Credit: Kitso Lynn Lelliott, soft.
Collective Amnesia by Koleka Putuma.
Grandma's Story chapter four in Woman, Native, Other by Trinh T. Minh-ha.
'memories'
'memories' is a preoccupation on how bodies can evoke embodiments of knowledge through the voice and positions this as a way to present the hauntings of the past explore through a reflective reading session.
How do events from the past, inform and impact the bodily experience in/of spaces?
Kitso Lynn Lelliott, an artist and filmmaker based in Johannesburg, South Africa, harnessing the voice as a tool or a mode of tracing and mapping this bleeds into relevant discussion about language, place and displacement. She positions language and spoken word as a method of mapping, as well as a form of intergenerational and embodied knowledge.
Lelliott invited annotation and group readings of Woman, Native, Other by Trinh T. Minh-ha chapter four Grandma's Story to think through the ideas of language, haunting, and place as a means to collectively find how to communicate and reverberate histories by gathering traces/fragments with one another.
Lelliott is drawn to the ideas;
"In this chain and continuum, I am but one link. The story is me, neither me nor mine. It does not really belong to me... my story carries with it their stories, their history, and our story" the idea of carrying ancestral and comunal histories and storytelling as a way to tend to them...
The voice and language for diaspora holds fragments/traces or breakages in lineage that are telling and are something to speak of, explore, map,and rebuild. Such embodied knowledge is held in the tongue, they impact intonation and pattern which in turn affects and forms dialects, ways of speaking and pronouncing words that have a richness and power.
Using the text Woman, Native, Other by Trinh T. Minh-ha, in a group reading of the fourth chapter Grandma's Stories, to think through the ideas of language, haunting, and place as a means to collectively find how to communicate and reverberate histories by gathering traces/fragments with one another.
More information
Kitso Lynn Lelliott on her practice and biography. My practice moves between video installation, film and writing. I am interested in the way the world looks when seen through differing knowledge systems, conceptions of time, [hi]story and their making of the present. I look for and work to surface [hi]stories that have been elided and, through them, an altered more livable present. The idea of the real becomes a contested space when enunciations from spaces beyond dominant knowledge systems trouble the real of the hegemony. I am broadly interested in radicalised hierarchy as it is tied to hierarchies of knowledge, considering how these took form across the Atlantic world during the formative episode that shaped the modern age. I work from the perspectives of historically subjugated subjectivities, privileging South-South engagements that are in relation to yet imaginatively and epistemologically unmediated by the Global North. In 2017 I was laureate of the Iwalewahaus art award and was a featured guest artist at The Flaherty Seminar 2018. In 2019 I won the NIHSS award for best visual arts. I was an artist in residence with the Cité internationale des arts in Paris in 2019 and am currently a postdoctoral fellow and artist in residence with the Centre for Humanities Research at the UWC.