Theme: Creatively engaging with archives and memory through sound
Our guest for this edition of the Culture Catch Up is Nombuso Mathibela. Mathibela is a cultural worker, educator, writer, and vinyl selector based in Johannesburg, who works through sound, focusing on anti-colonial liberation histories and cultural ecological behaviours in Africa.
She is the founder of Jewel Scents & Song, a Pan-African research space thinking through metal and jewellery production and an archivist at the Centre for the Study of Race, Class, and Gender at the University of Johannesburg. Mathibela works with and responds to sound archives, including music, vinyl, cassettes, CDs, field recordings, audio interviews, voices, noise, and silence as cultural texts. With this, she produces live sound broadcasts and recorded sonic installations that examine – through cultural practice, environmental damage, identity, and heritage.
Her work sees the production of art, literature, and other tangible and intangible aesthetic products as manifestations of a cultural instinct, rather than constituting culture itself.
This Culture Catch Up conversation will focus on what it means to creatively engage with archives and memory specifically through the medium of sound. Understanding that archives have been used as tools to maintain power and control hegemonic narratives, we hope to discuss and dream of alternative and liberatory ways of engaging with memory and our collective histories.
We look forward to having this conversation on Thursday the 25th of April, 2024 at 18:00 EAT on Zoom.
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If you missed it, here is how it went:
While preparing for this fourth edition of our public history talks, we really wanted to stretch and play with the definition and notion of what working with archives entails. Our session, which opened with a powerful sonic offering by Nombuso, brought us to a space of understanding memory work through archiving as healing breath, medicine, and intimacy.
