Published by the government of Zimbabwe
Celia Winter Irving
28 January 2008
Harare — CRAMMED into a kombi with stretchers, paintings and canvas, personal and social space at a premium or not at all, five Zimbabwean artists leave for a three-week workshop in Maputo, Mozambique.
Moving backwards and forwards in time, removed from the cushioning and comfort of their families and artists communities, space travelling through ink black darkness, their minds are roaming.
They cannot see where they are going, they do not know the place they are going to. If they could see there would be dilapidated signposts with the names of places where far back, people might have been eaten and not come back, today --- simply place names, spaces deserted without human habitation.
In the early morning they will wipe the stuff and the stuff of sleep from their eyes, listen to the sounds of their creaking bones as they start moving around, repositioning the stretchers, frames, canvas and themselves in the kombi and hit the day.
The sense of smell is heightened when a person cannot see so they would sniff the smell of the sea welcoming them to Vilanculos, their one nightstand on the way to Maputo.
What will Mozambique mean to these artists? Will it be a scarred place, a place of healing wounds? Will it be the country of painter Malangatana Valente who like Picasso in Guernica depicts the innards of war, in the case of Malanganta the fat cats cigar smoking, dangling girls on knees and ordinary people, all bones for faces and deep pools for eyes?
Will it be a beach-strewn country where seafood is the staple diet and wine flows like water? Will it be a country where they as artists occupy a far different space from the space allowed to them in the remote rural areas or the high density suburbs of Harare?
There may not be the noises of chickens scratching on the ground, the high pitched neutered sounds of the Nyau, the sounds of mothers screaming at their kids over the back fence of the house next door.
There will be familiar sounds of hammers and adzes burrowing their way into stones and grinders and the sharp pitched sound of the welding rod touching the metal.
If they leave the workshop to scavenge for materials there may be the sound of feet scrunching on sand as they search the beaches for what the sea has thrown up on the shore.
And working with children there may be the squeals of delight of kids messing around with paint and all the time there will be the lilting lisping sound of spoken Portuguese.
What will this workshop organised by Moveart bring to these artists? For some there will be collaborations with other artists without the need for shared languages and backgrounds, for others new stones, for others "contacts" and new opportunities and a sense of being artists from the Southern Region of Africa as well as being Zimbabwean.
For others it will bring about a broadening of mind and spirit in a country where faith is paraded in processions and prayer is the order of each day of the week as well as Sunday.
So for Shadreck Chitima, Stephen Garanánga, Collin Nyarumbwe, Issa Sims and Osian, three weeks will give them the experience of being a truly African artist, at one with their colleagues from South Africa and Mozambique, a redrawing of the map, a new sense of territory and a pride of continent as well as country.
The art they make will reflect this new sense of identity, be a response to new surroundings and the air they are breathing.
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