MIKE MAVURA looks at the 2025 theme for the Stellenbosch Triennale and considers the fundamental quality of breath and the shared experience of breathing – and how the arts are breath to the community.
THE STELLENBOSCH TRIENNALE officially launched its 2025 theme ‘BA’ZINZILE: A Rehearsal for Breathing’ at the Rupert Museum on 29 August. Inspired by the Global South and its richly diverse creative improvisations to sustain life and imagination, the 2025 Triennale will use Stellenbosch as a rehearsal space for new ideas, where every breath becomes an act of defiance and creativity.
BA’ZINZILE and breath are the conceptual tools and compass for ideating the Triennale 2025. In thinking about the theme, the event’s chief curator, Khanyisile Mbongwa, looked to the traditions of the Nguni people of southern and East Africa, who invoke zinza, a philosophy that commends being grounded and advocates calmness as a mechanism for survival and imagination in the face of adversity. Breath, on the other hand, is invisible yet always present and vital for living beings. As Khanyisile, who is also a sociologist, points out, “In a world losing its breath, where breathlessness pervades, we witness the tremors in our bodies and the depths we must dive [to] to sustain life through the histories of slavery, colonialism, apartheid and ongoing struggles.”
The Triennale will explore breath and the processes of breathing through states of duress, emphasising improvisation as a means of survival. It will present a myriad of creative endeavours as a rehearsal that puts ideas into concrete form and sparks imagination for the world we want to see. Invited artists, mainly from the Global South, are being challenged to come to Stellenbosch and create works using materials found in and around the town.
For the duration of the Triennale, Stellenbosch will serve as a home, a studio and an exhibition space for the invited artists, who will present a diverse range of art forms: from sculpture, paintings and installations with plant life, to paintings, photography, dance and performance. The works to be presented will look to involve all the senses, providing a holistic experience that challenges and delights.
The Triennale will weave a thread across venues in the town that will have thematically linked exhibitions. It triangulates in the timeline between past, present and future with three major exhibitions that sit in each timeline. The Oude Libertas precinct will be activated by two major exhibitions, firstly ‘In the Current’, which focuses on artists with established practices in the present, the likes of Torkwase Dyson (USA), William Miko (Zambia), Thierry Oussou (Benin) and Aline Mota (Brazil). ‘On the Cusp’, at the same venue, will reveal the dazzling creative talents of tomorrow, such as Astrid González (Colombia–Chile), Kasangati Godelive Kabena (Democratic Republic of Congo), Nandele Muguni (Mozambique), Simphiwe Buthelezi (South Africa) and Helen Zeru (Ethiopia). These are exciting young artists who have pushed their creative boundaries and whose aesthetic, conceptual, critical, material choice, form and installation methods have brought them to the cusp between beauty and magic.
The ‘From the Vault’ section of the Triennale looks specifically at bringing to the public collections of art from the past that form part of individual, institutional or corporate collections. The idea here is to collaborate with the institutions that hold these collections and to present them to the public through a fresh and insightful curatorial lens.
For the Stellenbosch Triennale 2025, the ‘From the Vault’ exhibition will present the Stellenbosch University Museum’s anthropology collection in conversation with the Rupert Museum collection at the respective venues. The anthropology collection is especially fascinating, being framed in the past and made up of objects from various regions of Africa collected in ways and means that remain obscure. The exhibition reflects southern African peoples, including the Nguni, Sotho, Venda, Shona and Kavango, and also contains objects and displays that represent West African cultures.
With this collection, it seems the ‘From the Vault’ exhibition poses a pertinent dialectic question around time: are we mainly interested in what the objects meant in their historical context, or is the allure in thinking of what these objects mean for us now, what their designs mean and how they inspire us now and into the future? To help unpack some of these questions, contemporary makers who produce work with their hands, who work with earth materials like clay and beads, have been invited to be part of the exhibition. The idea here is to have work by artists like Sisonke Papu and Andile Dyalvane in dialogue with the collections’ objects from the past in an attempt to probe relational aesthetics or narratives between the historical objects and the way these artists are making objects in the present and for the future.
As curators, we have been looking at traditions that emancipate, that push breath to its limit for catharsis. They’re like the blue note in jazz. We both love John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’, but other musicians like Dollar Brand/Abdullah Ibrahim, Alice Coltrane, Herbie Tsoaeli and Nina Simone also come to mind.
Jazz was born from ancient traditions of wailing and histories of catastrophe. It is a black tradition of improvisation that speaks to the ability to adapt and play something new ‘in the moment’. It blows a sound of dissonance, of defiance, of wrestling with darkness, but always sustains a sense of endurance, stamina and determination for others. Jazz embodies compositions of how to breathe in breathlessness.
And in the spirit of improvisation and producing knowledge, the Triennale will present a ‘Community of Practice’ programme that looks to upend the traditional format of a talks programme. It will present a distinctive knowledge-producing and knowledge-sharing constellation that features a range of art industry leaders from here and abroad, as well as an exclusive film premiere.
Another exciting and very important programme of the Triennale is ‘The Space to Breathe’ education programme, an initiative that has been designed to explore the ways in which arts and the creative process can empower youth. In the 10-week programme, 30 Grade 8 to Grade 10 learners from disadvantaged and under-resourced schools in the Stellenbosch area will be invited to take part on Fridays after school, with the intention of increasing their capacity to learn by creating an environment where they are able to explore, create and play. We believe that the best learning occurs through experience and interaction with the environment. The programme will engage the learners in all the art forms – visual arts, music, dance and drama – and they will be invited to interact with different sites where the exhibition will be taking place. In South Africa, where the reality is that trauma is often the ‘norm’ in children’s lives, art provides a non-threatening medium that children can use to work through difficult challenges. A large component of this programme will therefore be the healing nature of arts and using them as a way to address the hidden psycho-social barriers to education.
As a non-commercial, free-of-charge event, the Triennale gives the nod to the democratisation of access to art. The arts, and by extension the Triennale, represent one of the few areas where people can come together, even if they see the world in radically different ways. The important thing to remind ourselves is not that we agree about the experience that we share, but that we consider it worthwhile sharing an experience at all. In the sharing, art creates avenues for dialogue – and for breath to circulate. V