The skin of memory : performing load shedding as a means to present trouble as a tactic towards reconsidering power, difference and authority

Abstract

In 2008, Johannesburg, and the rest of South Africa, began experiencing an energy crisis, resulting in blackouts pointing to a colloquialism now known as ‘load shedding’. This occurred during a collaborative performance-based project at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) School of the Arts. The project called Skin of Memory (2008) was inspired by Charlotte Delbo’s (1995) dilemma of how to explain the inexplicable; an audacious task of translating trauma into testimony by conjuring up the metaphor of a snake shedding its old skin. Skin of Memory was a project that became troublesome, intensified by particular notions of the participants, including myself, performing specific types of roles. The project was not resolved. This outcome presupposed the on-going process of crises. Trouble in this case meant locating a methodology of practice and reflection reconfiguring the arrangement of the modes of masculinity inherent within works created by male artists (such as myself). It is an attempt to subvert the innate tendencies such as patriarchy, power and authority that might emanate from these works. In reflecting upon these intersections, I want to reconsider how memory and identity intersect through the metaphor of load shedding. I aim to represent this argument through a retrospective of the events leading up to the performed presentation at the colloquium ’Collaborative art activism: A tool for decolonising genders and sexualities in the global South’ in 2014. In this performed lecture I provoked how a performer is able to load and shed identity. I consider performance strategies as interventions that subvert marginalised identities in order to understand how the categorisation of identity might be redeemed and transformed through performance.