Archives and Refusal

This presentation is an experiment that explores the visual frequencies of refusal and border-being, and the performance of state and intimate archiving practices. Following from the works of Tina Campt, this presentation engages with one of Julius’ archiving projects: Proclamation 73 — an exhibition project in collaboration with Dr Chandra Frank, which explores the family archives of people racialized as coloured and Indian in Durban, South Africa under the 1950 Group Areas Act. Here, Julius asks how one might employ all the senses when working with archives, and consider the ways the nation state might be implicated in the politics of race and place through 'the archive'.

Zara Julius is a social practice artist, cultural researcher and vinyl selector based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is also the founder of Pan-African creative research and cultural production agency, KONJO. She has an Honors in Social Anthropology from the University of Cape Town, and a MAFA in Fine Art from the University of the Witwaterstrand. Her work is concerned with the relationship between aesthetics, frequency, fugitivity and rapture across the African continent and the African diaspora in the ‘global south’. Through sound, video, performance and object-based installation, her practice involves the collection, selection, creation and performance of archives (both real and imagined). The bulk of Zara’s projects have focused on the performance of sonic and spiritual mobilities of rapture and socio-political rupture with congregants of syncretic religious and spiritual practice, and on (post)apartheid narratives around race and place as they pertain to intimate archiving practices as sites of refusal.