Introduction

It always interests me to notice what occupies me at the moment of an invitation to present my thinking around my work.

But for me – a philosopher of the body – a presentation, which will always have the sanctity of performance to it – has become an increasingly difficult task.

What calls me?

What screams to become artistic matter in the world?

Where is my attention?

To the latest manifestation of state collapse?

The immense genocide?

The looming possibility of global war and our extinction – in our lifetime?

The now, accelerating collapse of the environment through extractivism, through waste? Polluted water? Vanishing species? The deep unease of food insecurity, unemployment? Or the unmanageable pressure that the digital world exerts on our attention?

Or – is it an ensouled engagement with justice itself – that rare element, now slipping from the moral field of our time?

In the quagmire of this age, I deliberately choose to enter the difficult, the entangled, where the ground sucks at the feet and every struggle refuses an exit.

I love verbs – especially those that once were nouns or adjectives.

To difficultate – not yet claimed by AI – is one of them.

To difficultate is to refuse easy answers. It's the act of allowing things to be difficult – a deliberate resistance, a creative complication. It invites muddiness, friction, tension – the necessary grit of thought at an age at risk.

I practise difficultating as a devotion. I refuse entertainment. I am appalled by easy bypassing of matters that require attention. I can't bear people's compulsions to inner peace. I am a restless woman. And I have grown to love it.

With you, I would like to find a differently entangled performativity, around three issues:

Relationality, a concept without a binary

Barbarians, another concept without a binary

Justice-to-Come, a state, without a binary

Relationality

I often experience a breakdown in my ability to share or teach. I no longer know how to give people instructions on the dance floor. It is a philosophical crisis. Asking students to breathe in and out feels morally charged. In and out, as far as breathing goes, is just not the full truth, and we will never recover the truth of breath, ontologically.

But what about relationality?

Now, in my 70^th year, I find my relationality with breath indescribably complex – an irreversible event, bound to gravity and the body's slow wrestle with entropy – from order to disorder, from structure to decay. Breath is nomadic, wanders, loses focus, dissolves into the breakdown of matter, and perhaps of civilisation itself. If only we could rescue breath from capitalist instruction, from its constant surveillance.

Since I began to speak to you, we have all moved closer to our relationality with death. And we have died many deaths in between. Life is entirely non-binary, awakening dormant pathways of metabolizing, composting, and growing down to face our destiny as artists.

Back to relationality. I choose this word over "relationship," because between two people there is also the relationality with everyone else – their bodies, our breaths, capitalism, the rules that govern our relating, institutions, knowledge, the city, subjectivities, this space we occupy, its history, the soil beneath, centuries past, the irreversibility of every other relationality that touched this moment, ad infinitum.

Take us. What if our relationality existed long before you and I – before this so-called relationship – ever did? Imagine the dance that existed long before the dancers were born. Your performances, long before they had bodies. Or, consider that all of this is shaped by the future, and I have to restrain my hands from the compulsion to reach forward, as if the future were truly ... there. What would happen if I turned around?

In my journalling, mostly in Afrikaans, I try to write through complex relationalities into what I call an event, in Afrikaans: ‘n aangeleentheid.

It helps to call everything that is characterised by my philosophical struggle, an event. For instance, if a relationship explodes into a relationality, and that event is present in time and space, I cannot revert to previous disciplines, or habits to call the other person a man, or child, or criminal, politician, academic, worker, a Malawian, or Ugandan citizen, or a Trumpite, or an anti-Semite, or a person from a certain racial or ethnic group. As relationality, none of that knowledge is useful. The continuum of rapidly unfolding events also makes my previous theories on relationships null and void, defunct, invalid and outdated.

Until I moved or sounded an event of complexly entangled relationality I cannot automatically accept that a concept may be what I think it is.

We are a significant relational event exploring our choices of art, politics and thoughts in the age of risk. Here are some discoveries I have made on the floor through dance and voice. Just flow with the ideas and enjoy the imaginary visitation you give yourself.

A relational event is irreducible. You cannot divide it, unpack, undo and analyse it. It is an entire re-embodiment and reconceptualization of where we come from and what we have as agency to work with. Who are we, then? We are constantly becoming, where our so-called Yes and our No are continually reconfiguring boundaries away from known coordinates. We are how we think about things, and we do not stand external to any other or anything, whether we be people, or more-than people. This is the only way to exist with some coherence, and sense-making, at the age of risk.

