Joe Blog

Untitled Basement presents MoRa:

Tumi Mogorosi & Lesego Rampolokeng (Dialogue & Performance) Friday 19th September, 6pm

Mogorosi meets Rampolokeng is not a word sound genesis but a word sound continuation. Upholding a sentiment of Black liberation even in its momentarily deferral into the arts. The meeting of different generations still musing on the fundamental freedom question, which is an absolute must within the current upheaval of world politics. The question that sounds out the center of this meeting is a question of a “writing the ungovernable” (Rampolokeng :2015) ringing true of O.R Tambos request to make the state ungovernable. How might these ethics of ungovernability apply in thinking of freedom anew, in thinking of a way to bring forth a new world as this current world has continuously positioned the black as the outsider to freedom and rights.

MoRa which according to Rampolokeng “can be seen and translated from a seSotho word for son’’ functions for me as a conceptual frame of thinking and linking us back to Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Peter Abrahams Mine Boy. Though understanding the conceptual constraints of gender in the 21st century MoRa functions as a placeholder for a meeting place of a subjectivity under duress looking for freedom. Pushing the public discourse conceptually on the basis of political and cultural aesthetics of the postponement of freedom. MoRa presents a cultural critique within the current field of cultural practices that are determined by an amnesia driven aesthetic that fosters ethnic nationalism that hinder the national project. MoRa brings in the historical, sociological and political implications of Black cultural work.

MoRa (Dialogue) 6pmA conversation panel focus on the Figure of the Rebel. How the rebel is a question of invention, the rebel becomes a catalyst for a new orientation in being and not only as a figure that stands for destruction. The movement of destruction is at once a moment of invention of a different world. The rebel is a promise for freedom, a promise of an otherwise and elsewhere for the oppressed and subjugated. Like Fanon would have it this position is a “demand [for]true invention.Let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction” (Fanon, 1961 :313)

MoRa (Live at The Basement) 8pmWith Rampolokeng’s gutter bound poetics the soundscape takes on a figuration of one who is bearing witness, an accompaniment from within the darkness bearing witness to the historical hurt. The ensemble the huddles around Rampolokeng is word and rhythmic centric with a lightness of strings that hold the bottom loosely thinking of a blues that meet the rugged South African landscape through Rampolokengs oeuvre. A sense of space between word and sound is created though sometimes open to the cacophony of all sounds as they blanket Rampolokeng. This will be a meeting of word and sound that explores a different textural composition in the strings, Tuba and Drums (western and african) that has not been heard in Rampolokeng or Mogorosi. The ensemble’s textural sits in the hold of the blues and the ostinato lines that keep the pulse of revolution alive.