DIALOGUE some forms of refusal

Jani Ruscica

To: Dineo Seshee Bopape
Tue, Oct 10, 2023, 5:25 PM

Dear Dineo,

It has been so lovely to reconnect with you in Helsinki during this past year. It's phenomenal how your light and energy (I have no better words to describe it) radiates so strongly throughout your show at Kiasma.

Here are some questions for our dialogue.

"To metabolize those who said no"
I've heard you use this phrase in an interview and I was immediately struck by its power. It's such a vivid description of a working process. It would be interesting to hear more explicitly about the social or political context of the refusals you are referring to, as well as to hear about what it personally means to you, as an artist, to metabolize these acts of refusal.

Soil is a primary material in your practice. It seems to be so loaded, as it embodies and carries so much, yet your use of it is so effortless and "natural". So much so, that your use of it and thinking with it makes it feel like it is well beyond a material or a medium even. Could you tell me a bit more about the importance of its malleability and more specifically about what it carries for you personally; materially, symbolically, spiritually, conceptually, politically or in whatever way you deem significant?

Your biography so gracefully refuses hierarchical thinking. It refuses to value certain things over others and instead relishes relationality, plurality and simultaneity. You refuse egocentrism and bead in an expanse, a rhizomatic tapestry of relations and timelines. Your biography is alive and most definitely not the kind of epitaph that we are so accustomed to. How, and perhaps even more importantly, why did you arrive at this format?

Lots of love from Helsinki, Jani

Dineo Seshee Bopape

To: Jani Ruscica
Wed, Jun 26, 2024, 8:09 PM

Hello dear Jani
I hope you are well.
Here’s a draft of the text... it is not quite finished... and am still allowing questions or reflections to stream in....
I thought to send it anyways for you to have a look...
I have missed some of your other questions but will respond soon... I don’t know how things become overwhelmingly busy... well... metabolizing speed whilst on the road...can be challenging

How are you doing?
Do you have a studio by the way? Xo

Dear Jani
First letter...unfinished...

I had been thinking of refusals for some time...
What nos are heard, which are not...
No- to what...
In an earlier work “title unknown at time of publication” there was
a line said by the female lead of the film “I have no, I have a no” What did it mean for her to have no- whether her no was audible or not...

Nothing/no/negation Negate

Lerole...
Colonialism...
Change in timelines...
Who said yes..who said no...
No to conversions to Christianity
No to accommodating certain things (certain things:things that were to happen)
For some time they might have been considered enemies of progress No to killing themselves
No to their own deaths/lives

Winnie Mandela was a person who seemed to be able say no.
A woman who in her conviction said no- publicly
Refusing being battered or pushed around by the police.
I am reminded here of Spivak... and reframing her words: who hears ... the no

Those who said no to mining at the gold rush

#Mail 2#

Greetings dear Jani
Thanks so much for initiating this conversation.
It’s taken some time to arrive at my laptop to answer the call... Perhaps because it is a hard knot to unfold
In the meantime- the question was reframed several times in my mind....
“What does it mean to metabolize “no”...”
I had tried various ways to answer it, to decipher it...
Rereading the question "To metabolize those who said no”, rings differently[now].
“No” first came in a video/ film work I made some time in 2012/18

“name unknown at time of publication” , in the script, the actress says- she has a “NO”.
The film was an exploration about a story of a rape... back in 2004/5, a woman had accused the then vice president of South Africa of rape... the trial was public and I used some of what was said from the court and what journalists had at the time written about the event in various places....(context)

There was someone who had ‘accused’ the woman (Khwezi) of being a bad witness to her own trauma...
The presence of “no” as an entity (a No) sets her up within a dialogue with her self/selves and language...albeit the text suggests some dissociation.

"To metabolize those who said no”,
As the saying goes- the tale of the hunt is told by the hunter... Imagining what the hunted may have said...
And what may have happened to those people, their voices...
“I told you so” (is it that?)
Are they those who his-story ‘left behind’? Where does the-
There were groups of people who said no to the way in which the beginning of the democratic era in South Africa was negotiated... Specifically from Africans/the indigenous groups...
And in the various eras...
Those who died in wars of resistance against Colonialisms, Imperialisms...who fought for their sovereignty...and sometimes died...whose stories were not documented... except in the land, the waters...the trees...
How to metabolize them...
Is it about a particular kind of a no? Does it depend where the
no sits?

