Artists

Sonorous Bodies addresses the dense relational sonority between objects, persons, and ecology and accentuates its dispersal across various embodied artistic forms and practices, which signify diverse ways of knowing.(1) The referential frame for the curatorial project is drawn from multiple aural registers within these processes, which are intensified and/or attenuated through reciprocity, movement, and dislocation. The project explores aural regimes that recenter the transformational relationship between objects, persons, and their ceremonial world.(2)
Histories between persons and objects are expressed as a web of sonorous enactments that commence from the making of an object, its use in the everyday, in sacral spaces, and possesses the potential to shift our temporalities and topography. These processes are: invocations of object, maker, custodian, continuous evocation in the everyday, and its summoning through memorial processes; the sonorous presence that permeates and exceeds the materiality and aesthetics of the object as its limitless affect; and the objects’ belated spectral presence in various contexts.(3)
What happens to the life of a dispossessed object? Does it continue to be imbued with this sonorous presence? And what im/possibilities are present when we develop practices which are attuned to these ongoing reverberations. Our invitation to bring together these concepts of listening between objects and persons advances a much anticipated dialogue and an attendance to the intimate, and multivocal approaches by and between artistic practitioners to generate new sites of learning and knowledge.(4) We offer a process of reflection on the gravity of resounding histories between dispossessed objects, persons, and geographies in the context of processes of reclamation fraught with ambiguities and
disjuncture. Our approach is attuned to these fissures, the subterranean, and unbounded effects with objects, which are continuously mobilized into various constellations to reenact the “imaginaries of historical justice.”(5)
This platform opens up these processes outside of the rehearsed debates on restitution between networks of institutions, and pushes at the limits of these processes which are often institutionally subsumed. To return an object to its place of “origin” is a significant process, and only the beginning of the paths through which restitution ought to proceed. Many issues abound such as: What knowledge of the object has been transmitted between generations? What effects does spoliation have on the transmissions between generations? What resonances do these objects now carry, what place do they inhabit, and how are these objects reintegrated into the society from which they were despoiled? And notably, to emphasize that, “the conditions that made dispossession possible remain unaddressed.”(6)
This section commences with a description of an installation in the Linden-Museum in Stuttgart, one of the largest ethnological museums in Germany, in the wake of the restitution of Outa !Nanseb’s bible and whip to Namibia, as well as the inauguration of Baden-Württemberg’s, Namibia Initiative.(7) This is followed by a reading of aural inscriptions in the literary work of Uazuvara Katjivena.(8) Whereas the ethnological museum presents the histories of objects in their collections as erased, and with the potential to be
recuperated through provenance research, Katjivena’s work departs from these evidentiary modes, to evince a continuous relationship between his grandmother and her adornments, as one intimately connected to her family geneaology, geography, and the catastrophic events which led to their irrecoverable severing.
A month after the return of Kaptein Hendrik Witbooi’s bible and whip, from the
Linden Museum to Windhoek in 2019, the museum opened an exhibition titled, Wo ist
Afrika? (Where is Africa?). The exhibition showcased artworks which form part of the museum’s century old Africa collection from Congo, Cameroon, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Namibia. The common thread
of the exhibit was themed,
Things to Collect, or Of a Deafening Silence, associated with hyper-collection, and erasure of person’s biographies with objects. The “deafening silence” points to more than that however. Although there is a policy of restitution, and provenance research
established at the museum, numerous objects of Namibia, from the rest of the African continent, South America, and Asia are housed
in the museum, and continues to draw audiences to the institution. What has yet to form part of research is how the artworks contributed
to the knowledge production on art, culture, science and expanded the resource base in these institutions, and the wider society.(9) The process of restitution therefore ought not to be a temporary return of a material object, but an ongoing interrogation of knowledge extraction, dislocation, and reproduction in the spaces associated with the artworks’ histories.
