Labo*r
AN INVITATION TO ACTION… A BASIS FOR HOPE

SAVVY Contemporary’s yearlong TRANSITIONS programme takes colonial heritage and decolonization as facts and practices of transition. The second of its four chapters is the research, exhibition and laboratory project LABO*R: AN INVITATION TO ACTION… A BASIS FOR HOPE. It reflects on the work of cultural production and the condition of cultural workers themselves, to create possibilities for a more expansive and internationalist understanding of anti-colonial struggle(s). Curated and produced by a team that locates itself within the context of a nation state as implicated in colonialism and its continuities as Germany, the project engages in collective study through the prism of “labour” to draw inspiration from the works and practices of cultural practitioners who have come before us and who situated themselves and their work in pursuit of anti-colonial liberation, domestically and internationally. If we see culture as a weapon of struggle against apartheid, imperialism, patriarchy and other dominant ideologies, how do we understand the role of the cultural worker?

The project is anchored in the work of the Medu Art Ensemble, which was active in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa from 1976 to 1985. The Ensemble intentionally rejected the classification of their position as “artists”, seeing a need to transcend the elitism of the term and choosing instead to ground their practice as “cultural workers”. Consequently, Medu articulated a vision of their liberation which understood that the role of the cultural worker is to engage themselves in the struggle of the brick and tile factory workers of Durban, the workers in textile, metal and chemical plants, the students and teachers of the Soweto Uprising, the writers and playwrights of the Black Consciousness movement and the many other mass democratic movements which called for fair wages, abolishment of pass laws, and an end to the humiliation of apartheid and racial capitalism. Medu saw the struggle of the workers as linked to these and other anti-colonial struggles; the question of art and culture was not different from the kind of “social development” which should exist at the end of apartheid.

The spirit of Medu is channelled here to engage in a reading of struggles that preceded us so as to lead us to action and to hope. The project aims to avoid the presentation of historical anti-colonial struggle as what Fanon has termed “mummified fragments which hypnotise us” – but rather, we believe, these are flashpoints on a continuum, of which we are still part. The project’s exhibitionary approach suggests that we can and we should move forward with the understanding that the past is not past, the dead are not dead, and freedom is in fact, in the words of Angela Davis, “a constant struggle.” 

Our work here has been to invite art handlers, filmmakers, archivists, illustrators, musicians, photographers, intellectuals, storytellers – in short, cultural workers – to join us in the collective labour of reflecting, studying and creating. Laying bare the labour of cultural work, we join our labours together in the hope of planting a seed in our collective consciousnesses and to give us a view of how to take action even during times of fear and paralysis. This is work that is perpetually in motion, it is never to stand still. Through a programme that also involves a series of workshops, film screenings, readings, plays and various activations, we invite you to reflect, study and create with us.