(Negation/ ———-\

Thinking of your work....
The blob
This amorphous being- does it have consciousness? It has life and it is

These beings that are in the midst of becoming- what is their m-o? I think a lot of parenthood when looking at these ...
Blobs of flesh- wanting...
‘They’ don’t make sense...

Are we like that- until we suddenly repeat everything in our environment? These repetitions- granny’s mouth, so and so’s eyes, so and so’s toes... conglomerates of .... Bundles of everything ...
What have these shapes to do w exploring parenthood...exploring one’s self...

One having been such a blob... and now... this...here, now..

I am also reminded of ectopic pregnancies or cysts...apparently growth can sometimes occur in the womb- the growths might contain in them hair, a nose or another part of the human body, a part that is recognizable surrounded by parts that are unrecognizable ... Jamiroquai- virtual insanity...a gene pool lab...

Ridiculous! A dictionary of things! What are we?!
It reminds me of a work I made contemplating my father’s Alzheimer’s conditions stories no longer made sense to me... relationships went haywire...
What is the relationship between apathy and algorithm and aperitif Hilarious!!!

Imprints Copies Duplicates

Replica
Mirror
Repeat
Rhythm
Does sense come from the repetition of it? Distillation

Distilling
In the process of a movement The movement of a process

(Ridiculous ....)
Synthetic, synthesize
AI, cloning
Adding parts together data from disparate realities/sources
Godly -did other gods laugh at our creator?and the ridiculous creations When the creations ....
“There’s nothing so bad as a manmade man” Jamiroquai
Spirit acclimatizing to new body

“The tragedy of being a human being, is that we were once a child” Simone de Beauvoir

And the worm, serpent
Serpent of creation dancing on the wall... Imprinted into the white paint
For the time being...
For
The time being...
How did the animal forms enter into the midst?

Jani Ruscica

To: Dineo Seshee Bopape
Sun, Jun 30, 2024, 10:42 AM

Dear Dineo,

Thank you so much for your response, so exciting! So wonderful : ) What a joy to read

I’m aware of how busy and challenging your schedules are, so I really appreciate the time you have taken to reflect on this in the midst of it all. I’ll let your reflections/questions related to my work sink in a bit and then respond.

I’m currently in the east of Finland in the lake region with Etna for a little break. This is where my mother used to live, unfortunately she passed away 10 years ago, but I still love to come here during the summer, it’s somehow comforting.

I do have a basement studio in the building where I live, nothing fancy, most of all very practical as it makes it so flexible to move between home and studio.

Do you have a studio?
I actually really love and admire how you collapse any distinction between the site of production and presentation in your practice, with the exhibition spaces really becoming like a studio and more.

Lots of love from Savonlinna, Jani

Dineo Seshee Bopape

To: Jani Ruscica
Mon, Aug 12, 2024, 9:14 AM

Morning Jani
This passage from Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche’s
“In love with the world” reminded me of your work again :)

Jani Ruscica

To: Dineo Seshee Bopape
Tue, Aug 13, 2024, 10:01 AM

Morning Dineo,

What a lovely note to be getting first thing in the morning, thank you, Love the passage!

"the misunderstanding that the compilation of parts adds up to something real and independent in its own right, not contingent on narratives and circumstances"

It also resonates with the way you approach biography : ) more very soon...

j
+ images of some older work 'I for Iridescence'

Jani Ruscica

To: Dineo Seshee Bopape
Tue, Sept 10, 2024, 9:57 AM

Dear Dineo,

To let thoughts sit, to let them arrange and rearrange themselves over time is so precious. I sometimes think that it might be the very reason to commit to making any kind of art in the first place, to allow things to sit and process, metabolize at a different speed. At a speed that doesn’t sit comfortably at all within the late capitalist frameworks in which we have to operate. Very few material, “man- made” things actually enjoy the kind of timeframe, or lifespan art does (surely one of its downfalls too...). Maybe it is a timeframe that is altogether more akin to that of the natural world? Permanence and impermanence inseparable.