In the exhibition space for,
Wo ist Afrika?, in a corner of one of the rooms, hidden from plain sight, emanated a lone voice, from near a glass cabinet. In the glass cabinet was placed a dusty-brown
necklace. The caption in the glass cabinet reads: "Ostrich eggshell necklace xxx × xxxxx. Xxxxx xxxx × Xxxxxx
woman xxx xxx xxxxxx xx ×
xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxx Xxxxxx
xx Otjihinamaparero [xxxxxxx Xxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxx xx
Xxxxxxxx xxxx, 1904]."(10)
The necklace was exhibited adjacent to a two-channel sound installation. The voice of Adelheid Mbuaondjou, recorded in Namibia in the 1950s played-back into the room.(11) We returned to the exhibition again in 2021, and anticipated hearing the voice in the background, there was silence, the recording had been switched off, but the eerie and disquiet necklace exhibit was still there. I still have many questions as I did when I first heard about, and then saw the necklace. My
questions are premised on the following words, and call attention to the philosophy of being “guided to listening,” through the process of asking questions, and dialogue.(12)
"You know that in our language you only ask a question because you have
something bothering you and you doubt that the answer you have thought of is the right one. When you ask a question it means that you have something to say. That is why the Otjiherero word for “listen” (puratena) is composed of two different words, pura is “ask,” and
tena is “say.” This means that before you ask a question you already have an idea about what you are asking. It is therefore very important that you explain what you already know and why you have come to the question you are about to ask, before you ask it. Always share the
thoughts which have led to your asking what you are asking. By talking and asking, or asking and talking you will be guided to listening."(13)
What remains of the woman were on this necklace? Does
the necklace become a human remain because of these bodily resonances and aura(lity)? What does it mean for a museum to exhibit a necklace which once belonged to a woman who was violated in this manner? And to then exhibit this necklace for an audience in Germany one hundred years later? What charge does this necklace hold, from maker, post-spoliation, within the exhibition space? What vibrations does the necklace hold across and between
time? How can we reimagine the object as having agency
as a sensor, or as an object that can be sensed with, or have an effect on a person’s life, changing the course of events? Is there a multi-directional reverberation between objects, their bearers, and the spaces where these objects were
created and are remembered?
In the book, Mama Penee: Transcending the Genocide,
launched at the National Art Gallery of Namibia in 2020, Uazuvara Katjivena, employs aural techniques: oral histories, origin myths, praise songs, and rhyme to narrate
the lived experiences and guidance of his grandmother,
Mama Penee. His opus is a culmination of decades of intergenerational collective listening to family members’
narrations of multiple colonialisms in Namibia. Katjivena also said that he reworked the pace and intonation of his text alongside the rhythm of the drum. These vocalizations carried the documented experiences of Mama Penee,
who was orphaned during the anti-colonial war. Mama
Penee survived, with her memories, leather bag with belt, apron, ceremonial headdress, copper armbands, braided and threaded bead necklaces, which were “the last visible connection with her parents.”(14) Katjivena’s recollection of his grandmother’s ceremonial gear is, however, shattered by the loss of these sacred objects in her later life. The
literary text ruptures genre, and references multiple sonic
registers, which foreground a non-linear history. We understand “transcending” not to mean a mastery of history recoverable in the material sense, but an attending to history as a continuous process, one which enacts, suspends, and mobilizes timing - as performed between origin myths and future commemoration, enumerating genealogy not only in the names of persons, but the sociopolitical and symbolic role of clans within community, an incorporeality which permeates women’s sartorial and adorning reenactments, from infancy throughout life, and embodied tracing across
geographies that re-shift destinies.
Sonorous Bodies has the honor to engage with the artworks of five incredible women and artists who live and have a dedicated practice in southern Africa. Stephané Conradie’s cacophonous assemblages of everyday objects trace a complex transnational genealogy of extended families, who experienced colonization and enslavement at the Cape, and
migrated to resettle between Northern Cape and southern Namibia. Thania Petersen’s
mnemonic sculpture of talismans woven together with black thread hearken the prince from Tidore’s covert gifts to revivify the faith of fellow inmates on a barren prison island north of Cape Town. Elisia Nghidishange reflects on three protagonists, ancestral healers, who reanimate healing practices in our society. With the support of sonorous objects and
olfactory medicines, the healers intercede within a sensorial constellation between worlds.
