Fragments of Encounters

Abstract

ABSTRACT Fragments of Encounters is a performance-installation based research project that was first performed at the Infecting the City public art festival in 2019 in Cape Town. The project was build around a personal archive (over 150 hours of audio recorded material), comprised of fragments of everyday encounters and conversations with South Africans, Zimbabweans, Congolese, Nigerians, Pakistanis, Somalians, Tanzanians, Romanians, Roma and others, who prefer to remain anonymous, and memories of my own. The archive assumes a double role; it is both a mnemonic instrument and a geography of my encounters. The work recreates a mixture of cultures, identities and geographies that need to be decoded and interpreted as way to make meaning. One needs to learn and to un-learn at the same time in order to adapt to unfamiliar contexts.