The Library of Things We Forgot To Remember

VINYL SPOTLIGHT

Apala: Apala Groups in Nigeria 1967-70’ is the first ever collection of Apala music to be released outside of Nigeria. The album focuses on a wide selection of recordings made in Nigeria in the 1960s, a time when Apala music was at the height of its popularity.

Apala is a popular music that also functioned as a form of cultural resistance – Apala music involved no western instrumentation and is sung in the Yoruba language, its aesthetic an implicit cultural rejection of the British Empire’s colonial rule over Nigeria which lasted from 1901 until independence in 1960.

Text:

Track: Haruna Ishola and His Apala Group - Ewure Ile Komoyi Ode

David Scott & Black Intellectual Praxes
with vinyl selections by Nombuso Mathibela & friends
 
Thursday 3 October
16:00-18:00
The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember
44 Stanley Avenue
Refreshments will be served
 
Don’t miss this community gathering and listening session at the Library of Things we Forgot to Remember! The Black Intellectual Praxes collective will be in dialogue with Prof Scott, unpacking his intellectual project and method of scholarship, and its impact on young intellectuals in the Black Radical Tradition. With vinyl selections from Nombuso Mathibela and friends, the session will extend work started in the Radical Praxes Reading Group.

This is an ongoing conversation, grounded in multiple temporalities and trans-generational labour of the Black Radical Tradition. This coming together marks a significant moment in radical Black journal publishing, as the collective prepares to launch its first edition of the Black Praxes Journal - a project in many ways inspired by the emergence, actualisation and continuity of Small Axe, founded by Scott in 1997.

RSVP link in our bio

Join us at The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember, at 3PM on 25 August, for the opening of the Rohingya Genocide Commemoration Exhibition featuring photography by Andrew Day and a sound piece contributed by Atiyyah Khan.

The exhibition will run from 25 August to 25 September.

25 August 2024, marks the 7th Rohingya Genocide Remembrance Day.

The Rohingya in Myanmar are the world’s most persecuted ethnic minority. The violence against the Rohingya is symptomatic of a long and oppressive history of discrimination for which the Myanmar government is to blame. They are denied citizenship, education, freedom of movement, employment, the right to own property or marry without state permission and are used as forced labour on roads and at military camps.

In August of 2017 almost 1 million Rohingya were forced to flee genocide and are now living in the biggest refugee camp in the world at Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. They are labelled illegal immigrants from Bangladesh thus rendering them stateless, despite many of them having lived in the country for generations. The vast majority of Rohingya refugees remain in Bangladesh, unable to return.

Join us tomorrow for a special event 🎧 12pm to 1:30pm

Happy Holidays 🎄 🎉 🌞

We are closing today. We will see you again from Thursday, 11 January 2024!

Thank you all for the support.

Sunday, 12 November
3 pm to 6 pm


LOSS | LAND | LINEAGE | LANGUAGE | LOVE 

Let us gather around MINE MINE MINE, an offering on loss and love - let us grieve for the loss of land which is the loss of lineage and of language - sense it in our bodies, centuries deep. Let us exalt love: the force that fuels our resistance, that returns us to land, lineage and language.
Let’s be cleansed and emboldened by an intergenerational song of life, of revolution as a love language

Join here, at The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember for this meditation 

let’s read our bodies which have been written by history 

let’s sit in deep listening and write/riot/rite together

Thanks to everyone who attended the launch of When Three Sevens Clash on Saturday. 📚

The launch featured a discussion between Boitumelo Tlhoaele, editor and contributor as well as music by .

The literary magazine's animating impulse was to celebrate the Zimbabwean musician Thomas Mapfumo but it morphed into another beast. It features non-fiction, photography and comic art. The project drew from several generations of artists.

Thanks to for the images!

When Three Sevens Clash will be available to read in the Library.

Join us this Saturday (25 February 2023) for the launch of When Three Sevens Clash!

When Three Sevens Clash is a literary magazine whose animating impulse was to celebrate the Zimbabwean musician Thomas Mapfumo but which morphed into another beast.

Featuring non-fiction, photography, and comic art, the project drew several generations of artists. The oldest, the Zimbabwean poet and retired teacher Musaemura Zimunya (City Lights and Country Dawns, Thought Tracks, And Now the Poets Speak), was born in 1949, while the youngest, the Zimbabwean doctoral student at Oxford Rutendo Chabikwa, was born in 1994.

Contributors include the novelist Brian Chikwava (Harare North), Durban photographer Rafs Mayet, Zimbabwean cartoonist Tony Namate, writer Farai Mudzingwa, Stanford doctoral candidate Geraldine Mukumbi, Cape Town journalist Atiyyah Khan, Bulawayo photojournalist Kb Mpofu, American historian Brooks Marmon,and Russian-born South African illustrator, Anastaysa Eliseeva.

