Disclaimer: This transcript was generated automatically. Although it was carefully reviewed, it may still contain errors and may not correspond exactly to the recorded audio track. Time stamps are indicative and may not correspond to the edited audio-video recording provided.
Keri Facer (00:02)
So, hello everybody. It's great to have today with us two award-winning artists and scholars, the poet and critic Professor Rukmini Nair, and the photographer and art historian Professor Nomusa Makhubu. And it's just lovely to have you both here today. Before we get into our conversation, I'm just going to give you bit of a background on these two amazing women. Rukmini is a linguist, poet, writer and critic. She's honorary professor of linguistics and English at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and global professorial fellow at Queen Mary University. Rukmini has worked all around the world. She's won many prizes for both poetry and for her academic research. And she's the author of over 150 papers and 10 books, which makes the rest of us feel very inadequate. Her work includes Poetry in a Time of Terror, Lying on the Post-Colonial Couch: The Idea of Indifference, as well as three beautiful books of poetry. Her most recent book is co-edited with Peter de Souza, it's Keywords for India, a conceptual lexicon for the 21st century. And Rukmini says that she does research in linguistics and literature for the same reason that she writes poetry, to discover the limits and possibilities of speech. Rukmini is working with us on the Times of a Just Transition programme and the questions of hunger and bodily time, and we'll get to that topic shortly. Nomusa is a photographer and art historian. She's professor in art history at the University of Cape Town and she's also founder of the brilliant Creative Knowledge Resources, which is this open access platform for social justice arts which is fantastic, really worth delving into. Her brilliant photographic work explores the archives of colonial photography and plays with questions of the performance of the past and the role of these historical artifacts in the present. Nomusa's exhibited widely, including co-curating the South African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. She was recipient of the ABSA L'Atelier Gerard Secoto Award in 2006 and the Prix du Studio National des Arts Contemporain Le Fredenoy in 2014. She received the American Council of Learned Societies African Humanities Program Fellowship Award. And she is working in the programme, the Time of the Just Transitions programme, with us on the temporal politics of land justice and stalled just transitions, as well as the way that artists are dealing with times of waste and a whole load of different things that we're going to drill into today. So, it's really Welcome both of you to this podcast. So, let's get started with a little light question, just a sense of what's your personal relationship with time? How do you get on with time? Is it a friend of yours? Rukmini, what do you think?
Rukmini Bhaya Nair (02:59)
That's a very cool warm-up question. Let me just think about how I'd like to frame this idea of relationship with time... What's your relationship with time? And I've always felt, in a way, that if you think of relationships, you think of children, partners, and so on. If you think of time, for me, is the most relentless partner because it never goes away. you know, you are all Imagine a partner who's always with you, no matter how you love, how much you love this partner, you're going to say, my God, give me some space. And, so, I've always been looking for I guess your question reminded me of that something, a rocket or something, which would have enough velocity to take me out of time. And for me, I guess, one of the fuels, the propellants of my time rocket has been art, poetry, thoughts of people. And they've taken me out of this, you know, this constant companionship of time. And I'm not thinking only of my own writing and poetry, but I'm thinking of how other poets have rescued me. And I just want to say before I hand over to Nomusa that I think I was thinking this morning of Shakespeare in the sonnets. And he says, "When I do count the clock that tells the time and see brave day sunk in hideous night, then of thy beauty do I question, Baig, that thou among the wastes of time must go." And there you have it encapsulated, you know, questioning of the clock time. When I do count the clock that tells the time, you have clock time, you have questioning of time, you have this rhythm, Michel's word, of day and night. And then the questioning of what that thou, you, friend, companion, among the wastes of time must go. And this question of wastage in policymaking, in how we conserve energy and all these things are kind of encapsulated questions of justice, time, loss, all these things in these four lines. So, that's what I mean by a propellant fuel to take you out of the tyranny of time.
Nomusa Makhubu (05:46)
I love that idea of being able to transcend the rocket. Mine is not as optimistic. I mean, I guess, you know, for me, I've always seen time as a way of organizing society, but I've never felt that I really have time in the true sense of possessing something.
Keri Facer (05:49)
That's a wonderful image, really.
Rukmini Bhaya Nair (05:58)
Yeah.
Nomusa Makhubu (06:17)
I guess I don't get on well with time, especially having witnessed how it can be used as an instrument to dominate and subjugate the lives of others. So, for me, it's about how do we strategically shift the way in which time is manipulated, which is why I think the idea of a rocket is quite interesting because then one can transcend that, you know, always catching up to time, always... It's not something we actually really have. It always belongs elsewhere, always seems to belong and be controlled from elsewhere. And we're simply responding to it. Which is why I think, you know, it's quite interesting that it actually, The point that you're raising about relationships is important because, in some ways, we can think about time as a social relation. It really is about how we relate to other people and navigate the differences and hierarchies with other people. Yeah, so that's me.
Keri Facer (07:17)
Well, that's got us started, hasn't it? That's got us right into questions. The thing that resonates with me, is it possible to possess time? What would it mean to possess it? What would it mean to be in ownership of this thing? So, thank you. Let's crack on. You're both artists You're both, you're a poet, you're a photographer, as well as academics and I want to invite a response from you in the first place with those parts of your lives. know you have many others. Quite often The sort of lay conception of time is often of time as a sort of container that we just exist with, it just exists within. And yet we can think of time as a material. You've already touched on that. And one of the things that strikes me that artistic practice does is invite us to pay attention to time as a material in some ways, to work with it, to inquire into it. I wonder if you have any thoughts on how, what it means to work with the two media that you work with, with poetry and photography. How are you working with time as a material, as a medium, when you're working with those two arts? Maybe Nomusa, you get going.
