country, we
could witness a generation refining the language of protest fearlessly and with
a clarity of what can be easily historically misrepresented. In this way, the students
wrote their own history book via placards directed to history (the older
generation) and a history yet to be written in placards reading DEAR HISTORY,
THIS REVOLUTION HAS WOMEN, GAYS, QUEERS & TRANS, REMEMBER THAT! Writing a
history book, therefore, is writing a document to address the past in order to
secure the future. We are always living in historical moments.

The universities responded with violence
and by further tightening security and restricting entrance to the university
grounds. This sparked protests that were happening around the university but
also acts of solidarity with students coming from the university manual labor
force, especially the workers that maintained the university, and whose
struggles with university managements became intertwined with the student’s
demands.

Chapter F: The Free School for Art and
all 'Fings Necessary (until Fees Fall), performed
at the Johannesburg Public Library in 2016 was informed by these events. For
this chapter, donna wore a t-shirt bearing the words borrowed from Fela Kuti’s
1986 song ‘TEACHER DON’T TEACH ME NONSENSE. Created by art students, the
t-shirts spoke to their brazen spirit and their ability to borrow from history
to speak to the present. donna’s title captures the newly constructed playfully
opaque words and terms; the symbolic operation of language, that came out of
the student movements and later became a code to identify with those who
related to the joy and the trauma experienced during the height protests and
its aftermaths.  

To date, chapters of donna’s history book
have continued to unfold across different geographies and sites, responding to
different but connected geo-political presences by revealing their historical
embeddedness. The book has chapters covering 24 letters of the Latin alphabet
with only ‘w’ and ‘k’ remaining.

Both the ‘missing’ letters can stand for
the gaps that exist in the construction of knowledge as an academic discipline
and in how questions can be posed to expose unknowable elements enacted in
artistic research as play.

What results as stand-ins of the ‘missing’
letters are objects, drawings/prints and sound pieces created from traces of
recordings and scribbles of earlier chapters. The material is a call and
invitation to create different non-discursive registers for the understanding
of histories (colonial, racial, capital). The production of the material
included as part of the in living memory suggests a kind of sampling
that offers more than what was known to be there to begin with. The works are
physical embodiments towards a an understanding of what may remain after
history.  

Gabi Ngcobo