Invitation to the Defense of Masimba Hwati

The Examination Panel is made up of: Janine Jembere (chair), Anette Baldauf and Renate Lorenz (supervisors), and Brandon LaBelle (external appraiser, Berlin University of the Arts).

Abstract

In Shona philosophy sound is the progenitor of knowing. “Can you hear the salt ?” is a common inquiry at most dinner tables as it opens up a multi-sensory dimension where synesthetic slippage is commonplace. Constituting part of this multi-sensory dimension is the black-market an illegal foreign currency street market that becomes a microcosm of a post-colonial nation state where sonic facts, fictions and ancestral-vibrational ontologies collide. Here the politics of listening reveal tectonic and vibrational shifts that exposes how developing countries are residual and satellite battle grounds of cold war economics and polisonitics and also how they resist and negotiate this status at sonic and micro levels. Sonic territorial marking is explored here as a state-crafting science as earwitnessed in the politics and poetics of struggle. The spiritual, political and ecological sonic science of Pungwe in Mapostori theology reveals intersections between necropolitical state-crafting practices and state-sanctioned theologies. It is at these intersections that deep struggles become audible in what I call here ‘acoustic shadows’. I introduce the idea of ‘acoustic shadows’ to frame places where conventional language malfunctions and we begin to rely on other sonic registers that are besides language. It is in these ‘shadows’ where we sense the militant performativity and impact of registers like the onomatopoeia in Toyi-toyi and in war discography as it plays out on the national affective sensorium. Here we also discover other sonic registers which are herein referred to as Sahwiras of words. One becomes an ear-witness to the sonic architecture of a struggle by listening to the city via made-in-china megaphones used by vendors of herbs, aphrodisiacs and homemade pesticides and to the sound of music pirates. Somewhere in this sonic soup one adapts a translocative ‘listening-in’ with living and non-living others, creating an ethics of ‘listening-in’ upon an ancestral continuum. 

Short biography

Hwati works internationally in sculpture, sound, performance, and video. His MFA is from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and is a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts-Vienna. A 2019 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture graduate. He studied sculpture at the Harare Polytechnic school in Harare. Museum collections include The Philharmonie de Paris, Darlene M. Perez Art Collection- Miami, Florida, University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), Iziko-South African National Gallery. George R. Nnamdi - Detroit Michigan, Scott White Contemporary - San Diego, Leridon & Gervanne, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Manchester Contemporary. Blackburn UK hosted the . During the 56th Venice Biennale, he exhibited at the Zimbabwean Pavilion. In Grahamstown, South Africa, he is an honorary research fellow at Rhodes University. Special projects and solo shows include London, Lagos, Belgium, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Berlin, Weimar, USA, France, and Nova Scotia, Halifax Canada, Blackburn, Manchester, South Carolina, Brussels, Belgium, Nottingham, Berlin, Texas El Paso, Ann Arbor Michigan, British Textile Biennale 2021. Books include Der Seeteufel: And Other Alien Species in the Mysteriously Dark Labyrinths of the Danube-2022- Sokunge (As if)- (2021). Currently, Hwati is working on another book, Chidzimbahwe sonic philosophies. Albums include: Hwati Collino LP, Lakenights 2019, under Alien Passengers Soil, Root Leaf 2025 under Collapsing Drums.

The thesis defense will be in English and will take place at the Academy at Schillerplatz, Turm 2, room DG06.

We are looking forward to welcoming you.