I like how you start to answer, start to frame something, and how that shifts and changes through time and revision. How specificity starts to emerge, how details start to lead the way, or on the other hand, how some sort of opacity starts to obscure. I think these shifts speak of the multiplicity and layered nature of the work itself.

I want to just note, that the questions I sent you have of course already been “answered” by your work, or perhaps more fittingly, the work, in return, has asked further questions. You know, the way in which only art can give answers, without draining a conversation or recurring to unflinching conclusions. Of course art can present unflinching conclusions too, but I’d like to believe it always does so in more nuanced ways, well, your work certainly does.

I guess what I find fascinating in conversations like ours, is this process of reflection, of mirroring, some kind of translation. Acknowledging or making visible that which might remain opaque in the work, or hover over or around the work, that which can have an almost ghostly presence in the work.

The tentative nature of the endeavor.

I’ve always found it really fascinating how spoken or written language also shifts and morphs through time, what we or others talk about in relation to the work changes with the times, with shifting focuses, understandings, discourses. Nothing is static or fixed, and art, I think at its best, has that rare ability to be endlessly approached and re-approached from different perspectives and from within different frameworks. Have you noticed discourse shift at all around your work? Or certain aspects of it to have become more prominent than others? No stress about answering even more questions...

What is the relationship between apathy, algorithm and aperitif, that is indeed hilarious!! Yet there is something very fitting in that string of words, that chain of associations, something that rings very true with the ethos, or “logic” or “non-logic” of my work. The amalgamation of parts, the indexes of the unnameable, unmanageable, unclassifiable, that which is beyond the reach and capture of language. That which doesn’t add up, to which one has to form, hopefully, an unburdened and unprejudiced relationship (art in general I guess?). I think I am disillusioned enough to keep hoping to exist, but certainly to deposit the work at least, in that pre- or post-linguistic space, outside of binaries. Utopian, I know... is it possible to exist non-binarily? A more complex concept than my gender identity.

Only after having made my hybrid blobs with their non-linguistic expression and utterances, did I encounter Julia Kristeva’s term “Chora”, and it immediately struck a chord. The “Chora” for Kristeva describes an early stage in psychosexual development, where distinctions between self and other don’t exist, and all kinds of boundaries and categories are inherently permeable and porous, leaking so to speak. There is no certainty. She describes it as the stage closest to the pure materiality of existence, dominated by perceptions, feelings and needs. As you said, it is almost like existing in a perceptual state of becoming, with endless potentiality. And of course, there also is that relationship to parenthood you mentioned. It is a stage in the development of human babies from birth to about 6 months.

My father also had Alzheimer’s, and so did both of his parents. Some say they perceived their parents or other loved ones with Alzheimer’s to have gained with the condition some sort of freedom; from the constraints of the rational, from logic and memory (from trauma?) and all the baggage that comes with it. How did you experience your father’s condition? To be honest, I saw in my father’s eyes only confusion and a disquieting sense of loss, even fear,

a level of uncertainty he couldn’t bear. My grandmother on the other hand was stuck in an endless time loop of expectations; she was constantly awaiting to go on a trip to Rome from Sicily, her home, evidently endlessly reliving an unfulfilled, disappointing event from her past. These anecdotes are to say, I don’t romanticize this kind of loss of boundaries or relationality. Yet, I can’t help but think what kind of threat to all kinds of systems of power losses of definition and differentiation pose. How to acknowledge more contingency and intersectionality, things always being both this and that, and in constant movement... Beyond the rational, continuity and memory can exist and be deposited in ways that are more bodily, more sensory or multisensorial, as is evident in your work as well. Granny’s mouth, so and so’s eyes, so and so’s toes... also their gestures, mouth clicks, burps, eye rolls, phrases etc.

In ‘Polynotknot’ connections were forged improvisationally, intuitively, cut and paste, organically, prosthetically, quite literally so... It was paramount for my blobs to escape normative conceptions of the body, put language to the test and defy illusions of a “coherent” whole.