Nomusa Makhubu (08:29)
I can't, I mean, as in, I think I've already mentioned that, you know, because I find it so manipulable, that's I find it so intriguing. Photography, which is a medium that I work with, is all about time. I'm reminded of how the American photographer, Dorothea Lange, defined photography as a practice that takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. But there's more to it than this in the sense that photography itself is manipulable, in same way as time is manipulable. When I was working on the self-portrait series, where I focused on colonial photography, I could see how even the concept of the "primitive" was created to construct this kind of temporal distance. Photography then was used to create this sort of other time. But there's a kind of temporal distance between the photographer and the photographed subject, even though both of them occupy the same time or are in the same moment when the photograph is taken. Colonial photography always seems to have this, always seems to create this other fantastic time. So, when I worked on that project, I selected images, but what I realized was that most of what I was looking at, those images were shot in studio with painted backdrops that created this illusion of a primordial landscape, which would then cast the subject as an entity that occupies a past. So, this sense of being out of contemporary time is something that's always haunted Africans for centuries. I mean, we've been seen as people who need to catch up with the rest of the world, always late, people who have not developed at the same speed through time, and people whose labor time is continually appropriated. So, in some ways that for that project, I think what I was trying to capture was ways in which time can also be used to objectify certain people, certain bodies. So, my work has always been about surfacing these kinds of temporal justices, you know, the idea of time being stolen, time being used to objectify. So, yeah, photography is the best way to do that because it's just, you know, the idea is that it's a truthful documentation of an exact moment, but we don't realise how much of those realities can actually be manipulated. And it allows us to be able to read those moments in very particular ways.
Keri Facer (11:11)
I wonder if you could just say before we turn to you, Rukmini here, Maybe it would be helpful for listeners for you to just describe a little bit about that photographic series that you did, because you didn't just look at those archive images, did you? You also projected your own contemporary image into those photographs. So, maybe you could just say a little something about what you were doing in that process. What did it mean? Help us understand. We'll post some links in the podcast notes to your series of photographs, so that would be great. But Maybe you can just help us have a sense of what were you trying to do as you projected yourself into those images?
Nomusa Makhubu (11:52)
Yes, thank you. I should have explained this from the beginning. So, that project, I was looking at a set of photographs that were included in a book by Michael Stevenson called Surviving the Lens. And it's colonial photographs that he's collected over time. And what I did was to project those images and then, when I started with that project, I would place an object and project and then place an object just to disrupt the image. But then I think as time went, we thought, actually, perhaps if I stood in the position of the photograph, it might then bring us to question this idea of time as a social relation. What was that relationship between the photographer and the photograph? So, the images can be described as this overlay of the colonial photograph within the contemporary, but also it's a disruption of the way that we think about memory, which is always constructed in the present. It's retrospective, but it's constructed in the present. And in the same way as I can imagine, you know, what the feeling must have been for the sitter, the photographed and the photographer, was this trying to create a particular sort of timeframe. And which is, mean, I think the process of making those photographs, you know, was also for me, was let's think about how timeframes are created, within photography.
Keri Facer (13:20)
I see such a wonderful layering of pasts and presents and multiple pasts and multiple presents in those images of yours. You're really troubling this hugely simplistic image of time as a simple progress from past, present to future. It feels almost like you're talking about the aliveness as well of the past in the present in that instant of photography too. Yeah, it's very beautiful. We'll come back to that more in a second, I hope. Rukmini, what about you as a poet? How are you working with time as a material in this wonderful medium?
Rukmini Bhaya Nair (13:55)
You know, when listening to Nomusa, I was thinking how similar and yet dissimilar the processes are when one is dealing with a form like poetry, which is much, much, much older and was both, you know, oral and there was no record of it at all. And, so, we're looking at a very ancient form when we come to poetry and a much more precise form with photography where you can do a lot of things through the visual lenses and superimposition and so on. And I was thinking that with poetry, the problem is that, in a way, because it's had such a long history and even prehistory, and it's, you know, oral memory and all these things, you think I began to think of poetry as something which is, you know, which belongs, which kind of is an object created for, just for looking, as with all art. It has no other purpose than saying, "Look at me. I am your mirror. I am your memory. I am your context. I am your love. you know, those kind so it does Any work of art, for me, starting off from poetry, was that it is just an object created to be regarded and interpreted. Its function is to be regarded and interpreted. When if Nomusa creates this image of several photographs, and let's say I write a haiku history of the world, and I go from the current all the way back to the first century in 21 haikus, what am I doing? I'm creating a kind of memory glyph, you know. I just say, look at me. You know, I'm saying this. It's clearly contrary to the history of the world. There's so much context lost. You know, you're writing the history of the world in 21 haikus. Are you crazy? And then I realized that the reason you need this craziness is that it's a place of sanity. It's saying, stand still, look at me. I am memory. It has no other purpose. If all the objects of the world everything in the world disappeared, our coffee mugs, our cell phones, everything disappeared, would still think, the imagination would still be hungry. It would be thirsty. It would be asking for interaction and looking. And that's why I think all works of art have no direct purpose. They may serve to subjugate. Colonial photography definitely did. They may serve to create distance. They may be unjust, but, at the same time, because they are kind of these objects only meant for interpretation, especially poetry or any other thing, any other form of art, I would say it's about grabbing your, all your selfhood in that moment.
