Livingstone Office for Contemporary Arts (LoCA)

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It is 9,619.05 km between Livingstone and Lofoten, the shortest driving route: 9,099.65 mi (14,644.47 km) using 181 23 min in hours and minutes. A flight route covering 5,893.87 mi (9,485.27 km) using 11h 39 min. However, more than the spatial distance itself, which can be covered by air and other means of transport, there are cultural and historical differences. At the time, there are some peculiarities that are of curious interest and form the entry conjunction that we would like to indulge in dialogue with. The first is the parallel of a decolonial narrative struggle of the Sami communities of Northern Norway, land and displacement, and where we are, Livingstone and the southern province. Second, we are curious about the seed vault (Noah’s Ark) and the politics that surround it.

For the collaboration with Lofoten International Art Festival – LIAF 2024, Livingstone Office for Contemporary Arts (LoCA), led by AnawanaHaloba and Kabila Kyowa Stéphane, have invited the artists Banji Chona, Bwanga ’BennyBlow’ Kapumpa and the artist duo Pungwe Listening (Memory Biwa & Robert Machiri) to take part in a dialogue. By extending their invitation to inviting artists with diverse approaches to questions related to endogenous knowledge and colonial heritage, the project aims to create a conversation in the shape of a sonic corridor, inspired by the elephant corridors – a strip of land that facilitates the movement of elephants between two or more viable habitat patches. The project will be leading up to the Mosi Oa Tunya international perennial exhibition (Livingstone / Victoria Town) in 2026.

For over a decade the Livingstone Office for Contemporary Arts has dedicated itself to bring about critical awareness towards artistic practice and its relations to aesthetics, social, politics, history and cultural challenges. Their work investigates histories (colonial histories, social and political histories and their legacies) and how they relate to language and contemporary art locally and internationally. LoCA functions within a constellation of art and cultural institutions in Livingstone, and it thrives from their support and collaboration while acting as a resource facility within the same network, – a community where experimental practices and fresh perspectives are fostered and shared among interdisciplinary artists, curators, writers, scholars, cultural custodians and audiences in the region.

Memory Biwa and Robert Machiri form the duo Pungwe Listening, founded in 2016. Their work centres Southern African aural histories and multi-media archives, and present relational art formats through performance, installation and collective curatorial practice in an extended play in public space. Pungwe Listening has presented their work at Pan African Space Station at Mkukina Nyota in Dar es Salaam, Musée Théodore Monod d’Art Africain, Dakar, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, Ifa Gallery, Berlin and Stuttgart, and Kunsthalle Bern. Pungwe Listening was awarded the DAAD artist in Berlin fellowship in 2021. The project received an honorary mention by Prix Ars Electronica in the category Digital Communities in 2020.

Memory Biwa is a historian, and artist. Her research addresses anti-colonial resistance, genocide, memory and reparative processes in Namibia. Biwa’s practice pivots on aurality, historical production, and geographies. Biwa has curated workshops, ‘We grow with our leaves, and flowers turned towards home’, a transnational project between Berlin, and Cape Town, South Africa in 2024. And ‘Prossession Pedagogies’, in the framework of the artist residency program between Namibia, and Germany hosted by Akademie Schloss Solitude. Biwa has also co-curated exhibitions in Berlin, at Ifa Gallery in 2023, and at the Kleinplastik Triennale in Fellbach in 2022. Biwa forms part of the duo, Pungwe Listening, with Robert Machiri. Their work centres Southern African aural histories and multi-media archives, and presents relational art formats through performance, installation and collective curatorial practice in durational play in public space.

