After All Is Said and Done: On Fluid Solidarity and Survival

Abstract

There is no doubt, given seemingly permanent social, environmental, and economic crises, that transnational solidarity is fundamental in the renewal and survival of art institutions. In the last couple of years, there have been several online discursive platforms—panels, symposia, colloquia—featuring artists, cultural critics, and academics to reflect on the consequences of global disasters such as the coronavirus pandemic on the livelihood of art practitioners and the sustainability of organizations and institutions based in the African continent, most of which are dependent on and competing for shrinking funding resources. In response to the precarity and desolation precipitated by crisis, there is revived urgency in solidarity through the ethics of care, healing, self-preservation, and other contingent strategies of survival. Alternatives such as online exhibitions, interventions, and forums seem to offer new prospects for how modes of practice and working relations across the African continent can be refashioned and large-scale transnational support networks can be formulated. Most significant is that a structurally altered art ecosystem modelled on generosity and collective empathy seems palpable. It is now possible, for example, to imagine the repositioning of institutions like museums as “spaces of care” and habituate therapeutic activities—sometimes ritualized and mysticized—in various initiatives, programs, events, and discursive platforms. The focus on recuperation and repair from psychosocial woundedness, ecocide, social injustice, and compounded trauma has enlivened the quest for slowing down to be in communion and to feel with others. Yet with the translocation of the hard work in affective labor from live to virtual spaces, there is also dilution of otherwise pivotal concepts and strategies demanded by solidarity. In very general terms, affective labor—already deeply entrenched in creative practice—is catalyzed and made visible. The disorienting simulation of social contact online, steamrolled by commercial traffic, trivializes the practice of “care,” leaving class polarization intact and impeding meaningful solidarity. One is reminded of the questions that the artist Naadira Patel so pointedly asks in the text included in her art work the future of work (2020): “how do we imagine a sustainable, more generous, more caring, more kind, unbiased, and more calm world of work?” and then “how radical is your self-care if you don’t post about it? [...] try the self-care app of the year? [...] how high is your social justice barometer?” Solidarity—civic, social, cultural, or political—among institutions, organizations, and art practitioners in the African continent is vital but it is predicated on volatile, uneven, constrained, and neocolonially bound societies. Take, for example, one of the rich historical intellectual legacies of cultural solidarity on the African continent: Pan-Africanism. Although bold in its ideals, Pan-Africanism is also criticized for being a “rhetoric-laden,” androcentric, and elitist “passive concept” that is “represented in pan-African institutions such as the African Union (AU) and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD)” (Nzewi 2013). The grand narrative of Pan-Africanism conspicuously redacts women’s creative, political, and intellectual work in actuating the pan-African vision (Abbas and Mama 2014).1 For this reason, a transnational feminist position (Mohanty 2003: 7) is paramount given its emphasis on accountability and oppositionality in assembling the collective voice across the gender spectrum. To address the need for transnational solidarity across socioeconomic classes, concepts such as “trans-Africanism” (Okereke 2021) and “critical pan-Africanism,” which “mobilize the values of solidarity and cultural exchange to effect a situation that has political ramifications,” have become generative. In the reflections that follow—structured according to acts of solidarity such as gathering, assembling, caring, working, and devising strategies for survival—are preliminary notes on solidarity, particularly fluid solidarity, and the bonds that art practitioners are molding. Fluid solidarity—the organic organizing of civil society—recognizes ever-changing meanings in the bases upon which different kinds of solidarity are formed. Mohammed Bamyeh (2009: 39) defines it as “frames of affiliation and agendas that are not coterminous with state ideologies.” He distinguishes it from solid solidarity, which defines hierarchical and state-led notions of collectivity. Solidarity, he argues, is “essentially fluid in nature” (Bamyeh 2009: 39) with the transmutation of one form of solidarity to another. The question is: what does solidarity demand of art institutions and practitioners in the current context? GATHERING In 2020, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (Zeitz MOCAA) hosted the Radical Solidarity Summit—a platform that brought together artists, scholars, and writers working across disciplines to gather and collectively formulate ideas on various modes of solidarity such as collaboration, knowledge sharing, and transnational mobilities and to reflect on the intellectual legacies of Pan-Africanism. Its overarching message emphasized “practicing togetherness,” in the words of Koyo Kouoh, the museum’s executive director and chief curator.2 In her opening address to the Summit, Kouoh argued that solidarity is a “fundamental dimension of life.” Conceptualizing this event, the Zeitz team asked: “What can we do for ourselves, what can we do for others, what can we do together?” One of the aims Kouoh took up after being appointed in 2019 was to “bring a certain degree of institutional humility.” This would be a necessary shift, given the aloofness of the museum in its initial year under the first director, Mark Coetzee.3 Following its launch in 2017, Zeitz MOCAA faced criticism for lack of transparency, abuses of power, and failure to engage local art professionals and establishments (Blackman 2015), the domination of White males, and inequity (Sargent 2017, Suarez 2017), among other things. Yet it was also touted as the “first Contemporary African Art Museum on the continent” and “the Tate of Africa” (Guardian 2017). Located at the obscenely opulent Victoria and Albert Waterfront, Cape Town, in the context of abysmal racial economic inequality, Nomusa Makhubu is an artist, curator and associate professor in Art History and Deputy Dean of Transformation in Humanities at the University of Cape Town. She founded the Creative Knowledge Resources project—a platform for mentorship and collaborative practice in socially responsive arts. nomusa.makhubu@uct.ac.za 1 Interior of Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa. Thomas Heatherwick Architects (2017). Photo: Iwan Baan