Keri Facer (17:36)
Nomusa, do you have a response to that? I can see you nodding your head. So, I'm wondering if there's a connection. I've got something I would like to say as well. But I mean, These are very visceral images, aren't they? This idea of art grabbing us. It's like it's a it's a physical moment. almost. I go back to your point about the rocket pulling you out of time, that kind of separation from that kind of relentless relationship with time. And you talk about sanity, a moment of sanity and that moment of standing still. And it's making me think, with both of you actually, about this question of what the time of interpretation is in arts practice. So, I'm talking to you both as creators, but I suppose I'm curious and maybe Michel this ties to your work on rhythm as well, which is this moment of, There is the moment of the interpretation, but, then there's also, for me, it feels like there are ripples that that flow out from that moment of encounter, that moment of being pulled out of life into a different realization, moment, awareness that then constructs ripples. I can see Michel nodding. Do you want to say something, Michel?
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (18:46)
Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating to listen to both of you. I was wondering, was reacting as I was listening to you, Rukmini, when you said the only purpose of art, in a way, is to be interpreted and somewhere seen or heard. And I was wondering, listening to both of you, what room do you let to self-expression, art as a way to express oneself? And I'm thinking about poetry and how poetry is a way to create a rhythm through language, to express something about oneself that maybe we cannot express in any other way. And the same about photography, in a way, it's as a means to express something through visual means that says something also about the rhythm that are composing who we are and how we relate to the world. And, so, I was wondering how that resonated for you.
Rukmini Bhaya Nair (19:39)
I'd say that, as a species, we are a pattern-making species. Our business is to see patterns even where there are no patterns. So, our self-expression is to create patterns which we think will resonate literally with other people. You know, they'll hear the tap, tap, tap. So this rhythm is embedded and this takes us towards the question of hunger in our bodily rhythms. All of us have gut reactions to reading poetry and to writing it. And what is that gut? If you look at narrative, the rhythms of narrative, for example, there's a beginning, a middle, whatever, a conclusion and so on. You realize that, at each stage, you're listening to a false things. It's just a created object, but you will feel the same emotions that you feel in real life. So you will feel rage. You will feel happiness. You will feel sorrow just through this creation of something artistic. And I once asked a famous British writer, David Lodge, you I asked him, like, do you write these very funny novels, you know, academic novels, and do you at all laugh when, to yourself, when you write these things? Because you're spending all this time on this project, do you laugh when you write your tremendously funny novels? And he said, I never laugh. I cannot afford to laugh. I have to because what I'm doing is a deadly serious business and I'm holding it all in and spilling it out on the page. And even though So, the laughter, the reward comes when somebody else laughs. So, this business of inclusion and, you know, sort of making a point indirectly through poetry or whatever, those things give one, you know, that self-expression. Why was he spending so much time writing? But his self-expression caused me to laugh, not him.
Nomusa Makhubu (21:59)
Okay.
Keri Facer (21:59)
That's a very interesting time delay thing going on there.
Nomusa Makhubu (22:03)
Absolutely. I guess It's expression, but it's also recordable. mean, I think, you know, We're also a species that finds security in knowing that we fit somewhere in time, that we're not just arbitrary, not existing arbitrarily. you know, Poetry also records something. It records a zeitgeist, you know, and for us to be able to create those patterns, you know, to able to record what happened before so that we know whether or not to avoid or to repeat. So, I think, yeah, mean, in some ways, I think, you know, both art and poetry are also forms of record.
Keri Facer (22:43)
And, I mean, that takes us very nicely to another thing that I wanted to talk with you both about. You're both working in post-colonial settings. You've both explicitly talked about colonial history as an important part of your work. I mean, this question of how to deal with these pasts in the present is a hugely live, ongoing situation, both in the global south and in the UK, where I'm speaking from. So, I wanted to think about, with you, how do you approach this question? How do you think about working with these different times in the present? And Nomusa, you've talked a little bit about your work, but maybe you want to say some more about that in relation to maybe projects that you're working on just now.
