Book Launch: Lost Libraries - Burnt Archives (Sindi-Leigh McBride & Julia Rensing eds)

Artists and scholars engage with the destruction of the African Studies library at the University of Cape Town: What happens when a library is burnt, an archive lost? What emerges from the ashes?

The book is the outcome of a two years' engagement witht the destruction of the Jagger Library by bushfire in April 2021. PhD-candidates Sindi-Leigh McBride and Julia Rensing, at the time, were teaching a class for the Graduate School of Social Sciences focussing on ways of reading contemporary African art to engage with relevant discourses in African Studies. Subsequently, a partnership grew with Jethro and Nair who curated  Of Smoke and Ash: Jagger Library Memorial Exhibition commemorating the tragic loss of the African Studies Special Collections at the UCT. On 25 April 2022 they held an exhibition response workshop in Cape Town, inviting a group of artists and academics to visit the burnt library and the exhibition at Michaelis Galleries Fine Art Gallery at the University of Cape Town and to participate in a workshop on the topic of commemorative practices, collective loss, the archive, decolonization, and curatorship as a creative site of knowledge. The publication co-edited by McBride and Rensing features artworks, poems, reflective essays and short stories by participants from the workshop in Cape Town as well as external writers, academics and poets from South Africa, Namibia and Switzerland.

Contributors

• Danielle Bowler
• Nicola Brandt
• Sophie Cope
• Dag Henrichsen
• Duane Jethro
• Atiyyah Khan
• Bongani Kona
• Lerato Maduna
• Portia Malatjie
• Sindi-Leigh McBride
• Nisha Merit
• Santu Mofokeng
• Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja
• Jade Nair
• Masande Ntshanga
• Koleka Putuma
• Julia Rensing
• Lorena Rizzo
• Ruth Sacks
• Niren Tolsi
• Eugene van der Merwe
• Lady Skollie
• Carine Zaayman

The event starts 4pm CET (or 5pm CAT)

Link: Please register here to join on Zoom

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