Blackness is Blooming was a symposium held at Zeitz Mocaa that delved into the complex experiences of exile and the aftermath of displacement as explored in the exhibition A Protea Is Not a Flower.
The symposium title quotes Don Mattera’s poem, Blackness Blooms, which he wrote while in solitary confinement. The last stanza reads:
Ah, black sunbeams fall on the slope
Bringing new light to fulfil my hope
Ever conscious of their sacred duty
Then sweet, sweetly my blackness blooms
And becomes my beauty
Framed as a gathering, the symposium centred poetry, speculative fiction, and a renewed imagination of Blackness as a lived experience, and was divided between two parts. The first session offered an intergenerational reflection of the exhibition facilitated by educators in the BMW Centre for Art Education. This was followed by a keynote address by Kea Mosienyane and conversation around exile, homemaking, and Bessie Head’s life and literature. The second session, facilitated by the CHR’s Lee Walters, included the video work Hema by Lerato Shadi and Robin Rhode’s short film Eulogy for the Non People – as well as a participatory reading group on South African Modernist artists and their labour. In this session, symposium attendees were invited to read texts by Mattera, N Chabani Manganyi, and a soon to be published book chapter by Walters, titled ‘Organic Feminism, Slow Affect and Women Cultural Workers in South Africa’.