Nomusa Makhubu (23:30)
Yeah, I mean, for me, the colonial is always present. You know, I wrote an article following the 2016 protests and the removal of the Cecil John Rhodes statue. And it's really unbelievable that, you know, after all these years, Cecil John Rhodes still looms large, and he's still occupied a pride of place on campus. But because the campus is located on a mountain, it's almost as if he's got this vantage point over the whole of Cape Town. And, for me, it was like this continued presence. I mean, today, when you walk past that empty plinth, the plinth is still there. But next to the plinth, someone has drawn this long shadow of the statue that used to be there. So, it's like even though he's gone, but there's this long shadow that's being cast. So, it really is, it's the leftovers we are living in of colonial history. The buildings we occupy, the institutions that we have, you we continue to work in, live in culturally and otherwise, our practices, our customs, those things are part and parcel of that colonial entanglement. So, there's a continuity of presence that I think has to be troubled. I'm also reminded of a work that I did many years ago. I think I was still a student. It's called Trading Lies and it is a series of photographs that were shot in a museum called the Observatory Museum in Makhanda in the Eastern Cape. And I don't know if it's changed now, but at the time, the entire museum was like walking into the home of a British settler family. It's everything. It's walking, It's the kitchen. It's the bedrooms. It's the lounge. And you have these mannequins that are dressed in like 19th century garb and you're meant to sort of walk with this or through this kind of imperialist nostalgia. And then I suppose in many ways it was like freezing time to preserve the ideas or the cultural values or preserve this kind of for certain kinds of memory about British settler colonial life. And yeah, And then at the top of the museum, you had a camera obscura. So, you're literally inside a camera and what you were seeing from inside the camera is everything that was happening in the street. It was daily movements of people know, getting into taxis and all of this, which is quite interesting. And also when you're in the camera obscura, that life that you see happening every day is inverted. So, the image is upside down. So, it's a fun project in many ways, and what I did really was to pose with the mannequins as though I'm this sort of other presence that's just, you know, laying on the couches, having tea. You know, and I just had fun with them, although it represents a very painful part of our history. But it was also to question, you know, this kind of imperialist nostalgia and the ways in which those institutions of colonialism persisted and have persisted through time. And, you know, I mean, we've kind of acquiesced in some ways. There are things that we just aren't challenging anymore. So, I mean, I think, yeah, for me, It was a very interesting way to think about how even places like museums can create this interplay between solid times, if you think of what was being preserved in the house, the sort of unchanging setting of British colonial life, and what one can see is like a liquid time, which is fleeting. And what you can see from the camera obscura outside, the constantly moving, changing light that you see below. When you see it, you're standing right at the top of the museum. And both of them are contemporaneous. You know, this frozen solid time, fleeting liquid time. So, yeah, it was interesting in that sense and I think colonialism sort of creates those distortions of our realities.
Keri Facer (27:55)
I love that image of these multiple fleeting times in this frozen present. It's a kind of inversion of what we sometimes think photography as, as the freezing of time. It's the kind of flip of that, isn't it? It's you're using the photography to surface the living time. It makes me also think of all of the work on ghosts and haunting and remember, you know, those old photographs that used to have, you know, here's a photograph of a ghost in the present. And I'm almost seeing you as a ghost of the future in the past in that building. This is you locating yourself as a future presence in this history, this wonderful sense of a different future that is going to emerge even within this place that seems so frozen.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (28:41)
I just can piggy-tail on what Nomusa just introduced. You were talking about nostalgia and somewhere nostalgia is a form of reminiscence. One way is to see it as something stuck and solid that contrasts with the fluidity of history and the fluidity of the course of events moving on. And I was wondering if we could see it from a more kind of rhythmic perspective as nostalgia is the repeating of the self, of the same, again, like the broken record, you know, that keep in loop repeating the same sentence or the same, you know, lyrics. And, so, I wonder, how do you both perceive artistic expression as a way to break the cycle in a way and to move to that fluidity you were referring to and break with the broken record in a way?
Rukmini Bhaya Nair (29:29)
Well, about this broken record, nostalgia as a form of repetition, as recuperation through repetition. I want to talk about that, but I think I want to go back to my own encounter with the colonial archive... I looked at colonial poetry in particular in the National Library in India around the 17th century to the 19th century archive, you know, of colonial poetry. And, you know, you often get this notion colonial time is clock time. It's rhythmic. It goes ahead and so on and so forth. Whereas, you know, the local time is flowing and liquid and so on and so forth. But I found when I looked at the colonial archive that, in fact, for two centuries, the British, they were encountering this strange environment. They were supposed to rule over it, guide it, et cetera. And what I found is for almost two centuries in the poetry, these were, rehearsals or repetitions of conquest. They were before conquest happened and the crown took over, which was, you know, only in 1858. I discovered these reams of poetry. And I was thinking, why are they writing so much poetry? Until it occurred to me that poetry was a way of envisioning through repetition, through rhythm, your relationship with your future when you would rule over this land. So, the British in India since Catherine of Braganza gave her dowry to Philip or whatever it was, you know, in 1670 or 1660, all the way up to the takeover after the crown, you had rehearsals of conquest, rhythmic rehearsals of conquest. And that, I think, does touch upon the way in which colonial time, archival time is frangible. It has many, many gaps. And you, as the reader, has to fill in these gaps. But why do I say it's as rehearsals of conquest? I'll just recite one paragraph. So, this guy says he's looking over the landscape, the space that he is ruling over and he says, "This land as it present it stands has no church or steeple... These lands are all low lying lands, flat lands, and the people are low lying people." So, he's constructing the people and the landscape at the same time. So, in some sense, that archival time is important. And just one minute to comment on what Nomusa said about all these liquid times and solid times and so on. They were the same for the colonizers. Their poetry was a survival mode. They had to move on and the archive has tremendous gaps in it. You know, this colonial time and colonial photographs kind of live with us in the present. We can't get rid of them. And they're constantly in our years, particularly because one of the colonial institutions which we have inherited is language. So, language is there in our bureaucracies, in our schools, in our privileges and so on. And, so, that linguistic time is very critical. Nomusa's point about the shadow of removing the statue, I think is really, really interesting and important. And I was thinking about how colonialism threw up people like Nelson Mandela or Gandhi and so on. And we built endless statues of them in order to freeze them, to freeze their authority, to freeze their understanding, and they were embodied in these statues and so on as works of art. The Gandhi with his stick, the Mandela with his presence, his dominating presence. So, in some ways, even if we pull down the colonial statues, we have new consoling statues which are kind of our art to remind ourselves of what the past was. So, that's humans configured as art. And I'm wondering whether that is something that we should think about because how long will these humans last on their pedestals?
