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Future White Women of Azania - The Founding Myth
The Future White Woman of Azania is an
ongoing series of performances first conceived in 2010 and evolving to engage
new definitions of nationhood in relation to the autonomous body.
In the
enactment of the site-specific work commissioned for the 55th Venice Biennale,
the performance takes the form of an absurdist funerary procession. The
participants are the ABODADE - the sisterhood
order of Azania and the central protagonist - The Future White Woman.
“Azania, as a
geographic location, is first described in 1stCentury Greek records of navigation and trade , The
Peryplus of the Erythrean Sea and is
thought to refer to a portion of the East and Southern African coast. The word Azania
itself is thought to have been derived from an Arabic word referring
to the ‘dark-skinned inhabitants of Africa.’
Azania is then eulogised in the black consciousness movement as a pre-colonial utopian black homeland- this
Promised Land, referenced in struggle songs, political sermons and African
Nationalist speeches. In Cold War pop
culture , Marvel Comics used Azania as a
fictional backdrop to a Liberation story that bares a close resemblance to the
situation that was Apartheid in Old South Africa … so it is at once a mythical and faintly factual
place/state that this performance unfolds… Who are the Azanians for what it’s
worth ? It is in this liminal state that
the performance unfolds…“
Seeking to radically reimage the potential of Azania and its
inhabitants, the performance questions the mythical place that we mourn for and
asks who its future inhabitants may be. Using the “Nation-Finding language of pomp and procession” , Ruga
proposes a bold and iconoclastic break
with the past Utopian promise of the elders and instead presents us with a new
potential and hybridity .
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HELLO? Paranoia much... |
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| - See more at: http://www.visi.co.za/content/article/2331/venice-in-fact#sthash.f0j35ufS.dpuf |