We discussion starts at 2pm 🙏🏾

Library Talks 🎙️

In our last Library Talks session of 2022, host and guests and talked about all things love.

Titled after bell hooks' book, All About Love, the panel and audience joined in on a lively discussion about masculinity, creativity, activism and teaching practice.

Thanks to everyone who attended. Our 2023 round of talks will be announced in due course. 🙏🏾

FLIGHT - the publication ✨

📸 .spinach

Setting up the Library Of Things We Forgot to Remember which is part of the exhibition FLIGHT at Malmö Konsthall curated by Tawanda Appiah.

FLIGHT 4.2 - 0.4.2023

.spinach

Yesterday we had an honour of being one of the hosting venues for .uj closed workshop of the Think from Black: a lexicon convening. Featuring a local cohort of 16 artists, thinkers, writers, curators, practitioners and members of the Practicing Refusal Collective.

Join RGC in-person at the Johannesburg Art Gallery NOW, (10:00-14:00) for
Think from Black: a Lexicon - a programme of art activations and poetry readings, featuring Nelisiwe Xaba, Christina Sharpe, Danai Mupotsa, Canisia Lubrin and Gabrielle Goliath.

Or visit the library, we are open until 4pm

We are open!

Thursday to Saturday
10am to 4pm

Thank you to all the librarians and everyone who attended our events this year, and engaged with the collection, and posted pictures of the space... We are appreciate your support. Take care and see you soon!

The library is open today until 4pm

#2023

Kudzanai Chiurai’s archival work, The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember will be part of the exhibition, FLIGHT, curated by Tawanda Appiah .spinach at Malmö Konsthall from 4 February - 9 April 2023.

Kudzanai Chiurai’s archival work, The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember will be part of the exhibition, FLIGHT, curated by .spinach

Open from 4 February to 9 April 2023

#6 “Four Days in May: Kingston 2010” Screening & conversation
Global Blackness Summer School ‘22 - Black Geographies, of Care

Saturday 17 December, 14:00 at the Library of things we forgot to remember

- - -

Join us for an intimate screening and conversation with Deborah A. Thomas, presented by the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC), University of Johannesburg. Following the screening, Prof Thomas will engage in conversation with RGC Director Prof Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, reflecting on questions of intimacy, access, geography and a Black feminist rethinking of witness. There will be music, drinks & light catering – please RSVP to: [email protected]



“Four Days in May: Kingston 2010” / 40 minutes (English, Jamaican Patois)

A collaboration between anthropologist and filmmaker Deborah A. Thomas, musician and composer Junior “Gabu” Wedderburn, and psychologist Deanne M. Bell, this experimental documentary explores the archives generated by state violence by focusing on the 2010 State of Emergency in West Kingston, Jamaica. In May of that year, the military and police force entered Tivoli Gardens and surrounding communities by force in order to apprehend Christopher “Dudus” Coke, who had been ordered for extradition to the United States to stand trial for gun and drug-related charges. This resulted in the deaths of at least 75 civilians. The film features community residents talking about what they experienced during the “incursion,” and naming and memorializing loved ones they lost. Through the use of archival film and photographs, footage from the U.S. drone that was overhead during the operation, and contemporary hyper-realist film photography of the “garrison” of Tivoli Gardens, it encourages viewers to think about how people negotiate the entanglements among nationalist governments, imperialist practices, and local articulations with illicit international trades. It also seeks to catalyze discussions about how we might envision modes of accountability, justice, and repair.


uj

On Friday, 25 November 2022, Unit 19 founder and creator, Tuliza Sindi, and Unit assistant Miliswa Ndziba, of the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) in Johannesburg, were honoured to have hosted acclaimed US author and humanities lecturer Tina Campt at Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai Chiurai’s The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember in Johannesburg. Their architecture collective, room19isaFactory. – whose other collective members include Thandeka Mnguni and Tuki Mbalo – are The Library’s current librarians, and their installation, Lounge(v), is on show there at present.

The collective’s installation forms a part of their mode of spatial practice, which they call Quiet Architecture, and the installation was used as a contextual prompt and framework through which to engage the role and nature of ‘quiet’ in architecture, as is informed and inspired by Campt’s definition of ‘quiet’ in her book, Listening to Images.

The conversation, entitled on Quiet Architecture, and which was an invite-only session that was co-hosted with Unit 19 critic and reviewer Anesu Chigariro, was structured around call-and-response prompts from three of the vocabulary terms offered in Chapter 2 of Listening to Images. Through intimate offerings by both Tina and audience members as responses to these prompts, a generous and generative space for thinking together through notions of ‘otherwise architectures’ was made possible.