Nomusa Makhubu (34:36)
The question you're posing, Michel, about the broken record and imperialist nostalgia... I think the issue is that it's so value laden, but also it has this very effective nature to it. These things are not just there, they are there to make people feel something. There's a lot of freezing of the past. It's romanticized and it's romanticizing the past because we have to feel some kind of love and reverence. Museums are like that. We are in those spaces to revere something. And it's interesting because whenever we think about affective politics, we often think like things like love and pain and anger and hurt and rage are things that cannot be contained in time. But at the same time, I mean, if you think about artworks and poetry, it's precisely that they have this affective resonance. For someone to have said we need a whole museum to make sure we show what a settler, the spoon they would have used, the plate they would have used, why do these things matter? But they will matter because for future generations they are meant to feel something. And I think that's the problem. The record is broken because they want it to be broken. There's an emotion that's tied to a particular part of understanding or interpretation of a part of history. And, so, that idea of return and the cyclical notion that's part of imperialist nostalgia is meant to have this pattern of affect that's continued through generations. That particular generation is looking at what they feel is a sense of pride in the victories of imperialism and colonialism, whereas for some it's anger, it's rage at the effects and, you know, the impact of that.
Keri Facer (36:39)
What does it mean that we have to do things again and again and whether that sort of rhythm is precisely to create something that we think is maybe not there or to hold something that we think we might be losing or to make something happen. It makes me wonder what is going on in those moments of repetition. of you, thank you for this. Looking at your work, I want to shift gear a little bit to this question of hunger and time that you're both exploring in different ways, which is fascinating. Let's start maybe with Rukmini and the body and hunger and time that you are trying to draw our attention to in your work at the moment. Could you maybe describe a little bit about the project that you're working on right now and why you think this is an important thing for us to consider?
Rukmini Bhaya Nair (37:35)
I started working on this particular segment of what I think of as inequality and injustice, this sliver of thought in my head, during the time of COVID, because I saw hundreds of urban workers living in city time, you know, forced to go back to their villages on these long, long treks. So, those were segments of time and they were hungry. They went back because they had no economic base because their factories shut down during COVID and they were just carrying these small packs and their children in one hand and singing songs to get them to their villages which were thousands of miles away sometimes because they were trapped from Bombay to Behar and so on. So, that's when I began to think, when do we move? When do we move our bodies from one place to another place? And why do we do so? And one of these movements, this migrancy is about unequal access to resources in the villages, which is why people come to the cities, but they go back to the villages when the cities fail them. So, I began to think what moves you physically? And I began to think that we had, again, rhythms, body clocks embedded in us, which told us when we were hungry. And they told us at regular intervals because these were biological rhythmic clocks. They were embedded in our body and you couldn't shut them off. And then I began to think of Sustainable Development Goal 2, which is the removal of hunger. And I thought, well, you know, they're saying zero hunger, but we cannot survive a day if we have zero hunger. We need hunger because it's a survival clock within us. And it tells us that you're starving, you must move to a place where you're less likely to starve. So, it's a movement towards the future. It's a movement of hope. And then I began to read up on hunger. And I looked at very developed countries like Norway and found that in Knut Hamsun's 'Hunger', you had one of the most graphic descriptions of hunger in the world. Because 100 years ago, Norway was not a rich country with all these good indices. Norway was a poor country. It didn't grow food and people were living in hunger. So, one of the things which happened with hunger memories and body blocks is that Europe has forgotten its hunger memories. Nobody does research in Europe. They do it on all the senses, know, hearing and sound and all these touch and so on, but not on hunger, because hunger has been consigned to the past. And, so, I began to record the rhythms of hunger, both in the cities now, with the young between 15 and 22, were the hungriest cohort in the world. And I began to ask them, when do you feel most hungry? And they would say things like at 2:30, you know, very precise, 2:30 in the afternoon. They would describe their favorite foods, which were Western foods, you know, burgers and so on. And then when they were asked, what cuisine do you love the most? They would say national cuisine. So, they were eating one thing and telling themselves this myth of how they loved their local food. So, I could see shifts across cultures me all the way from starving, fasting to, you know, whatever it is, hunger, starvation, body clocks and hunger clocks.
Keri Facer (41:48)
Ever since I've come across your work, Rukmini, it's been making me think about this question of the body clock and the hunger clock, which is a phrase that you've developed in the West and in Europe. And actually, the more I look at questions of how we shift, for example, to more sustainable, more regenerative farming, what it strikes me is that maybe we haven't forgotten in Europe, we've just suppressed it, because actually, hunger from after the Second World War was huge. I have stories of my mum growing up with ration books and the hunger is still there. So, I'm thinking not just about the hunger clocks at the moment, but the ghosts of hunger clocks that still exist. And at the same time, we suppress the fact that we have thousands of people in this country, in the UK, who are going to food banks because they are hungry and they are malnourished. So, the invisibility, the story that gets told is a really fascinating temporal one. It locates hunger as something in the past and therefore we can't see it in the present. And yet it's a memory that is embodied and alive and real today.
