After All Is Said and Done

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?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, Zeitz MOCAA has had to work hard to shake off what Kouoh accurately defines as “institutional arrogance.” Cape Town, colloquially called the “Europe of Africa,” has long been labelled as one of South Africa most racist cities (McDonald 2008). It is a brand that impedes social solidarity, even at a local national level. Not only does Zeitz MOCAA face these extreme polarities and the Whiteness of Cape Town, but it also faces the added challenge of being located in a country plagued by class- and race-based Afrophobia—a phenomenon of scapegoating Black Africans who are deemed not “native” to South Africa. These obstacles encumber the expediency of pan-African solidarity beyond the discursive platforms that are, in general, frequented by mostly middle-class participants. Considering this, the position that museums should be “community-and artist-led” adopted by Zeitz MOCAA is progressive but necessitates cautious navigation of a context that is beleaguered by confounding and often inhospitable internal relations.Kouoh's remark about the museum's civic role, “its responsibility to rebuild citizenship and political engagement,” is pertinent when one considers how state-owned institutions fare when compared to privately owned ones in fostering debates about citizenship. In the context of faltering democracies, a term that Stuart Hall (2002: 21) sees as “so proliferated [that] it is virtually useless,” the parameters of citizenship and associated rights seem anchored in the racial economies of private property and private philanthropy. Generally, state-owned museums, which should center the objective of rebuilding citizenship, are not always well resourced for projects at a transnational scale, while privately (often White) owned museums in South Africa are not always driven by sincere social justice objectives. Arguably, the private-sector-led revival of democracy vitiates the claim that democracy is about elected forms of public representation. As a not-for-profit museum, termed public but privately owned, Zeitz MOCAA provokes well-timed questions about these imbalances, specifically the implications for how solidarity is conceived and projected in public and private institutions.In addition to these complexities, Zeitz MOCAA has also had to reestablish its relations with institutions, organizations, and practitioners beyond South Africa, positioning itself as the first museum that “sets out to present, collect, and engage with the artistic and intellectual production in a pan-African and Afro-diasporic scale” and placing emphasis on “mutuality and plurality.” Kouoh defined the inclusion of the entire continent as well as its diaspora as an “urgent necessity” but one with an older trajectory. She pointed out thatThis homage to earlier forms of solidarity codifies the bases for contemporary pan-African solidarity. It points to an era dedicated to the anticolonial gathering of critical thought and social organizing when the formation of independent nation-state sovereignties was hinged on international solidarity.As mentioned, this glowing legacy of Pan-Africanism has eclipsed the contributions of women art practitioners. Africa-based Black women and queer writers, art historians, cultural thinkers, and artists who were practicing in the Independence decades are seldom lauded to a fair extent as their male counterparts. Hakima Abbas and Amina Mama (2014: 4) question “the hegemonic androcentric narratives of pan-Africanist history that erase women's participation” and ask, “How should feminist movements challenge the yawning gap between the pan-African vision for Africa in the millennium and grim material, social, and political realities?” Pan-Africanism is not comprehensive if it does not heed the repertoires of feminist pan-Africanism in forging solidarity.Contemporary examples of impactful Africa-based women-led extrainstitutional forms of solidarity can be traced in initiatives such as Bisi Silva's Àsìkò, held in Nigeria (2010, 2012), Ghana (2013, 2017), Senegal (2014), Mozambique (2015), Ethiopia (2016), and Cape Verde (2018). It often coincided with major events such as Dak'Art in Senegal and in 2017 with the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) meeting in Ghana, where the Àsìkò book was launched. This transnational mobile knowledge-I realsharing alternative art education platform addressed a gap in art education systems across the continent and current demands in “critical theory, art history, research methodologies, and conceptual strategies that underpin artistic and curatorial practice today” (Silva 2017). Kouoh's Raw Material Company, based in Dakar, has long facilitated groundbreaking intellectual platforms for art critical thought through the Condition Report 1–4 Symposia, RAW Académie, publications, and residencies. These are just a few examples.Other transnational modes of gathering resources and sharing knowledge include the Pan-African Circle of Artists (PACA) that was initiated by Kryds Ikwuemesi in 1991; the Exit Tour spearheaded by Goddy Leye in 2006; and Invisible Borders, founded in 2009 and led by Emeka Okereke. Invisible Borders advocates for Trans-Africanism: “trans-African interaction between artists and art practitioners in the many countries that make up the continent.”4This approach recognizes class struggle and the distancing of “arts” from “the layman.”5So what are the civil and micro foundations of solidarity? It was pointed out at the Radical Solidarity Summit that the current crisis, as well as protest and civil unrest, has “intensified the general call for care and for humility.” Radical, Kouoh remarks, needs not only to be “loud and extreme” but can also be “silent, subtle, and steady defiance of any given state of affairs.” Solidarity implies “the condition of living under a constant drive for care, consciousness, and sensitivity to the matters that surround us.” These strategies and approaches to solidarity through care and humility are rooted in feminist praxis. The resounding call to gather and share provides a basis for understanding shifting meanings in the political thrust of contemporary modes of solidarity on the continent.At an individual level, (fluid) solidarity may refer to very personal bonds. The artist Lungiswa Gqunta homes in on intergenerational solidarity between women in her family. This shows that micro- and macrosolidarities are interwoven, even if at first in small-scale solidarity of those who might not have formed part of movements but together worked to defy the indignity of oppressive systems. This scale of solidarity is also far reaching. Take, for example, Gqunta's Riotous Assembly (2019), an installation named after South Africa's