[Candrama] CFP: GPS special issue on Uhambo - translating embodied wanderings into performance practices and epistemologies through audio/multimedia walks

[Schmidt, T.U. (Theron)]

Download this CFP as a PDF: https://gps.psi-web.org/libraryFiles/downloadPublic/14

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

Uhambo: translating embodied wanderings into performance practices and epistemologies through audio/multimedia walks

Following the Uhambo Luyazilawula PSi28 conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, in August 2023, the Global Performance Studies<https://gps.psi-web.org/> (GPS) journal invites proposals for sound/audio walk or multimedia walk contributions in conversation with the presentations at the Uhambo Luyazilawula conference.

Format: Sound/audio walks or multimedia walks

Deadline: 27 November 2023 (first call); 04 December 2023 (final call)

Editors: Felipe Cervera, Theron Schmidt, Neka Da Costa, Kamogelo Molobye, Hamish Neill

Framing:

Uhambo ("a/to journey") was an invitation by the Performance Studies international conference #28 to surrender to journeys that connect us, and to explore ways of understanding and critiquing how we came to be through praxis and reflection. Framed through Performance Studies, uhambo is a creative art and a research paradigm through which practitioners and scholars can contemplate and unpack the significance of journeying as embodied practices of movement, nomadism, migration, immigration and cultural exchanges, among its many other dimensions. We position Uhambo Oluzilawulayo (a journey that is self-controlling or self-fulfilling) as a critical-place studies framework that encourages intertextual critiques of space, location, society, culture, and politics as necessary for the diversity of embodied knowledge emerging from communities and people (Stevenson, 2008). As such, uhambo inspires engagements in walking, travel or movement as a form of socio-cultural exchange in order to discover and reveal artistic and intellectual practices that assert the intersectionality of space and place as fluid stimuli intertwined with human experiences.

This call invites post-conference elaborations on the notion of uhambo to frame how scholars, researchers, and artistic practitioners explore environments and the self as archives and institutions of knowledge that contextually, socially, and culturally influence performance studies practices both in Africa and around the world. We have chosen to locate the publication of such knowledge in the form of sound/audio and multimedia walks which, through active and immersive listening, conflate space, place and sound with critical documentation and reflection. Sound/audio walks and multimedia walks are provocations that invite listeners or audiences to take an actual and/or imaginative journey on a route or in a location carefully planned on a map or documented through photography, videography, or sonic scapes that capture a specific environment and narrative.

Sound/audio and multimedia walks extend the concept of uhambo through generating multisensory experiences that make knowledge sharing and production more inclusive and accessible. The communal mobility embraced by sound/ audio and multimedia walks means that they are often site-specific in their documentation, containing recorded instructions for listeners and audiences to follow as they walk and engage with the stories or critical research shared by the author. Uhambo considers sound/audio or multimedia walks as an entry point to create dynamic research that reflects on the relationships between humans, communities and the politics of indigenous knowledge gathered and developed through practices of movement, mapping, sensory and immersive performance, conceptual art practices, photography and sonic installations (Hauge, 2007).

Through the curation and publication of sound/audio and multimedia walks, we aim to collate research that questions the creation, production, reproduction and legitimacy of knowledges both inside and outside of institutions. We encourage artists and scholars to grapple with knowing as interpersonal construction, knowing as re-membering, knowing as contextually situated, and knowing as located through body, place, and time (Risner, 2014: 155) and expand the notion of uhambo in multiple contexts. Proposed sound/audio and multimedia walks should centre the personal-as-political, the personal-as-pedagogic, and the personal-as-epistemic to excavate endemic vocabularies and prioritise 'original' knowledges that store, transfer, and disseminate history and philosophical wisdom (Magoqwana, 2018).

To walk, to wander and to embody is to recontextualise cultures, traditions, and identities and incorporate them into new ways of self-understanding that inform performance studies (Okere, 1983). Thus, this call invites contributors to use sound/audio or multimedia walks to critique the complexities and nuances that emerge from themselves and their environments, particularly considering that uhambo centres living and embodied epistemes as legitimate forms of knowledge that can inform, challenge and decolonise contemporary performance practices.

Proposals are requested through two mediums:

  1.  Long-form - 20 - 30 minute sound/audio walks: sound/audio walks invite scholars and creatives to consider publication that explores the art of walking and hearing an academic and/or creative publication. Applicants are encouraged to think of the sound/audio walk as a scholarly sonic guided experience that can be facilitated through frames that suggest to walkers and listeners the kinds of routes, sites, and places to occupy or journey through while listening and engaging with the audio walk. The sound/audio walk should be accompanied by a full transcript of the paper read during the experience. .
  2.  Short-form, 12-20 minute multimedia walks: multimedia walks invite applicants to consider visual and audio media features accompanying the paper. Audiences can engage with images, animation, video and texts as the digital landscapes to accompany audio publications. The format may be suitable for short papers and poetic writings, or poster papers.

Proposals are welcomed in one or more of the following sub-themes:

  *   Performative mappings, wanderings and wonderings;
  *   Indigenous knowledge systems and cultural performance practices;
  *   Spaces and places as sites of contextually located knowledge;
  *   Living and embodied archives as institutions of performance studies knowledge;
  *   Alternative epistemologies: explorations of undiscovered performances, pedagogies and practices;
  *   The migration of performance and performance studies;
  *   Translations and interpretations as performance studies;
  *   Intergenerational knowledge, explorations, and re-membering;
  *   Archives, documentation and performance studies;
  *   Identities, fluidities and performance studies;

Submission procedure:

Applicants are invited to submit an abstract, concept, or framing document (maximum 1000 words) on or before November 27, 2023, by email to gps-uhambo at psi-web.org<mailto:gps-uhambo at psi-web.org>. The abstract should clearly explain the intention, mission and exploration of their proposed audio or multimedia walk. Applicants will be notified by January 15, 2024, about the status of their proposals and will be sent audio/multimedia walk guidelines. The complete audio/multimedia walk is expected to be submitted for peer-first review by April 22, 2024.

Important dates:

Proposal deadline: 27 November 2023

Proposal outcome: 15 January 2024

First audio/multimedia walk submission: 18 March 2024

Review results: 22 April 2024

Second review process: 17 May 2024

Final audio/multimedia walk submission: 14 June 2024 (possible publication in June/July 2024)

References:

  *   Hauge, Å.L. (2007). Identity and Place: a critical comparision of three identity theories. Architectural Science Review, 50(1), pp. 44-51.
  *   Magoqwana, B. (2018). Repositioning uMakhulu as an institution of knowledge: beyond 'Biologism' towards uMakhulu as the body of indigenous knowledge. In: J Bam, L Ntsebeza., and A Zinn (eds.). Whose history counts? Decolonising African pre-colonial historiography. Cape Town: AFRICA Sun MeDIA, 75-90.
  *   Okere, T. (1983). African philosophy. A historic-hermeneutical investigation of the conditions of its possibility. Lanham, New York, London: University Press of America.
  *   Risner, D. (2000). Making Dance, Making Sense: epistemology and choreography. Research in Dance Education, 1(2), pp. 155-172.
  *   Stevenson, R.B. (2008). A critical pedagogy of place and the critical place(s) of pedagogy. Environmental Education Research, 14(2), pp. 353-360.

Send proposals and inquiries to: gps-uhambo at psi-web.org<mailto:gps-uhambo at psi-web.org>

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