With Queer Love: Critical Intimacy and Oceans in the Grave of a Tree - Vikram Kershan Pancham
Channel: Vikram Kershan
Date: 2020-06-30

This is a live public art/life performance and ritual, at the University of Cape Town Hiddingh Campus, where they killed a tree, an old and ancient tree, an elder. 

With no warning, with no public announcement, with no public and temporal engagement, no ceremony, no ritual, no permission, no consent. Did they ask the Tree what it wants? Did they ask us? 

On heritage, loss, memory and queer love, ethics, and this particular tree. It includes stories from the archive of my masters study, on indentured and enslaved people's histories, Black Indian Dalit and Queer histories from KwaZulu-Natal on the South-East African coast. and flickers of truth of from Kutiyattam, decolonial gestures from the South Indian performance dance theatre and storytelling tradition, an art of the slow and elaborate and detail of rasa. and songs, chants of and for orisha Ogun, from AfroCuba art/life makers. It was art-making in the grave of that tree, to honour it, and the indignation of our indigenous spirits that create light and offer softness,  healing, flame, and release wood memory.

It forms part of my research and phd interests as a Mellon Fellow with the Recentring AfroAsia Project at the Universities of Cape Town, Western Cape, Witwatersrand.

It was the outcome of a series of live art workshops, generously supported by the Institute for Creative Arts at UCT and ProHelvetia Johannesburg, powerfully and sensitively led by the world-renownded Jay Pather.

We were studying inside when it happened. Why wasn't the everyday normalized massacre of uMakhulu recognised as part of the curriculum, South African and other regions universities, and the neoliberal mode of education (education as dispossession)? We heard it, the tree spirit. We saw it, its pieces scattered, chips for dumping somewhere, space cleared for pavements and coffee shops here. It is a living memorial for the Great Spirit of this Ancestor, whose air made us, and whose death is alive in us. 

You will see it everywhere in Cape Town and UCT - Development by dispossession, education by militarism, and the shelling out of the human's  practice and potentiality of critical intimacy. However, we too bitchy to not practice freedom, radical relationality, and queer ethics, so we make this offering and sharing.