Sinethemba Twalo

The Abyss is a Tautology
Failed Sketch or a Sonic Lecture

Format: A series of sonic lectures
Research project

“Blackness – the extended movement of a specific upheaval, an ongoing irruption that anarranges every line – is a strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of personhood and subjectivity.” Fred Moten [1]

To concatenate a series of sequestered and disparate moments requires a certain recrudescence, a savoir-faire of sorts. One need not only have a speculative efficacy, they must also simultaneously be able to uncover the chasm layered by history’s deliberate obfuscations. One must meander, through the shrouded ferocity of the violent word, and attempt to locate what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak terms “epistemic violence”[2] in universal time or the time of the universal.

If the proclivity of the Hesperian corpus has been the proposition of chronological time as the essence of history, and contemporary time having been determined by the event of enlightenment, is the counterattack thus the assertion of discontinuity?

Through a series of sonic lectures, the project The Abyss is a Tautology attempts to postulate on performances of blackness, blackness as performance, performance in black, and the black as a performance. Subsisting on a chronotope of opacity, noting the difference implicit within a performance of blackness on one hand and the lived experience of being black, these productions attempt to embrace otherness; not an otherness determined by history’s follies, but an otherness that seeks to determine its own idea of the other. It is a desire to annihilate your idea of my otherness.

In a world where blackness is imbued with incommensurable desolation, its Ursprung having been understood as rebarbative, the project reflects on the contrapuntal strategies utilized by the Black Avant-garde. Notwithstanding, the project attempts to not be a history lesson into the Occidental’s inimical voyages or errant discoveries, nor does it present itself as a specious and cursory glance into the archive. However it does seek to interrogate an affective alienation brought on by certain practice. The Abyss is a Tautology will attempt to reflect on the seismic act of dispossession in black life. It is an amorphous journey into the darkness. A speculative inquiry into the unknown. A black unknown that is never fixed, embraces the liminal, and evades a concise description.

[1] Fred Moten: In the Break. The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis 2003.

[2] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Can the Subaltern Speak?, in: Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg: Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Basingstroke 1988, pp. 271–313.

The Abyss is a Tautology: The Indexicality of a Ritual
Installation view: Parking Gallery at VANSA, Johannesburg
A curatorial collaboration between Sinethemba Twalo and F.M. Ploch

The Abyss is a Tautology: The Indexicality of a Ritual
Installation view: Parking Gallery at VANSA, Johannesburg
A curatorial collaboration between Sinethemba Twalo and F.M Ploch

The Abyss is a Tautology: Mnemonic Tonalities of her Scream
Performance View: UferHallen, Berlin-Wedding