Unit 19 is an architecture graduate research Unit at the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) in Johannesburg. The studio, called Unsettling Ground, approaches the primary pillars of modern state formation – religion, defense, law, media, administration, and economics – as frameworks of societal myths and mythmaking, and through them, investigates what mythological role(s) architecture fulfils as their material language.

Talks with

Session title “All About Love”

Friday 25 November from 6pm

Our guest speakers


Gcobani Qambela (PhD) is a multi-award-winning distinguished educator and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of
Johannesburg. He is the co-author, with Dr Warren Chalklen of the “Anti-Racist Teaching Practices and Learning Strategies” workbook. He’s working on two monographs focusing on “The Anthropology of Boyhoods” and the interior lives of men living in conditions of economic and structural violence. He teaches Childhoods and Youth, Anthropological Theories and Medical Anthropology.



Leon Sadiki documented and worked on stories in England during his two-year stay in the UK. Also covered the commemoration of the genocide in Rwanda, the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, blood-lead levels crisis in Zambia, Kenya, Malawi, Zanzibar, Mozambique, Lesotho, Botswana and
South Africa. His work is vastly published and exhibited in South Africa and abroad. He is the winner of the Standard Bank Sikuvile Journalism Award Story of the Year 2013 and CNN MultiChoice African Journalist Awards in the same year. Photojournalist of the year, Legends awards 2016, His Marikana picture “a man in a green blanket” has been exhibited around the world. The Marikana pictures were also published in his book, 'We Are Going Kill Each Other Today'-The Marikana story[tafelberg,2013]. He is also the co-author of Broke and Broke-The shameful legacy of Gold mining in South Africa [Jacana books, Blackbird, 2016]. In 2016 took part in an exchange program with Citizen TV in
Nairobi, Kenya, is one of the leading broadcasters in East Africa.

🎙️Talk sessions

With

‘All About Love’

When: Friday 25 November
Time: 6pm
Where: The Library of Things We Forgot to Remember

See you soon for this special year end session 2022

Library Talks hosted by

Topic: Redemption Songs
When: 28 October from 6pm
Where:

Meet our guest speakers!

Tinofireyi Zhou
Tinofireyi Zhou is a poet/musician whose multidisciplinary approach to creative expression is
informed by an array of (western, black diasporic and continental) insurgencies. Exploring
themes at the confluence of the personal/political, his broadcasts grapple with/in the
spectrum, layering beauty and dreaded, past and present, visual/s and sound alchemized into
melange. Also a sometime collector of obscure vinyl, Tinofireyi moonlights as a soundsystem
selectah, splicing together digital soundbites, field recordings and record crackle/s.

Keitu Gwangwa
Born in Botswana in 1980, the last of Jonas and Violet Gwangwa& #39;s children. With her parents being
active in the Liberation movement and exiled from South Africa, Keitu Gwangwa grew up on the
move, migrating from Botswana to England and to the Netherlands, her family members; scattered
around the globe for 15 years. In 1991, the family re-united in South Africa and gathering under one
roof for the 1st time. The journey in search of identity began and Keituletse found in the arts a
puissant tool of expression. She studied the Santa Monica Associate Theatre Arts Degree at Midrand
University and swiftly discovered her love for Arts Administration. She then studied and pursued
work in cultural entrepreneurship and Project management, working closely with her father on and
off stage. The birth of her son Leruo brought with it her calling to become a Sangoma. Keitu heeded
the call and was pulled into the ancient institution of African knowledge systems and philosophy,
this fundamentally shaped the foundation of her work today.


'stalks

Library Talks 🎤

28 October from 6pm

The next session is titled Redemption Songs. Our host and guests and will discuss struggle music in Africa.

Save the date!

Library Talks 🎤

28 October from 6pm

The next session is titled Redemption Songs. Our host and guests and will discuss struggle music in Africa.

Save the date!

Thomas Mapfumo and The Blacks Unlimited.

This was one of the late Prof Bhekizizwe Peterson’s favourite albums. Join us this Friday (September 30) at 6pm as we celebrate his life through music, memory and some selections from our archive. Our host is joined by co-host Moshibudi, a theorist and former student of Prof Peterson in the session.

Our talks are free and everyone is welcome to join. See you then. 👌🏾

Library talks 🎙

Joining our host in our special tribute to Prof Bhekizizwe Peterson this Friday is Moshibudi Motimele.

A former student of Prof Peterson, Shibu is a theorist, researcher, teacher, and writer currently completing a doctoral degree at the Wits University. Her work centres on questions of black intellectual histories, critical pedagogies, and emancipatory epistemologies. She is co-editor of this Agenda special issue on The Intimacies of Pandemics. Her forthcoming co-edited book is titled Wondering Hand(s) and Spirited Ink: Snapshots into the Black Public Humanities. She currently works as a lecturer in the Department of Political Studies and Governance at the University of the Free State.

Join us this Friday, 30 September at 6pm 🙏🏾