MADEYOULOOK

ON REVERB AND RETURN: VOICE AS WORLDMAKING

CHAIR
Laura Bohnenblust

This lecture performance explores voice as both echo and origin, how sound reverberates through time while enabling return to invisibilised knowledges and prefiguring futures yet imagined. Drawing from our artistic practice with South African oral histories – as sound, story, and song – we examine voice’s capacity to create new worlds through the radical potential of multi-vocality against singular meta-narratives.

When sight fails us, when conventional histories leave gaps, voice becomes a navigatory instrument toward knowledge. Like mabarebare – the practice of searching through collected fragments – oral histories teach us that knowledge emerges through dialogue, through the interplay of multiple voices rather than singular authority. But whose voice teaches? Whose stories fill the archival silences?

Our work reveals voice’s expansive potential to inhabit spaces of emptiness – not with the solid and fixed but with open exploratoration. In worlds of uncertainty, where we cannot see our destination, voice becomes more radical precisely because it refuses the certainty of vision. It searches in the mist, creating pathways where none previously existed.

In conversation with South African oral traditions, we argue that voice’s radical potential lies also in its capacity to teach through relationship and to make knowledge collectively. Against the violence of singular historical accounts, multi-vocality is relational, created only in the coming together of people and the more-than-human.

Through sound clips from Dinokana, Mafolofolo and the non-monuments programme, this lecture proposes voice as myth-making apparatus, carrying the weight of memory while also creating futures – it archives and dreams simultaneously.

MADEYOULOOK is a Johannesburg based interdisciplinary artist duo between Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho, operating since 2009. The works of MADEYOULOOK take as their point of departure everyday black practices that have either been historically overlooked or deemed inconsequential. These works encourage a re-observation of and defamiliarisation with the everyday of black South African life. MADEYOULOOK have exhibited, published, and hosted programmes in various forms. They were nominated for the Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics at the New School, New York, in 2017, and the MTN New Contemporaries Award in 2012. They were Fellows of the DAAD Berlin artist programme 2022, documenta fifteen Lumbung Artists and sole artists of the South African pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale.

Laura Bohnenblust (she/her) is an art historian and university assistant at the Chair for Cultural Heritage Studies at the University of Vienna. Her work focuses on modern and contemporary art and exhibition history. Her research interests include intangible cultural heritage, songs in visual arts, and processes of (art) historiography. Laura studied art history in Bern and Buenos Aires, as well as German literature in Bern. She conducted research in Argentina as part of her dissertation project and completed her doctorate at the University of Bern on the global exhibition history of the 20th century.