GIPCA's Project aims to investigate abundance in African arts

The Exuberance Project will investigate what is abundant, enthusiastic, overflowing, unrestrained and joyful in contemporary creative and performing arts of Africa. Convened by Raél Jero Salley and Jay Pather, and presented by the GIPCA, this weekend event will consist of a symposium, performances, exhibitions, panel discussions and film screenings.

Africa has long been described by critics as being perched on a threshold - between inadequacy and potential, between something and nothing. The vast complexity of the continent is thereby reduced, frozen by clichéd metaphors and paradoxical summations. Such large, elusive and unhappy representations work to shape individual imaginaries and bound collective sensibilities.

New views of creativity in Africa

As a result, African creative practices have long been framed by fractured identifications, shadowed by humiliation, or overexposed as hyper-visible depravity. Critics and artists respond to these perpetual pessimistic representations in the intellectual, political and aesthetic realms - in
diverse and particular ways - in an effort to both acknowledge the legacies of oppression, and produce creatively, without recapitulating problematic pathologies.

The Exuberance Project aims to foster new views and fresh understandings of creativity in contemporary Africa, through consideration and celebration of what is extremely good, effusive and uninhibitedly enthusiastic. A particular application within the creative context of Southern Africa
explores aesthetic capacities, as they appear in specific instances of the visual, textual, sound, performance, digital and virtual arts.

The resultant dialogue hopes to contribute to a democratic public sphere by generating informed public discussion and debate, urging its audience to engage the complex effervescence of Southern Africa's places and spaces, ideas and passions.

This event will take place at Hiddingh Hall, University of Cape Town Hiddingh Campus, Orange Street, Cape Town. The full programme comprising theatre visits, exhibition walkabouts, film screenings as well as a full two day conference will be available from www.gipca.uct.ac.za from Friday, 20 April.