Robert Machiri is a transient and a sound worker. He works primarily through sound mediation manifested through social practice. Machiri’s work exists at the juncture of two streams; music and post-disciplinary reproduction presented through embodied and process driven modalities. By learning to unlearn intersecting listening, movement, mobility, sonicity and the image, fostering futurity to archival possibilities. His work is most notable through PUNGWE, a project of mutable practices that circle pan African soundings with related contemporary arts discourses and spaces. Machiri together with Biwa are recipients of the 2021 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program. In 2022. Robert Machiri was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, in cooperation with DonaueschingerMusiktage 2021 as part of the project Donaueschingen Global. Resident Fellow at Cynthia Woods Mitchell Assistant University of Houston October 2023. In September 2024 Machiri will participate at the Venice Music biennale. He currently lives between Berlin and Harare.

Banji Chona is an artist, researcher, and curator. Chona’s practice combines ancestral baTonga knowledge with experimental contemporary techniques. Focusing on critical explorations of identity, memory, resistance and the communion of community through storytelling and healing, her work is rooted in the methodology of Radical Zambezian Reimagination. This is an offering of alternative historiographies and presentisms positioned to challenge socio-political and environmental fractures. By using ”Zambezia“ insteadof ”Zambia,“ she imagines an ancestral land beyond colonial projections and spatialities, fostering connections and healing beyond the imagined nation-state of Zambia. Chona has exhibited in both solo and group shows in Zambia, Italy, Germany, and South Africa. Her work and practice have been documented in the art journal Contemporary&. She is the recipient of the 2024 Prince Claus Seed Award and a fellow on the LoCA 2024 Curatorial Studio Programme in Livingstone, Zambia.

Bwanga ‘Benny Blow’ Kapumpa is a writer / artist. His ongoing research on Zambian traditional healers, “witchdoctors”, “witchcraft” and allied practices aims to open dialogue on these indigenous knowledge forms and see what we can learn from them. His work examines perceptions of the various roles people play within societal constructs. It is linked to his interest in the forms of (mis)representation of indigenous Zambian spirituality and its relation to Christianity. Drawing on his background as a writer, he combines text with stop-motion animation and multi-media installations to create new narratives. Bwanga has been published by the Caine Prize for African Writing, longlisted and published by the Afritondo Short Story Prize, and was shortlisted for the Miles Morland Foundation scholarship twice. He hails from Lusaka, Zambia.

Anawana Haloba (b. 1978) lives and works in Oslo and Livingstone. She is educated at the Evelyn Hone College of Applied Arts in Lusaka, Zambia, the National Academy of Arts in Oslo, graduate of the Rijksakademie van BeeldendeKunsten in Amsterdam, and an alumnus of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in Washington DC. She is currently working on her PhD with the University of Bergen. Haloba’s work has featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; SKMU SørlandetsKunstmuseum, Kristiansand; National Museum of African Arts Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC; ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe; KODE Museum, Bergen; la Biennale di Venezia, 2009; Sydney Biennale 2008; MOMENTUM 12, 2023 and the Sharjah Biennial 08, 11 and 14th edition in 2019 in Sharjah to name just a few. AnawanaHaloba is an associate professor for contemporary at Oslo National Academy of the Art and is guest advisor at Rijksakademie van beeldendekunsten, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She co-founded Livingstone Office for Contemporary Arts (LoCA) in 2014.

Kabila Kyowa Stéphane (b. 1993) is a curator and researcher based between Lubumbashi, Livingstone, Cairo and Hamburg. He is part of the exhibition coordinator team at the Livingstone office for Contemporary Art in Livingstone (LoCA) and works at Waza art center in projects involving library and exhibition curating, talks and critical writings. His ongoing project Geometry of desire, Archeology of Art and Knowledge has been presented as participative performances at Waza art center in 2019 and at the Livingstone Office for Contemporary Art in March 2020. He recently presented the project at the Resonance Exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Livingstone, Zambia, as one of the outcomes of this project. Kabila is member of the Lubumbashi working group of Another Roadmap of Arts Education Africa Cluster. Post-graduated in Philosophy at the Lubumbashi University, Kabila has an MA in Curatorial practice program at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design at the University of Bergen (KMD) in Norway.