Mchokore Pweza Binadamu Hutamweza, 2022

A suite of new works and works-in-progress in a variety of media, mapping across time and across histories, in creative pursuit of revised connections to place.

Pursuit: Exhibition. A visual art exhibition of new works by advanced graduate students in poetry, architecture, and fine art. Curated by Cherry company member and National Book Award Finalist Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon.

Mchokore Pweza Binadamu Hutamweza, 2022 (IN PROCESS) is a sculptural piece of Kondo’s study in listening to the unsayable through taarab music, Swahili poetry during German colonialism in East Africa and Audre Lorde’s philosophy of the Marvelous Arithmetic of Distance – as a way to process the shifting actualities that arise in the study that occurs in another time and place.

The Leso is known as a fabric that speaks the unsayable (that can not be said verbally) similar to the taarab music of Siti Binti Saad, Bi Kidude, Sitara Bute and others. It communicates otherwise. It is a textile of text, that fabricates stemming from fabrica to skillfully produce a truth, message, or realisation that resides in the Jina (name) of the fabric. However, not all messages are to be understood by everyone and not all names are for every mouth. This sculpture is laid out as a place of trade, in the tradition of women vegetable sellers in the Kongowea market. The marketplace is a space of arithmetics and a place of calculating, for instance, calculating the difference that is handed back in change. In thinking about this arithmetic of difference Kondo thinks with Audre Lorde’s Marvelous Arithmetic of Distance (1993). What is seen in the distance from Mombasa the royal city of Mwana Mkisi as proclaimed by the poet Muyaka, that is in the Leso placed here? 

The Leso in this space is similarly but differently like the poet Hamedi bin Abdallah casts spells and prayers --Hamedi against the German colonialists in 1891, the Leso here in the shifting actualities created by distance.