Riotous Assemblies Act of 1956, which prohibited gatherings of twelve or more people and was used to target and hyperpolice Black people. In the Act, “assemblies,” or people gathering, is “conduct engendering feelings of hostility” and might endanger “public peace.”6 Gqunta's Riotous Assembly (2019) is defined as a celebration of “Black revolt, collective healing, and resistance focusing on the often-overlooked importance of women within these narratives.”7Gqunta points out the absurdity of this legislation in that, given its size, her family alone would constitute “an illegal gathering.”8 In some ways, the criminalization of gathering shows the political potency of coming together and, significantly, that solidarity is a spatial practice. Whether it defines allyship across national borders or across shifting conceptualizations of “public,” “private,” or virtual spaces, it demands reclaiming space to organize and communalize. Gqunta explains that she “wanted to create a space where various knowledges from different women would exist in the space and that would be the way in which we share between each other.” Riotous Assembly (2019) is designed as a space in which everyday tasks are shared, tasks that strengthen sisterhood (hooks 1986; Lugones and Rosezelle 1995). These are bonds that are not formed on the basis of “shared victimization”; rather they are formed on “the basis of shared strengths and resources” (hooks 1986: 128). They do not forego “doing the ‘dirty work’,” which hooks (1986: 128) defines as “the struggle and confrontation necessary to build political awareness as well as the many tedious tasks to be accomplished in day to day organizing that is necessary in the development of radical political Gqunta explains that it is while these tasks that women share their In her artist she notes that “the way in which people the of the is also a very not even but a in the that the far like a The of working together in Riotous Assembly knowledge of the installation is by It was in after the when Black people who at the to protest were and points out that by the the was political resistance had been Black was in after Gqunta or on in which she that gathering as in a of people being and being together systems of The in the installation is in that Gqunta is at slowing down as is a of an art collective in Its and worked collectively and It was formed in response to shared of and in the its institutions. For one of their collective The (2016), they in on in with of in the of women in Gqunta's and the of Black in the collective work of can be in of solidarity. In Borders, 7) defines solidarity of and the of as the basis for among from of solidarity, which solidarity as of struggle to the on the basis It you to by and a in 2003: solidarity the understanding of the kinds of necessary for solidarity in the solidarity with and or is hard It from labor under and labor social and, to a certain the one part As affective solidarity working on the of among institutions, This of solidarity in the context of online organizing and political may up in solidarity to support a with a of people they do not and may be part at in meaningful other an and to be to be in of solidarity work is in Naadira the future of work Patel online navigation between on social and from public environmental, and economic to and Patel shows how solidarity and other forms of online have to projects is as it like or are out and Patel the of the and the of solidarity affective labor where in is an app She of online solidarity as questions are about the for those who are of no or to constant and for those who are not to work those work is but and with no to create or in the of In many ways, work to the of affective labor and, significantly, the and class struggle that solidarity is about affective also reminded of a by It is a of a of being made As the is in the and are and the is the artists the a different the White class in South Africa. The words were from a The by is when the her who for a White family as a the while the her in her in to the political her in the of White and in the in Black of of as an that the The intergenerational between and the of and the in which in and often in the As a care of and the White family even she care of her and is in the and solidarity would For to her to work for White people that she sees as and she would have to up her political For her work is to her but for the family to For there is the affective labor in political work but there is also the affective labor upon by One is also reminded of the the in the White and the in the Black spatial and her for the White In this affective labor not only care, and it among those who share political recuperation of the care by feminist social justice movements has a in institutions, museums, and It is also alternative approaches for artists, and art writers, the and local knowledge for and For example, the Arts of South Africa initiated and for art practitioners on is a response to “the systems that of working and The quest for slowing down and to social relations has the struggle for social, and justice in the In the context of the practice of and is not only but and that care is “fundamental to social They care may also and In her at the African pointed to to with other don't to we don't to points out that the of and the of which to be of care but become “the of She what to as each and “What does it to together in points to the of care she focus on and from the social and political It and trauma rather that political a between the individual and the world which we are which is up with and from care as to She “What can care like under [...] what are the of care what are the oppressive of care These questions are the by for is not it is self-preservation, and that is an of political and who argues, to entire the For self-care would beyond questions to the of the for it to for and internal as an of solidarity, can be but it is not an in in the and within political As one can of but it is and in the of This many questions about the in which care is in cultural institutions by a history of does solidarity demand of art institutions and practitioners in the current strategies by art practitioners and institutions have in transnational solidarity. Solidarity a of in to the the in the kinds of bases upon which it is formulated. Solidarity we have ideas about who is in solidarity with and which resources are brought the and political and what or are at In the of online social concepts of solidarity, care, and become altered and such that they are The of political strategies it to beyond the of and the of political movements and in the

Political science · Sociology · Solidarity · Art Therapy and Mental Health · Law · Management and Organizational Studies

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