What do we want? We want to be standing as mutually implicated, entangled, so that we can be answerable to all the knowledge that is present, whether AI, scholarly, bodily, spiritually, ecologically, ad infinitum.

Who and what we are as well as our knowledge do not stand prior to the other's knowledge. No-one and no-thing has more consciousness than any other because no measurement of consciousness through whichever apparatus, will ever be reliable. No-one can be explained in terms of the other. We, as matter are incomparable.

Yet we are deeply entangled.

None of us is reducible to the other. None has privileged status in determining the other. None of us is articulated or describable in the absence of the other, because the other – from ancestors to the not-yet-born – is always present.

Look at AI, constantly wavering between rationality and irrationality, real or fantasy, clarity or illusion, attention or love. What you see here and what I see now is not AI, because we are a semi-solidified feature of the world, never quite becoming a thing, yet a constant doing.

Outside of this declaration of relationality we are bound to still ask: Who are we? What do we want? Or: Who are we waiting for?

That ends of the first part: relationality.

Barbarians

My first encounter with a book called Waiting for the Barbarians, a novel by J.M. Coetzee was shortly after its publication in 1980. I was 25.

It's a story of empire, and of fear. The fear of the so-called barbarians, the nomads beyond the borders. But as the story unfolds, the mirror turns. The barbarity shifts – from the nomads... to the government itself.

The title, Waiting for the Barbarians, comes from the poem by Constantine P. Cavafy, the Greek poet, journalist, and activist. He wrote it in 1895 – 130 years ago. But it was too dangerous, too revealing, for a conscientious objector, to publish at the time. He would have been treated as a whistle blower of today. Only in 1904 did the poem reach the public.

In Cavafy's poem, the barbarians are first imagined as the others – the ones we wait for, we fear, and define ourselves against. But gradually, the poem reveals the truth: the barbarians are, us.

Now – I'm going to play you a recording, a soundscape created by a New York performance artist Laurie Anderson in her performance of the poem, in 2023.

And with your permission, I will follow it with my own 2025 relational event, as my first steps in appropriating this poem to study the barbarians of the world.

But before that, there's another name I must speak.

Helen Mentis — Greek artist, crafter, textile importer, and poet. She came to South Africa, married the bronze artist Gerhard de Leeuw, and in 1950 began a lifelong challenge: to free the South African art world from its British and American dependencies. To open spaces for the local imagination.

It was said that Helen de Leeuw shaped an entire aesthetic – single-handedly.

She also sold her own work to fund Operation Hunger – an organisation born in South Africa 47 years ago, still active worldwide today. An organisation that, in truth, should never have had to exist.

Helen would often read me her poetry – from her bed – papers scattered everywhere, her voice rising out of the folds of her own lived texture. She managed to write acts of revolt into beauty in such a way so that one could – or could not – get to the revolution written into them.

This dress – entirely handmade by her – was given to me by Helen de Leeuw. It has hung on my wall since 2006, the year she gave it to me. The same year she died at the age of 89.

None of her poetry remains. Not one page has been found.

It poses the third concept. But first the performance. And hopefully, I am not the last to be the performer of this poem.

This is my first performance iteration to Laurie Anderson's You Tube soundtrack of the first 9:33 minutes. See her performance here.

Technically, as dance, the concept of waiting and its exploration of my body's relationality with gravity is the underlying principle. However, the entangled complexity of the politics of waiting while barbarianism informs-and-becomes the dance, with a deepened enquiry into the possibilities of being barbarianised un/willingly, will remain a performance quest with unsettling performative outcomes.

The last concept to share with you is one coined by feminist quantum physicist and posthuman philosopher, Karen River Barad.

Justice-to-come

In being a performance artist, there is one thing that always accompanies my performances. The increasing and extreme anxiety before and even after each performance. This anxiety feels like an independent and disruptive emotion, that expresses itself as a form of righteousness. Rationally, there would be no need for such anxiety, but it cracks open my veneer of 50 years of performance accomplishment, and forces through a severe state of being – one furthest away from the comfort of a blessing. It always reminds me, that one does this work not with a sense of ease and leisure, having all your senses in a line. But with the anguish of bringing matter to a surging idea, almost like crafting a boat while in a stormy sea.