Rukmini Bhaya Nair (42:37)
Actually hungry. Hungry. That's right. I agree, Keri, I want to correct myself. I think your word of suppressing memory, you know, and consigning it to a solid past, which is gone, is much more appropriate than using the word of it's gone, you know, it's gone. It's a suppressed memory and it's recurring now in the West, even in American schools. And you don't know how to deal with it because how is this rich country got so many starving kids? So, my focus also is kids because I think that malnutrition hits you a lot when you're young. Nomusa and I were discussing this in relation to hunger is never seen. Your belly feels full, because the government is distributing grain, but you still have stunting, malnutrition, and you suppress all of that in a way.
Keri Facer (43:53)
Thanks Rukmini. Nomusa, I know you're doing a lot on food and looking at some amazing artists doing wonderful work on food as well. And I know that you're thinking about hunger in a different way also as a hunger for justice. So, maybe you could talk a little bit more about your work in this area right now.
Nomusa Makhubu (44:13)
Recently I've been working on the struggle for land in Evaton.
Keri Facer (44:21)
Maybe say a little bit about Evaton and where it is for listeners from around the world.
Nomusa Makhubu (44:27)
Yes, for sure. Evaton is an area in the Valle Triangle. It lies south of Johannesburg. And it's one of the few areas that were freehold areas and where Black people could purchase land in the early 20th century, which is quite extraordinary because at that time Black people were not allowed to buy land unless if they were purchasing it in the name of a white person. In the way that the legislation is written, it doesn't actually preclude Black people from buying But also remember by 1913, we have the Land Act, which enables government to just expropriate large tracts of land. But they then continued to own that land until the 1950s when the apartheid government started strategically expropriating land by using strategies like starting a pyramid system and then people would fall into debt and then that land would then be expropriated, or forcing people to become tenants where they were originally owners, forcing people to subdivide their land because the new townships that the government was building were much smaller. So, Black people weren't necessarily allowed to have large tracts of land where they could plant. So, you know, when older people talk about everything, they always talk about how wonderful it was... Nobody went hungry because everybody had surplus and everybody exchanged their surplus. So, you always had something and the food was just abundant. But today that isn't the case. It's one of the areas that has, you know, largest percentage of unemployment. And a lot of people, you know, are going hungry because of the socio-economic conditions. But if you think about the very structure of what we know as black townships today, they were constructed in such a way that you're hungry for something else outside of the township. And, so, you're meant to aspire for a better life elsewhere because it does not exist in the township, especially in the way that was designed by the apartheid government. The idea of a middle-class life, of a quality life is one that exists elsewhere and in another time. And, so, there's always a hunger for justice, hunger for food, it's a hunger for another life, especially because people have had to wait for so long for things to happen. The current claim is a claim that was lodged in 1998, soon after apartheid ended, and it's been ongoing until today. So, the person who lodged the claim is no longer alive. So, he hasn't lived to see justice prevail. I love how Rukmini talks about it as body clocks. And in this case, it's almost as if those, those body clocks, the batteries have been taken out or the body clocks have been disrupted somehow. Township life is precisely that. When people define township life, they talk about it as a kind of prison, a containment, it's hard to get out. You know, it shortens your lifespan. It shapes the possibilities of your life in many ways than one. And, so, the idea of hunger is one that is more metaphorical, but it also has to do with livelihood.
Rukmini Bhaya Nair (47:58)
Mmm, exactly, yes.
Keri Facer (48:10)
There's a, I think the phrase is chronolectic time, which is the idea of killing time. So, the wonderful Liz Hoult did a brilliant study of life prisoners and looking at how they were working with time. And there was the sense of the time that you had to kill which is a very different relationship with time from the time that we had at the beginning. But it's also a time that is killing. It's a time that is reducing lifespans. It's a time that's reducing hopes and possibilities. What feels to me when we start talking about this relationship between hunger and bodies and time is all the questions around mortality and time that we can ignore quite a lot. Yeah, I'm very moved by both of these accounts because these are relationships with time that, you know, most of the critiques of Western time are, you know, about clocks and we're all too busy and it's acceleration and, you know, this is a particular narrative of the problems of time. Whereas what you two are talking about here is just much more visceral fundamental issues of justice that are raised when we look at it through a temporal lens. I think it'll be fascinating for listeners, I hope, and others to think about what happens when we think about hunger, time, and time and hunger, and the relationship with death that emerges, I think. Nomusa, the study that you're doing of this artist who's working around food waste, I think, gets us out of this locked in feeling that we get around when we think about hunger and time and bodies and prisons and start saying actually, if we reframe our perception of the time of food, what does that give us? Are there different practices of abundance that we might be able to see from this? Which is where I think this work, Nomusa, is very interesting to me, particularly when we think about food justice. Do you want to talk through this artist and the work that you've been studying there? I think it's Olufela Omokeko, is that right? Yeah.
