In this online conversation Belgium-based artist Kopano Maroga will lead a conversation about the performative possibilities within the concepts of biomythography, critical fabulations and disidentification. They will hold court with South African artist, poet and writer Maneo Mohale and Brazilian born and Belgian residing author and maker Carolina Maciel de Franca to engage in an enlivening conversation about these three powerful creators' work and practice.

Biomythography, first coined by US writer Audre Lorde, is an autobiographical practice that seeks to unshackle our stories from the confines of factual literality. Saidiya Hartman, a US writer and scholar, created the idea of critical fabulations to speak about her practice of going into and between the archival record to uplift the voices of marginalized and enslaved people. Jose Esteban Muńoz’s (US scholar) disidentification explores the ways outsider artists negotiate new relationships to mainstream culture and its objects. In this talk these three artists and thinkers will weave an examination of how these three cultural tools function in their own work as well as larger performance contexts both here in northern Europe and South Africa.

Bio:
Kopano Maroga (they/them) is a South African performance artist, writer and cultural worker. They are currently living in Brussels, Belgium and working as a curator and guest-dramaturge at Kunstencentrum Vooruit in Ghent, Belgium. Their debut anthology of poetry, Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations, was released through uHlanga press in December of 2020. They very much believe in the power of love as a weapon of mass construction.

Maneo Refiloe Mohale is a South African editor, feminist writer and poet. Their work has appeared in various local and international publications, including Jalada, Prufrock, The Beautiful Project, The Mail & Guardian, spectrum.za, and others. They’ve served as a contributing editor for The New York Times and i-D, among others.They were Bitch Media’s first Global Feminism Writing Fellow in their inaugural 2016 class, where they wrote on race, media, sexuality and survivorship. They have been long-listed twice for the Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Anthology Award, and their debut collection of poetry, Everything is a Deathly Flower was published with uHlanga press in September 2019. The book was shortlisted for the Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize, later winning the 2020 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry.

Carolina Maciel de França (1986) is an author, consultant and maker. She graduated as a literary translator (EN-NL-PT) and has since worked as an intercultural activist, cultural project leader, critic, dramatist and moderator. She completed the LinC Lage Landen leadership program in 2018 and started her own artistic practice. In the same year she won one of the young makers prizes of HETNIEUWSTEDdelijk for the start of The Hero's Journey of Anastácia and in 2019 (together with writer Sascha Reunes and actresses Deniz Polatoglu and Ikram Aoulad) she won the Cross Over Pitch prize VAF/TAZ/Literatuur Vlaanderen for the future development of a series. In 2020 she made her debut with the short story (AGATHA) in the literary collection AFROLIT(sam. Ebissé Rouw and Dalilla Hermans.) This year she wrote and worked for, among others, BRAINWASH TALKS (Human vzw, NPO), Flemish-Dutch House DeBuren, Ecopolis, District Borgerhout, Rataplan, Beursschouwburg, NTGent, Kunstenpunt and stage magazine ETCETERA .