Philisa Zibi weaves the legends of protector serpents that inhabit large water bodies into her sculptural work The serpent regenerates deep metallurgical knowledge, awakens the
spirit of a people to strike against malevolent forces, and restores supreme order. Vitjitua Ndjiharine’s mixed media tapestry attends to a “return” to fragmented family heirlooms located in a Swiss museum, and re-envisions a new relationship embodied in the traces of ancestral inheritance.

(1) Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier, “Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-century Colombia,” Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
(2) Alexander G. Weheliye, “Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity,” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995).
(3) Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier, “Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-century Colombia.”.
(4) In Columns of Memory,
Adepeju Layiwola brought to the fore ideas of how objects have the potential to transcend established contexts and meanings into the future. Layiwola’s installation formed part of her
long-term project on the Benin artworks looted by a British expedition in 1897, which were dispersed in museums in Europe and America. Layiwola installed plastic, bronze, aluminum foil, and fabric to create
ancestral/commemorative heads of queen mother (Iyoba) Idia, the heads of Oba, as praise to ancestors, the gongs to summon the ancestors and the Oyo bird, as the crier and bearer of news. These sacred objects were installed to trace the various trajectories associated with these objects, catapulting them into present-day discourse through the use of varied materials. These objects were created not merely as
replicas which stood in place of the looted objects, but as mnemonic “reverbs” demanding attention to artistic works, commercial circulation and institutional negotiations/contestations, both past and present. The acoustic presence in the objects, interacted in a
resounding call for the return of the Benin artworks. ‘Peju Layiwola, “Benin1897.com, Art and the Restitution Question: An Art Exhibition of Installations and Sculptures”, 2009’; ‘Peju Layiwola, Making
meaning from a fragmented past: 1897 and the creative process, Open Arts Journal, 2014’; ‘Peju Layiwola, “Columns of Memory”, ‘Kunstliche Tatsachen: Boundary Objects’, Kunsthaus Dresden, 2015’; Memory Biwa, “Ancestral Heads, Oyo Birds and Gongs: Towards an activation of boundary objects”.
(5) Banu Karaca, “Art, Dispossession, and the Imaginations of Historical
Justice: Thinking with the works of Maria Eichhorn and Dilek Winchester,” Critical Times 3, vol. 2 (2020): 224–248.
(6) Ibid.
(7) In February 2019, a Namibian national hero, Kaptein Hendrik Witbooi’s
bible and whip looted by German soldiers at Hornkranz in 1893, was
returned in an official ceremony in Gibeon, southern Namibia. The
restitution of the bible and whip took place amidst controversy within the /Khowese clan, and underlying pressure to recognize affected
communities in the ongoing negotiations about the acknowledgement of genocide and reparations between the governments of Namibia and Germany. Recognizing the unfinished process of restitution, the
great-grand daughter of Witbooi commented at the “handing-over” ceremony in Gibeon, southern Namibia that it was inevitable that one
had to return all objects which did not belong to you. The first official restitution of looted cultural objects by Germany to Namibia, was
preceded by the return of despoiled human remains from Germany in 2011, 2014, and 2018. Jemima Beukes, “Witbooi artefacts coming,”
Namibian Sun; ‘Witbooi heirlooms give clan hope,
The Namibian’; Reinhart Koessler, “The Bible and the Whip: Entanglements around
the restitution of robbed heirlooms,” ABI, Freiburg, 2019; Memory Biwa, “Afterlives of Genocide: Return of human bodies from Berlin to Windhoek,” 2017.
(8) Uazuvara Katjivena, Mama Penee: Transcending the Genocide (Chicago: Unam Press, 2020).
(9) Karaca, “Art, Dispossession, and the Imaginations of Historical
Justice,” 224–248.
(10) Ostrich eggshell necklace for a woman. Taken from a Herero woman who was killed by a grenade during the Battle at Otjihinamaparero
[against German colonial troops on February 25th, 1904].
(11) “Ernst and Ruth Dammann. Personal Papers and Sound Collection,
African Languages in Namibia and Southern Africa,” 1953–1997, BAB,
PA.39.
(12) Katjivena, Mama Penee: Transcending the Genocide.
(13) Words by Mama Penee imparted to her grandsons in ibid.
(14) Katjivena, Mama Penee: Transcending the Genocide.

Text: Memory Biwa