Nomusa Makhubu (50:13)
Yeah, Keko for short. So, Olufela's work is very interesting, in this sense that it draws our attention to how capitalist time has shaped how we consume. So, not just that we are consuming, but how are we consuming? And I think that lies at the core of his concerns. In the interview that we did with him, he talks about the work titled, Jeun Soke, which is an intervention to preserve food and position food as a kind of remembrance. He said something that's quite interesting. He says the word 'jeun soke' means chop up or eat up. You know, and it's something that the president, Bola Tinubu, used to say when he was running for president. He would say jeun-soke and then they call it the philosophy of jeun-soke was advocating for the sort of individual prosperity and greed and decadence and this insatiable hunger for more. You know, because it's like, wait, if I become president, you are all going to be eating. So eat up, you know? And a lot of people sort of think of that legacy of Tinubu as something that's contributed to the inequality. It has produced the hunger of others in order to feed the greed of others, or the hunger of some in order to feed the greed of others. So, in using that title, Olufela attends to the fact that there's a produced state of hunger that we have to be quite aware of. What he's also pointing out is that in this, you know, corruption and so on, a lot of people no longer have money. You know, the food that is good for you, the indigenous food, becomes much more expensive. And so most people end up buying fast food. So, he talks about that even the cities have been changing, you know? The people having to take on a lot of jobs and hustle here and everywhere means they have very little time to cook their food or source indigenous food. He says, even in the city, you see more and more fast food joints popping up everywhere to the detriment of local food cultures. He says, if you don't know what you consume, you don't know yourself, right? he says, because there are particular ways of consuming now, and particularly during COVID-19, he says there was a time when the food wasn't properly distributed. A lot of the food actually went to rot and decay. So, what he's done is to set up a mobile food museum which was set up at the Center for Contemporary Art in Lagos. And what he does is he exhibits local food or indigenous food to guard against and, in using his words, he's guarding against indigenous food going extinct, which is quite interesting, the idea that food could go extinct. I mean, something we never actually think about. But it's true. I mean, think there are certainly, you know, particular plants that, you know, we don't necessarily see and we don't see as part of our food cultures anymore, which in many ways is tied to land issues and it's tied to the politics around the means of production. And land has presented that escape from the capitalist control of the means of production. When Rukmini and I met last week, we were looking at Lerato Shadid's video work where the artist is holding a piece of soil which represents the land and she's trying to eat it and put it down her throat but her body continually rejects it so she's gagging and choking, which I thought was quite powerful, you know, because I remember even, you know, in the long discussions around land restitution in South Africa you'll get political parties that are conservative that say we don't see why land has to be returned. People can't eat land. So, give people jobs, not land. Whereas people see land as the only way for them to reclaim their time because then they can plant when they want, what they want, and that will enable them to eat and shift their body clocks back to where they should be. But what's interesting is that for Lerato Shadid the reference is also of the way in which enslaved people used to eat soil to commit suicide. The enslavers created a mask that blocks the mouth so that the slave does not commit suicide and that they get to the other side alive. You know, so it's quite interesting this idea of land, you know, representing the possibility of abundance of food. But also here in this work, it's like this land, she chokes on it and it's almost like it's the thing that's going to kill her and her body rejects it as well. So, it provoked a lot of thoughts in terms of the impact of land dispossession, the dispossession of both place and time, because it's not land theft, it's the theft of place and people lost their land, it meant they had to work for their food. You know, which means now they have to go into the mines to make money to get food. They no longer can plant. So, it's both spatial and temporal theft.
Rukmini Bhaya Nair (55:50)
I just was thinking when you were talking about, you know, that land hunger, which is also a phrase in India. But I was thinking about this. Losing the memory of the foods we eat and craving other stuff. And I want to link this to how our tastes change across time. So, when we look at modern humans, us, presumably, then modern humans can't digest raw meat at all. We have to cook it. This is not true of many mammals like dogs and so on. Modern humans need to cook and this cooking came about at a certain time in the prehistory of humans and it has undergone enormous changes. Levi Strauss and others wrote about it this question of cooking as an art form, which we devalue completely in a world where we have convenience foods, you know. They come to us, you can pick them up, we have convenience stores. And these shift because there's careful research done on what stimulates our taste buds. So, maybe the old foods did not necessarily stimulate our taste buds, but they kept the body more alive. And we know from a study of prehistory that our gut has undergone changes over time. And I'm trying to think, like, what would be the future of food when our guts are trained to think in one way? So, gut memories are different now than they were in prehistory.
Keri Facer (57:42)
So, all of the work that you're doing and talking about around food and clocks, to me surfaces all these questions, around how, how do we feel into, particularly when we've got advertising and food systems pushing us in a different direction, how do we feel into the rhythms of what bodies need? the rhythms of what all of our microbiota, all the gazillions of beings living within us need, and how those are going to be shifting over time. So, thank you so much for bringing those ideas to this discussion. They raised fundamental questions about time and hunger and justice. I'd like to wrap it up a little bit just with a couple of words. You're both artists. You're both writers. You're both thinkers. At the moment, around the world, the arts is being seen as less and less important and there's less and less investment in it. I wonder if you have any quick thoughts on how we make time for the arts as a powerful resource for thinking in and with and about time as you two have both so beautifully explained. Are there any thoughts from your particular situations in the world or anything in general that you'd like to share about how we make time for arts?
Nomusa Makhubu (59:02)
Yeah, I guess my sense is that we have to de-institutionalize and de-commodify time. I've seen some really incredible initiatives by artists where they're strategic about their own labour time because it's within what is currently a very market-led, commercial, competitive art ecosystem. A lot of artists are putting their time towards just becoming famous, traveling here and there, this thing that's next. But I've seen artists say, actually, I'm going to put my time into others and into making everybody else's life easy if possible. So, there are networks about creating possibilities for exchange and resource sharing. We're not all having to spend time doing exactly the same labour because we are aspiring to similar things, but that we share the labour and then we share the resources so that we're able to work outside of the institutions that make it hard for us to sustain ourselves and to not be dependent on the funding that's been slashed but also, at the moment, be so dependent on sort of the private sector. It's not easy, I know, and, you know, sometimes it sounds very dreamy that, you know, you can sustain an ecosystem of exchange and resource sharing but I think it's a good start towards something.
