What Remains Through Time (Slowness and Stillness)

A collaborative live performance and installation called Brick by Brick - as part of the installation/community event, led by South African artist Sonya Rademeyer, What Remains Through Time (Slowness and Stillness). It involved an intuitive, collaborative performance + media event in the South African National Gallery that was then subsequently exhibited as an installation. Viewed as a deliberate act of decolonisation, the performance explored ways in which resilience could be foregrounded within colonial museum culture. Spontaneous audience collaboration created a tangible and heightened layer to the performance piece, culminating in the escalating chant "brick by brick!" as well as physically contributing to moving clay installation bricks. The concept of deconstructing the colonial narrative was similarly echoed in the reading-performance of Professor Pitika Ntuli's poem Decolonising the Narrative by Dr Busisiwe Octavia Ntsele, as well as in Ntsele's own PhD text from "A Critical Study of Community Engagement at a South African University" (2024). Ntuli's poem, also projected back into the exhibition space through a video projection, created an embedded layer which the performer physically responded to.