Just like in the passage from Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche you sent me: “We are all victims of mistaken identity...” How could we acknowledge or be allowed to express and manifest ourselves and everything around us in all its plurality and innate incoherence and stop pretending or forcing things into neat, sensible packages, categories, classifications or linear timelines. If we allowed this kind of messiness and plurality would things go haywire, probably not? Maybe just new, more elastic connections would be forged, enabling more nuance, empathy and perhaps paradoxically more focus on likeness rather than difference? Rather Western paradigms to challenge. No wonder we revert to Buddhism, Taoism or indigenous knowledges for some support...

I’ll end my ramblings with some more pop music references from Jamiroquai to Björk, who said:
“Hope is a muscle” ; )

I don't think I answered all of your questions either, I'll get back to the murals in another message!

Jani Ruscica

To: Dineo Seshee Bopape
Wed, Feb 26, 2025, 11:36 AM

Dear Dineo,
I hope you are well!

I take my cue from my previous message, from one phrase in particular: “To defy illusions of a coherent whole...”

As I promised some reflection on the murals and print works, I think this is a good place to start. As defiance of coherence or illusions of wholeness certainly lie at the very core of these works. As so often with my work, things take shape through blatantly practical, even quite literal actions and material considerations.

About ten years ago I started to work on these “found images” that have in them a strong affinity to language; to the sign, to the symbol, to the mark, to the type of image that across cultures and ages is understood as clearly signifying, representing something specific (think of cave paintings, hieroglyphs, signage, emojis or typefaces. That sort of thing). I found myself being drawn to the performative nature of anthropomorphism, zoomorphism or biomorphism, particularly in the context of typefaces or graphemes. I guess this kind of transformation has always interested me, but also the ambiguity that some of these images embodied, that quality of being this and that and also something else... and always having a strong sense of movement, a potential to shift meaning with the slightest of actions or adjustments to their pose, posture or gestures.

I started to work with these images, really embracing their innate performativity, and really, just running wild with it; having them stretch, bend, fold, duplicate, replicate, multiply, extend, conjoin, latch on, fall flat etc. Very physical actions that enabled me and them to playfully refuse any meaning originally attached to them. Their relationship to body or bodies is undeniable, even at their most abstract, there is this animacy that makes them always undeniably bodily (human, animal, hybrid or other). Maybe it’s also due to this relationship they always maintain to space, to weight, to gravity and movement. Particularly the murals, but lately also the print works. Vibrating between language and body, body as language or body in language.

It felt very natural to initially start working on paper, with woodcuts and wood block printing, to specifically maintain a clear relationship to language and printing techniques. But soon another type of “language” started interfering or intermingling with these forms. A language made of physical traces; of bodies (my own) and of objects, like belts, clothes, plants, vegetables, flowers, wires, cables, clamps, hammers, plastic bags, cardboard boxes etc., anything I could find in the studio or in its vicinity. Soon I moved on to the walls, to the murals, to “cave paintings”, to a more architectural scale. To also enable a more physical encounter, where one's own body, as audience, is actively engaged with the work, and thus becomes more relational. Also due to the scale, the act of “reading” becomes or is contingent to one's own physical movement, and perhaps then, any attempt to actually “read” is rendered futile. At least I hope so. That’s also why I started to work with fragmentation, denying the whole, the single view and embracing discontinuity instead. I think all important developments in the evolution of these works. As you see, all shaped by very practical, even quite literal considerations and actions.

Perhaps, a bit perversely, I also find myself enjoying the urge to “read" these works engender, and the consequent failure one is bound to encounter when attempting to do so. I think it’s exactly in this refusal to neatly cohere, to become legible, that the politics of these works lie. To me they are vibration, rhythm, movement, a more expansive language. They are plural, multiple, entangled, provisional and I hope they manage to trouble acts of naming, of capture, of category.

If you have a bit of time, I would be really thrilled to hear a bit more about how your biography came about, as it speaks so gracefully of similar pluralities, entanglements and relationality I have been going on about!