Keri Facer (1:00:33)
Wonderful, that's great. So, reframing of the economic structures underneath rather than just trying to carve out more time within the existing system. That's a really helpful reframing for me. Thank you, Nomusa. Rukmini, any thoughts, pearls of wisdom, suggestions from your side?
Nomusa Makhubu (1:00:41)
Yeah.
Rukmini Bhaya Nair (1:00:51)
Well, you know, I think that art is something which is kind of devalued in societies like India in general, the arts and the humanities and all of it as opposed to the sciences. So, we've had a very, very strong policy to encourage science and scientists and exploration, which is a great thing. But it has meant that arts and the humanities all the way up to universities are much less paid than in economics terms than management or something. So, that essential imbalance is growing in the economy that we have today. And I would, therefore, begin bottom up and I would want policy changes in schools, which is what we are working towards, or in the street. So, we have a category called street children, which is a terrible category, but which the government has imposed. These street children are not in schools. So, I would want to ask children to represent hunger, set aside time for the key questions of our age and look at their representation through the eyes of bottom-up, and have that as a policy recommendation for all governments and then fight. I would love to spend my time on sabbaticals writing, but I have to earn a living. So, I'm dependent on the system. So, I think that within the system, I have a little bit of power and we should use that to introduce policy changes and emphasize arts and wonder at bottom up.
Keri Facer (1:02:48)
Great. One last very silly question. We know the old story of the time machine, which allows you to travel through time, but that's a very simple idea of what a time machine can do. If you had a time machine, a machine that could change how time works in some way, what would you want it to do? What button would you be pressing? What lever would you be pulling? Or what organic creature would you be growing to make time work differently?
Rukmini Bhaya Nair (1:03:15)
This is like your first question. It's playful, but it's difficult. You know, it's profound. So, let me say, if I had a time machine, I would probably not switch the damn thing on at all. But if I were forced, and this brings us back to the pressure, social pressure to use your inventions, how would I use it? So, I think of a time machine as a kind of a combination of kaleidoscope and a drone. And I want this kaleidoscope drone to do things for me and to tie this back to the question about policy that you asked very seriously. We want our machines, whatever our machines, to be able to help us predict and spur us on towards a more equitable world, a world where, you know, empathy was not lost. So, I would like my time machine to predict things. How would it do this? This drone would go over the world and spot signs of injustice and report back. And then it would continually circle schools and art institutions, and it would drop in a poem or a photograph or something before the crisis happened. To predict crises is a serious policy matter, but we leave it to people who just think that the imagination is this terrible thing. You shouldn't use it, but of course we should use it and we should use it to make our real worlds more just and our fictional worlds more wide open and wondrous. So, I would drop in a poem at crisis points. I would inspect this, look where things were brewing and I would constantly use my kaleidoscope to fire me up.
Keri Facer (1:05:24)
That's fabulous. Nomusa, what about you?
Nomusa Makhubu (1:05:30)
So, a few months ago my daughter was busy with exams and, you know, she had extramurals and she had to study and then she said, "Oh mom, I really wish I could just stop time right now and go elsewhere somewhere to some place that has no time and do everything I want to do and come back to this exact time. So, even if I've had a chance to do whatever I wanted to do nothing has shifted on this plane, like nothing has changed, and come back to this exact second. Don't you want to do that with me?" So, you know, I mean, in some ways it's like time is experienced as this tunnel and we're all just sort of trudging through it. And we want these escape points. And I'm just thinking, you know, the rocket is exactly that escape point. And it shouldn't be like that, you know? So, if there was some magical machine, I wouldn't want it to be a time machine. I would want it to be a mind changing machine so that we change that relationship. Time itself should be negotiable since it is a social construct. We should be able to negotiate. What time is it? Okay, we think it's time to work. What time is it? We think it's time to rest because our bodies are telling us that. We can't listen to our bodies. When we're tired, we're like this is the time to work. For me, if we had some magical tool, it would be changing the way we think and changing the way we relate to each other, and time should be negotiable. Apparently it isn't.
Keri Facer (1:06:58)
Thanks Nomusa. I think Rukmini wanted to come in.
Rukmini Bhaya Nair (1:07:01)
I just want to say one thing that today is the Festival of Holi which is the festival of colours in India. I would like, as a final dramatic moment, to dedicate some Holi colours to you. So, here, you know, I'm taking three and I'm making for you, Keri, a Vishnu trident. And for Nomusa, I would have pink. And then for Michel, I would have yellow all down my nose. And for our group, I would have green light, go ahead. So, sorry to be clownish, but I think that's what art is. It can afford to provoke laughter.
Keri Facer (1:07:56)
Thank you. You've taken us into another time and you've brought us into the Holi festival, which is wonderful to connect with over from all of these different countries that we're part of. Thank you both. We appreciate you joining and taking the time to talk with us today. We wish you both a good continuation for whatever you're doing next. So, many, many thanks for you.
Nomusa Makhubu (1:08:21)
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Rukmini Bhaya Nair (1:08:23)
Bye.
Michel Alhadeff-Jones (1:08:25)
Thank you, thank you both.
