Gabrielle GoliathElegy, 2024
Elegy is an ongoing labour of remembrance, repair and black feminist love. Initiated in 2015, the work has been staged in locations from Johannesburg to São Paulo, Paris, Basel, Munich and Amsterdam. Each performance gathers a group of seven opera singers who collectively enact a ritual of mourning, sustaining a single haunting tone over the course of an hour. Invoked in this gesture are the absent presences of women and LGBTQIA+ individuals lost to a normative crisis of rape culture and femicide in South Africa and globally.
With each performance a eulogistic text is shared, scripted by a family member or friend of the individual commemorated. In more historical cases of colonial and slaveocratic violence (against women and feminised bodies), speculative texts by collaborating scholars reach across generations, geographies and archival erasures, recalling these losses and accounting for a present of anti-black, anti-femme violence.
Refusing spectacle and the objectification of bodies deemed rapeable and killable, Elegy asserts conditions of hope and avowal: of black, brown, femme and queer life as loveable and grieveable. For those immersed in its sonic vigil, it offers a space for shared grief and radical refusal - for the urgent, ongoing life-work of mourning.
A series of ten documented Elegy performances are shown in this immersive video and sound installation, commemorating: Camron Britz, Hannah Cornelius, Eunice Ntombifuthi Dube, Kagiso Maema, Lerato ‘Tambai’ Moloi, Sizakele Sigasa & Salome Masooa, Noluvo Swelindawo, Joan Thabeng, Louisa van de Caab, and Cornelia van Piloane.
