We are starting here, from the place that has seen us bloom and perish. We start in the South, the corner, and from here we will expand. We start here with and without, displaced and disposed – we look towards the horizon and we see Tomorrow There Will Be More Of Us.

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As direct extensions of history, we are remembering – through the ancestral awakening – that exhumes the ancient on a global level. We experience our imagination as a sharpened tool in our state of becoming. Our grandmother’s technology becomes the compass.

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So, in the newness of things, we acknowledge Africans as the first modernist through the Transatlantic Slave Route. It is here we imagine. As borders are tightening, deep migration lines etch the Mediterranean – some will mark the sea with their bodies, some will arrive as immigrant amongst other things.

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In the litany of survival, being here is not a theoretical problem but an everyday lived experience. Artists and curators use the creative space as their weapon and arsenal to change what must be our common future.

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The remembering, is the act of tracing memory. The ancestral, is the act of cultural recovery, the inheritance and familial. The spiritual, is the act of connecting and positioning of oneself through soulful alignment. The imagination, is the act of forming new ideas and concepts not present to the senses. The becoming, is the act of enabling radicalized desire thus creating new individuations and affections.

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And as Gloria Anzaldía reminds us, “nothing happens in the real world unless it happens in the image of our heads”.

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Conceptual theme for Stellenbosch Triennale 2020

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Chief Curator: Khanyisile Mbongwa