The Shape of a Pocket Encounter: The Contours of Absence in the Table Mountain Quarries with Tammy Langtry, Talya Lubinsky and Gabi Motuba
Date: Wednesday, November 6th
Time: 19:00 – 21:00
Stone from the Table Mountain quarries in Cape Town, South Africa was mined by enslaved people since the beginning of slavery in the Dutch Cape Colony in 1653. The quarries remain a present absence in the mountain, attesting to compounded legacies of extraction and displacement. They are the very substance from which the city is constructed, and shape the material, spatial and economic logics upon which it continues to operate.
In a roundtable discussion, visual artist Talya Lubinsky (present in person), curator Tammy Langtry and vocalist and composer Gabi Motuba (who will join us by video from Johannesburg), will discuss their approaches to articulations of absence through their engagement with the quarries of Table Mountain. They will each introduce their contribution to the collaborative project, The Sanctuary of the Appointed time, and situate their practices in a larger discourse on coloniality and enslavement and their attentive continuities in the City of Cape Town.
Developed through working with a contour map of one of these quarries, a tent-like structure acts as a temporary shelter, a place of listening, to literally and metaphorically be present to the erasures and silences embodied by the quarry. This is not to hark back to a time before colonialism and enslavement, when the mountain was whole, rather it gestures towards the impossibility of refilling the empty space in the mountain. We invite the audience to stand inside of the void, now made visible, in the shape of what is no longer there, and listen to the sound piece, titled ‘Sounds defined and forged by way of the hinterlands, borders and limitations’ composed and sung by Gabi Motuba.
BIO
Tammy Langtry, South African born, is currently working as an independent curator, art historian and cultural producer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She worked as an Assistant Curator (2017 – 2021) at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (MOCAA). Cape Town and is currently director of a Pan-African artist residency – LAPA, a co-conceptualised project with the Goethe – Institut. She also contributes to the artistic collective, Art Meets and has presented their work at the 2022 VANSA Cultural Leaders Programme. She was awarded a bursary by the National Research Foundation to pursue an Honours degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in Art History (2010).
Talya Lubinsky (b. 1988) is an artist from Johannesburg, currently based in Berlin. Solo exhibitions include Melting Stone, Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial, Flossenbürg (2022). Marble Dust, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2020), Floating Bodies, Iwalewahaus, Bayreuth, (2017) and If we burn, there is ash, Wits Anthropology Museum, Johannesburg (2016). Lubinsky received an MFA with distinction from University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. In 2019-2020 she was awarded a one year residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, funded by the KfW Stiftung. She is a recipient of a NEUSTART Stipendium from the Stiftung Kunstfonds for 2022 and 2023.
Gabi Motuba is a South African award-winning jazz vocalist, composer and Wits Music School educator. Over the years she has produced several albums, ranging from jazz to avant-garde which include Tefiti-Goddess of Creation (her debut album released in 2018), Sanctum Sanctorium (A duo album which features Swiss pianist Malcom Braff released in 2015) and The Wretched (which is a sonic experimentation collab that focuses on the literary text The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon released in 2020). Motuba was selected for an 2023 Artist Fellow at the University of Western Cape as part of the Oscillations program and showcased her sound installation in Berlin in early 2024. She is currently the jazz voice and performance part time teacher at the University of Witwatersrand. Motuba recently released her second album, The Sabbath.