Sonya Rademeyer

live drawing performance 

photo credit: Boitumelo Choene

 

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Weeping the World is a collaborative experimental live performance created by visual artist Sonya Rademeyer and poet Masai Sepuru in collaboration with composer Franco Prinsloo, for the 2022 Creative Research Lab hosted by the TUT Faculty of Arts and Design in collaboration with the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

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The 9 minute video piece 'What Shall I Cry?' explores notions of non-belonging and forceful separation and segregation to Land. Much needed questions arise as to who decides what or whom is deemed invasive through the metaphorical use of the weed Echium plantagineum. Botanical research clearly indicates the role of human-mediated colonisation and that the path of introduction of E. Plantagineum holds direct links to early colonisation. Such questions hope to evoke much needed debates particularly around land and acknowledgement of historical trauma from a white settler perspective.

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The work’s soundscape is created by Franco Prinsloo, utilizing short phrases recorded live by Vox Chamber Choir, reassembled, stacked and looped to create a shimmering, dense and immersive ocean of sound, whilst Masai Sepuru responds with a gut-wrenching embodied poetry performance.

 

The collaborative experimental live performance will be written up as an academic conversational article, to be published in the near future.