In conversation with Kudzanai Chiurai about his film We Live In Silence and its UK debut at Goodman Gallery

Helen Jennings: How has We Live in Silence evolved both filmically and musically?
Kudzanai Chiurai: First I made three chapters that worked well together, and then started considering the entire process in terms of making a film that has a beginning but has no end. It is continually changing and could end up several hours long. I always try to find interesting spaces to show it – one time we closed down a street in Joburg and worked with Thandiswa Mazwai on the score. And earlier this year it was in an amphitheatre in Accra built by President Nkrumah, where we collaborated with M.anifest. In London we had BLK JKS play with some British horn musicians. Essentially it’s my underhanded way of starting a band I’d love to listen to! I put the musicians together and then let go so that they can create their own soundtrack.

HJ: What was it about Hondo’s Soleil O that struck you so intently?
KC: It was made at a time when so many African countries were gaining independence and it captures that moment brilliantly with some really dark humour. But what struck me as an omission is that there was not one black female character that one could consider a protagonist. I felt that it was important to address that creatively, which became the challenge.

I chose one female actor – the incredible Botshelo Motuba - to play all the lead parts and recreated some of the scenes from the film to see how the dialogue would feel if you change the face of the conversation. She’s an aristocratic, a capitalist and a black woman, so how do we see that within the politics of contemporary society? It speaks of migrants, the purpose of labour and to the fact that women have been the worst effected gender. Do we invent a new language or do we go back and look at the source problem?<\p>

HJ: Is ‘colonial futures’ your way of creating that new future, or a hard lesson in how history repeats itself?
KC: Colonial futures address the colony in itself. From my perspective, if we start to look at the process that led to independence, we’ll find that independence is a negotiated future. I find that problematic in the sense that you’re not looking to your future, you’re trying to synchronise your past to your present, so you continue the coloniality and therefore it is a colonial future. We need to start thinking about it differently so that we can consider where we go from here. Could there be a new vocabulary to talk about another future? And what does that mean?

HJ: A lot of artists work with afrofuturism in terms of creating a utopia, or a place where colonialism never happened, or has been erased. It’s a more positive, fantastical or science fictional realm than the one you are proposing.
KC: If you are still living in a colonial future, you can’t consider an afrofuture because you haven’t created a language outside of colonialism that allows you to have new gods, new religions, new practices, new rituals, new formations. Our great great grandparents were afrofuturists already. They named stars and constellations. They had temples that spoke to other dimensions; they were already time travellers. So what are we saying about our afrofuture? Now I’m creating the next chapters of the film that will start to examine those things.

HJ: You relocated back to Harare from Joburg four years ago. How has this affected your practice?
KC: I’d been in Joburg 13 years and had spent so much time looking at home from the outside that some misconceptions had become fact. So now I’m addressing those myths. For example, there’s this idea that Zimbabweans are very literate and educated but we’re not. We can read but we don’t necessarily understand what we’re reading, and that is reflected in our academic writing. Our politics aren’t based on forward thinking ideas. Conversely, I’m seeing South African ideas and politics from the outside, and what I see is vastly different to before, so now I’m trying to merge those experiences. Zimbabwe is far more complicated and nuanced than I thought, and South Africa isn’t so isolated as I thought. The entire region has now equalised; we’re essentially experiencing similar economic and politic turmoil so we’re levelling out in an interesting way.

HJ: Your solo show at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe opened two days before the November 2017 coup that finally ousted Mugabe. That must have been challenging!
KC: It’s was a show called We Need New Names being held in a state institution, so people were asking ‘What did you know?’ The press blanketed the show but people still wanted to go to because of its poignancy at that moment in time. For example, there was a lot of archive images in the exhibition from the 1980 independence celebrations and then the images that followed of the takeover were more or less the same. Side by side you wouldn’t think anything had changed. It was a surreal experience. People were so caught up in the euphoria of this new dawn, this second republic, and didn’t look at the detail.

Even now we haven’t properly processed what these events mean as a result of our history of internal and unresolved conflict. We haven’t created a space to ask what has happened in the past five years, or 30 years, in a way that is cathartic for most people. That is still to happen.

HJ: Zimbabwe’s emerging art scene is at least one zone where that catharsis can happen. Are you positive about how it is evolving?
KC: We don’t have a fine arts university programme, which is one of the reasons I went to South Africa to study. There is an informal school developed by the National Gallery, which is where many of the main artists went – Virginia Chihota, Portia Zvavahera, Wycliffe Mundopa – and because they’re not being taught form and function or art history, they don’t feel the pressure to follow prescribed rules. The diversity of materiality in their work is also very evident because a lot of them source their materials from auctions or junkyards. They are beginning to look at their creative process entirely differently and that’s what’s exciting.