GSA Radio:

Our GSA Radio podcast series are curated by a guest editor who presents a series framed by a theme or idea that is of interest or forms part of their research.

Black-Magic Series w/ Mxolisi Makhubo:

Magic is the ability for a conjurer to reveal an aspect of the world as we had never seen before; rather than invent anew, the magic resides in the ability to set new networks of relationships, which is where the magic lives. The magical moment then is the disruption of presuppositions and the rendering of new possibilities. Adding the adjective 'black' to magic renders it a racialised site that works against the ontological bounds set by racism for people racialised as black. Therefore, to experience black magic is to experience a new set of networks that sets off relationships anew and presses us to recalibrate the epistemic grounding of what we imagine to be possible.

In the three-part series, Black-magic, Mxolisi Makhubo explores discursive methods that hint at other sets of relationships with temporality, land and other beings. The series is an attempt at what Emanuel Admassu calls the decoupling of architecture from constantly producing property. Said differently, the podcast aims to extract different epistemes making even broader the extensive possibilities of building our material and immaterial worlds beyond the bounds of capital.

GSA Radio: Black-Magic Series | Podcast 01 w/ Mpho Matsipa

"In our inaugural episode,  I sit down with Mpho Matsipa, an educator, researcher, and curator based in South Africa. We discuss what she calls “thinking from blackness” and other epistemes for imagining freedom through expanding grammars of representation. We revisit her ongoing curatorial project, African Mobilities, to reflect on the generative dimensions of race. " - Mxolisi Makhubo

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MPHO MATSIPA is the curator of African Mobilities – a multi-sited, transnational experimental research platform and curatorial project. She is a research fellow at WiSER and a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

GSA Radio: Black-Magic Series | Podcast 02 w/Sifiso Khanyile

In the second episode, we sat down with Sifiso Khanyile, an archive researcher and filmmaker working primarily in Johannesburg, South Africa. In the conversation, we explore his ethics to "working with other people's lives" and the work required in dignifying black life using innately violent apartheid-era archives.

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Sifiso is an award-winning filmmaker, archive researcher and music records collector. His work is concerned with memory and history and how they continue to shape contemporary imaginations of South Africa. His recently completed short-film adaptation of Njabulo Ndebele's 'The Prophetess' expands his vocabulary into the South African literary archive, having worked with audio and video archives in the past. His ongoing project, 'Black Joy Under Apartheid', foregrounds black leisure and pleasure under apartheid to offer counter-hegemonic narratives to black victimhood.

GSA Radio: Black-Magic Series | Podcast 03 w/Panel Discussion

In the third and final episode of Black Magic, we sit down with Nombuso Mathibela, Molemo Ramphalile, Naledi Chai, and Vusi Hlatywayo, all DJs based in Johannesburg. The episode responds to Can Themba's monologue from Lionel Rogosin’s 1959 film, Come Back Africa. In the scene, Rogosin foregrounds the shebeen as a political site that produced counter-textualities about black South African subjectivities under apartheid. In response, we offer the DJ booth as an equally important site post-apartheid that is potentially equally concerned with contemporary socio-economic concerns. This episode troubles the notion of the panel discussion by borrowing from the shebeen, which democratises discourse to offer the DJ as a maker of worlds.

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Naledi Chai is a Johannesburg based DJ, multidisciplinary visual artist, researcher and one-half of The Fly Machine Sessions, a DJ and research collective working in Johannesburg. Under her DJ moniker, Mama Zeph, she uses the dancefloor to make left-field music right.

Molemo Ramphalile is a researcher, writer and music head from Johannesburg, South Africa.

Nombuso Mathibela is a Johannesburg based feminist educator, writer, vinyl collector and selector. Her sonic research interests span folk, anti-colonial, nationalist and feminist music histories and political aesthetics.

Vusi Hlatywayo is a graphic designer, DJ, archivist and one-half of The Fly Machine Sessions, a DJ and research collective working from Johannesburg. He is interested in the relationships of apartheid-era pop music and how they trouble narratives of black experiences under apartheid as only encompassing precarity.