Part of this haunted, tormented, burdened existence is that I am caught in the creepy grip of justice. I wonder how much justice there is to occupy the space of art-making while the world is in need of so much else. I understand this as an archetypal struggle for every artist who has to be in relationality with the world and then difficultate a personal signature statement about the world, as a purposeful yet entangled living. Commenting, expressing and embodying an event in the hope to bring greater understanding is a self-imposed stance to grapple with: the ethics of articulation itself. Once you have created something, there it is in the world. Somewhere in the aftermath, there is always the lamentational refrain from that song Senzeni Na? What have we done?

Indeed, the whole of humankind can now ask-sing: Senzeni Na?

It is only when the very nature of relationality dawns upon me yet again, that I understand why artists have been with us since the beginning of time. And more than any other profession, the artist would understand the nature of one's doing as a relational justice in the "thick-now", a phenomenon called: a justice-to-come.

Justice-to-come isn't waiting for a future moment when justice will arrive as we are currently doing. Waiting for potholes to be filled, water sources to be cared for, toilets to be provided in schools. Waiting like this, is like waiting for the barbarians.

Justice-to-come is also not a moral verdict but the creative restlessness of the world itself – the way matter, time, gesture, and sound never cease to reconfigure what can be sensed, felt, known or changed.

In this light, art becomes the practice through which justice shimmers into potential, maybe never reaching its expectation. But every artistic act – a movement, a mark, a vibration – is a response to a realisation of life as an entangled field. It is not expression of the self, but responsiveness to the world's ongoing making of meaning. In fact, it is an artistic response as the world, as justice-to-come.

Art, then, is how the universe thinks and feels through us, and as us, how it performs its unfinished ethics. In art, that means the work never closes. Even when performed, exhibited, or published, it keeps asking:

Who or what has been excluded from our attention?

The artist is not a destination but a trembling horizon themselves – again the dance before the dancers were born, a movement toward that which cannot yet be seen, a form of love that refuses completion.

Even when the empire, the government has the final word, the artist will still step forth and comment on it. When that happens, let us never forget it being a moment for, justice-to-come.

This planet itself embodies justice-to-come, and is therefore without binaries, always an act, a doing. In this sense, it is better to see justice-to-come as a texture – a felt ethic that arises in the materials themselves, in their capacity to change presence, to record, to remember, to resist.

And matter's relationality with the artist tells us, more than ever before that the artist is never alone. Each gesture draws from and alters a vast network – ancestors, histories, wounds, wars, dreams, particles, machines, ecologies. Art is always a site of entanglement, and therefore a justice-to-come.

Justice-to-come opens our perception of always, already, automatically (my triple A) here in tension, never fully settled, full in potential, calling in matter. It calls for an ethics that lives with unfulfilled expectations, imperfect knowledge and uncertainty.

Justice-to-come is a constant coping with incomplete knowledge, and entangled risk, on-going death, Gaza.

Gaza is a large scale site for justice-to-come, with an increasing number of players. As an afterthought, Sudan is often second in line of our attention because Sudan is in Africa. People do not pay attention to Africa because where the soul must survive systemic corruption, extractive capitalism, political pandemonium and institutional violence, observers are afraid to sense how their attention, can become a form of love, because it evokes justice-to-come deeply embedded in every soul to come to Africa. This is a categorical state of human experience: Your attention to Africa is a form of love whether you write, sing, politicise, preach, cry, kill or die here.

Now, I have never been to the Middle East but I have seen impressive performances of justice-to-come in The Kordofan region in the south of Sudan. Let me tell you about it.

One could not call what I was doing, facilitating – making things easier – but I was truly difficultating – articulating the complexity of relational processes. I did this for the Sudan People's Liberation Army, the SPLA. But also for myself.

There I met a man who drove trucks of soldiers, to and from their places of fighting the other forces. As a main driver – any time at night or day – he had to follow his intuition of where every landmine was planted. At night, they rested at the border. It was the border where these two armes gathered, where the enemy soldiers met, over meals cooked by people who cared, and who loved, soldiers. There they met as brothers, discussed the war and exchanged goods, gifts, bags of rice, poetry maybe ... well, whatever men exchange. In the morning they got up, separated into their diverse armies, became each other's barbarians, and then the war continued. As Laurie Anderson sings: The barbarians are "a kind of solution". I would say a justice-to-come. This is a good example of an event that is unspecified, without a fixed end-point, definitely not cleanly linear, spatially demarcated or certain.

It was during those visits where it dawned upon me that one's mind is only separate from your body at the moment you die, and not before.

And that the courageous breath of a starving child, can take be taken away.

Thank you.

TOP ↑