PS. Attached also a photo from de Ateliers times : )
I love this photo! I really wonder what book you are handing over? I'd be sooo curious to know...

Dineo Seshee Bopape

To: Jani Ruscica
Tue, Wed, 15 april, 2025, 12:09 PM

Hello Jani, thanks for this...

The biography...on material considerations(and material considerations)... the incoherent whole- cohering the multitude- the multi faceted orchestra

The bio... It was ...is a way to find out who I am...
In the Ubuntu/Botho philosophy- motho ke motho ka batho- a person is a person through other people...it speaks of the relational aspect of being a human being... through the mirroring process, one’s consciousness is birthed/developed/articulated.
I wonder if it is also through the events that have occurred in one’s life or at the convergence/consolidation of circumstances, matters, events, that emerge prior to one’s entrance into the theatre of life... the tools, the noise, the orchestra one enters with...

The idea that one is born of so many ancestors... so many collaborations through time... that there were so many embodied people who came before me (or you...)... that there were 7 generations of so many ancestors...____that led to me/you...and all those embodied beings intersected directly and indirectly with various other embodied beings...

I also wonder if how the events at the time of one’s birth affect, impact the person/collective...what the events mean within the cosmic ingredient pot...
I had started to think about these events that then influence

a generation- how they influence their beliefs or ways of being

in the world whilst partaking in the Younger than Jesus show at New Museum in 2008. The premise of the show was that we all (the invited artists) had to be younger than the supposed age when Jesus ‘died’. So at the time, I and others included were younger than 33... we came from various parts of the world...I became aware of some political and social global/world events I had not been aware of-(many actually). So I learnt about them as I was vaguely researching the various artists in the show...

I wondered about the relationships between what happened in South Africa- politically, socially, religiously, geologically, climatically- and how that related to things/events that happened in other parts of the world....those juices must have had effects on my parents(and their lives). My father was in Leeds, UK around the time of my birth- there were events that he attended - news he was privy to, South Africa was deep in Apartheid and rebellion against that system.... And the city of Leeds was going through its own things that have entered the world (and my life) in various ways since...

Anyhow- the Younger than Jesus show expanded my world in a new way...even though I had lived in Amsterdam and traveled a bit in the west, had attended the world racism conference in 2001 whilst living in Durban South Africa, encountering all sorts of people from around the world- I suddenly met all these other consciousnesses -my age mates- who were born in the same period...through various conditions....some more aware than others of where they came from... particularly those from outside the western world...

I had also spent some years being immersed so much in Salman Rushdie’s works and was mesmerized by his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children ...about 2 children -swapped at birth...born to parents of opposite socio-political realities.

anyhow...what is a person...a result of all these things that birthed them...the genes- affected by the social...the geological...
the emotional: the fears, the joys, the peace ; inhibited or celebrated ancestral expressions ...; food consumed affected by political wills and agendas and geological shifts ...all these factors...how does personality or personhood come into being- or stabilize or persist through time...does it stabilize with the various social events? Family dynamics attuned to the macro...The intersection of all these transitory factors...

And if all these events are shared with others...are we all the same self?
But then there are also the private- or micro events... I asked myself the other day whether this bio is a way of hiding...the events do not really say who I am...
But the other way- speaking of institutions one has attended ..also obscures the person or being being described...
Again we land back at the idea of this tension between the tangible and the intangible or rather the things/vibe that is hard to account for consistently in ...one language..

I love this that you said earlier: As defiance of coherence or illusions of wholeness certainly lie at the very core of these works. As so often with my work, things take shape through blatantly practical, even quite literal actions and material considerations. —

Perhaps in a similar way to how I have structured the bio- not quite directly - but indirectly pulling at something that unifies the global ‘body’

I think it’s exactly in this refusal to neatly cohere, i love it to become legible, that the politics of these works lie. Yes To me they are vibration, rhythm, movement, a more expansive language. They are plural, multiple, entangled, provisional and I hope they manage to trouble acts of naming, of capture, of category.

—
peace and cosmic blessings

Dineo Seshee Bopape...
le cosmic
//ultra cosmic : kopadilalelo