Gabrielle Goliath

“When I was told about the cancellation of Gabrielle Goliath’s Elegy at the Venice Biennale, my stomach turned, my eyes burned and I experienced a tinnitus-like ringing in my ears - the phantom remains of a loud noise… the body’s refusal to forget traumatic sound by refusing silence.

Gabrielle and I are friends. Our friendship was born from solidarity against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and our common preoccupation with abusive power that extends from the intimate, domestic, social sort to the political, institutional and statutory kind.

Our talks have extended to our work and the microcosmic art and film worlds we have fought to exist within, an extension of our fight to exist in the world at large. We have talked about the precarity of bodies like ours in these spaces… still… once again.

Gabrielle and I have talked about architectures of exclusion, tokenisation, discipline and control. We’ve talked about negotiating with them and finding agency within their limits.

We’ve talked about how much the worlds of art and film have changed since we entered them as younger women - change we know was born from the slow steady labour of countless bodies like ours over a wide sweep of historical time.

We’ve talked about hard-won gains being rolled back at frightening speed in South Africa and in the most powerful countries on earth. We’ve talked about what this means for us and bodies like ours, and the invisible, silent histories and dreams we carry - inherently, imperfectly, intentionally or unintentionally.

We’ve talked about carrying, of carrying as a calling - a practice of sustained movement and of sustained breath… a practice built on generations of practice by bodies like ours.

We’ve talked idealistically and in abstraction about tracing and testing the borders of the worlds we inhabit. Of uncovering the faultlines, of journeying to the edge of the arena and breaching the electric fence without knowing the strength of the current waiting to push us back. We’ve talked about the shock of true power revealing itself.

We’ve remembered the bodies of our liberators and what they physically endured in this same service. We’ve prayed that we will only ever need to test our courage in voice and not flesh itself… that our experience of shock remains metaphoric. 

We’ve talked about probable, quotidian consequences. The end of polite smiles and invitations, the impossibility of travelling to countries we once dreamt of visiting, of risking already vulnerable livelihoods. We might have acknowledged our fears of erasure or worse - of having false narratives written over us… but perhaps we didn’t say these things out loud, didn’t allow ourselves such indulgence.

Gabrielle has talked of antidote, hope, repair, memory, survival and solidarity. Such is her way. 

These conversations are not uncommon when bodies like ours and the worlds we represent are under siege as they have always been. When our eyes are red and our ears are ringing. We are the perpetual canaries in the coal mine, the first to suffer poisoned air. The air in our beloved country is hard to breathe.

Still, we carry.

Like in Gabrielle’s Elegy, we know that when our breath runs out a body like ours will carry on so we may recover. We hold the line, we hold the note. We practice.

Bodies like ours know bodies like Gayton Mackenzie’s. We know he also knows survival and its costs. Men (and women) like him, pay the high price of power at the expense of bodies like ours… bodies like their own.

I wonder if he is also struggling to breathe.

If I could talk to him like I talk to Gabrielle I would ask how he feels about the procession who eagerly stand behind him as he bleats out false expensive notes, waiting for his breath and usefulness to run out.

Unlike in Elegy, they’re not there to carry him.”

…

Image credit: Gabrielle Goliath, Elegy - for a poet, 2026, performance, Homecoming Centre, District Six, photo by Zunis