Gabrielle Goliath

“I appreciate your note on the centrality of bodily presence and situated knowledge, which is key to the political, poetic, affective and conceptual impetus of the work, as it calls us into a different, more relational aesthetic encounter. It is, however, important to recall that not all “bodies” are equal, or equally “believable”, and do not enter into political representation on commensurate terms. An (anti-black/brown/poor/femme) index of differentially valued life continues to sustain an inequitable regime of representation, one in which white heteronormativity reads (and reads well) whilst the “affectable others” (to cite Denise Ferreira da Silva) do not.”

Art Frame Interview read

____

The copyright for any material published on this website is reserved. Any duplication or use of objects such as images, videos, sound files and texts is not permitted without the written agreement of Studio Goliath contact

Elegy

2015-

Elegy is an ongoing labour of remembrance, repair and black feminist love. Initiated in 2015, the work has been staged in locations from Johannesburg to São Paulo, Paris, Basel, Munich and Amsterdam. Each performance gathers a group of seven opera singers who collectively enact a ritual of mourning, sustaining a single haunting tone over the course of an hour. Invoked in this gesture are the absent presences of women and LGBTQIA+ individuals lost to a normative crisis of rape culture and femicide in South Africa and globally.

With each performance a eulogistic text is shared, scripted by a family member or friend of the individual commemorated. In more historical cases of colonial and slaveocratic violence (against women and feminised bodies), speculative texts by collaborating scholars reach across generations, geographies and archival erasures, recalling these losses and accounting for a present of anti-black, anti-femme violence.

Refusing spectacle and the objectification of bodies deemed rapeable and killable, Elegy asserts conditions of hope and avowal: of black, brown, femme and queer life as loveable and grieveable. For those immersed in its sonic vigil, it offers a space for shared grief and radical refusal - for the urgent, ongoing life-work of mourning.

. . .

An introduction to Elegy - Lerato ‘Tambai’ Moloi, by Deborah A. Thomas
Johannesburg Art Gallery, Think from Black: a lexicon, 2023

I first encountered Elegy at the Cape Town Slave Lodge in 2018. It was the opening of an exhibit called “Under the Cover of Darkness: Women in Servitude in the Cape Colony,” that was curated by Carine Zaayman. The exhibit itself was meant to surface the untold stories of women forced into slavery in what would then have been the Dutch-controlled Cape during the eighteenth century. Twelve specific women were commemorated, their lives detailed throughout the exhibit. One of these women, Louisa van de Caab, was the subject of the critically-speculative eulogistic text written by historian Saarah Jappie for the performance of Elegy.

This is what is so beautiful about Gabrielle’s Goliath’s work, and it is what makes the work both mourning and memorial, a citational practice that acknowledges and amplifies the ubiquity of sexual violence, and celebrates specific lives lived. Central to Elegy, and to all Gabrielle’s work, are these questions: How do we make work that bears witness to violence without trafficking in violence? How do we share trauma without directly representing it? How do we give voice without giving transparency?

What was so striking to me in 2018 was that this work of memorialization was so profoundly interior, but also collaborative and collective. The performers created a sonic landscape that was shared, in that the note they vocalized was durational but simultaneously individual. I came to anticipate particular voices, looking forward to specific women’s tone. I watched as some audience members, initially entranced, became uncomfortable. After about ten or fifteen minutes, some began to fidget, some left. Those who remained settled deeply into the sound, and into the worlds evoked by and through that sound. Consciously and unconsciously, we surrendered to what Gabrielle has called a “sonics of knowing,” a “collective transference of likeness,” and “a condition for survival and hope.” As the women began to peel off and sit among audience members, I watched their own release. One woman sat next to me and began quietly sobbing. I placed my hand on hers and felt the spark of relation and care.

That experience of Elegy felt incredibly vulnerable, yet extraordinarily powerful. It created the conditions for reflection without laying out a pre-determined end point for that reflection. At the time, I had been thinking with some colleagues about ways to memorialize and release the spirits of those ancestors who live in the Penn Museum, the space where I spend most of my days. Gabrielle’s work opened up those discussions in ways that have subsequently prompted me to think about what it would mean to experience and practice authority without sovereignty, freedom without autonomy, and surrender without subordination.

Mourning, for Gabrielle, is life work. It is, in her words, “a reaffirmation of the conditions of hope through the ritual invocation of named, loved, missed, and grieved after lives.” Elegy, and indeed all of Gabrielle’s work, is a kind of portal. It creates the conditions for us to give ourselves over to the work of mourning, and, potentially, to reflect on the conditions that create the need for mourning in the first place. In generating a feeling in relation to, rather than a feeling “for,” specific lives rather than faceless victims, Elegy not only makes these specific lives grieve-able, but also becomes a necessary precursor to something that will take place afterward. It models the act of yielding, of giving oneself over to something or someone, of surrender to modes of vulnerability grounded in embodied practice, process, and dialogue. This surrender is fractal and recursive; it requires witnesses and generates archives. It lays out political and social possibilities beyond those imagined to follow from recognition, inclusion, and the extension of rights, those certainties of liberal possessive individualism foundational to state-centered onto-epistemological phenomena that produce whiteness, maleness, and Europeanness as the apex of humanity. Surrender is an iterative practice rooted in love that is future-oriented yet enacted in the day to day.