C& Book #2: Launch Event

In celebration of the C& book All that it holds. Tout ce qu’elle renferme. Tudo o que ela abarca. Todo lo que ella alberga, we are thrilled to invite you to an online event featuring an artistic intervention by The Jehovas and a conversation between artists Cholita Chic and Ethel-Ruth Tawe. Moderated and conceptualized by Russel Hlongwane in collaboration with C&, the event takes place on 27 March at 17h CET.

This second C& book is a continuation of various rich and dynamic strands of the ten-year conversation within the C& community – it is an artifact of art critique that reaches beyond canons, beyond singular narratives, refusing to rest on universal ideas.⁠ Thanks to our writers, and to cultural producers on the African continent and its global Diaspora, the book gathers a selection of texts that represent the whole spectrum of the C& Magazine and the C& América Latina Magazine archives. On 27 March, the artists’ conversation will circle around essential questions on living archives, as these issues are at the heart of C& and our invited guests encounter them daily.

Russel Hlongwane

Russel Hlongwane is a cultural producer based in Durban, South Africa. His work is preoccupied with the tensions in heritage, modernity, culture, and tradition as applied to Black life. It includes research, cultural production, design theory, writing, film, and curating. He is part of a number of working groups spread across the Southern African region, the continent more broadly, and internationally. He is currently pursuing a MPhil in southern urbanism at the African Centre for Cities (UCT).

Ethel-Ruth Tawe

Ethel-Ruth Tawe (b. Yaoundé, Cameroon) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and creative researcher exploring memory in Africa and its Diaspora. Image-making, storytelling, and time-travelling compose the framework of her inquiry. From collage to moving image, often from a speculative lens, Ethel examines space- and time-based technologies.

Cholita Chic

An anonymous photographer, designer, and visual artist who is a member of Cholita Chic. This person lives and works from the tripartite border between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. Their work largely develops through the collective imaginary represented by the collective Cholita Chic, which disseminates dialogues to review the place of the Aymara woman. Using various audiovisual, artistic, and photographic resources, the artist studies the contingency of Chilean-Bolivian-Peruvian relations, and how they impact infinite topics related to gender and feminism.

The Jehovas

The Jehovas are an electronic duo from Nairobi. Their music is ancient forest lore, a sonic ritual to rekindle multispecies communication and evoke more-than-human joy. The duo, V for 5 (she/her) and Gek0 (she/they), are multidisciplinary artists who met while attending Santuri Electronic Music Academy in 2022. Their work so far as The Jehovas has included the release of their singles “Dream One” and “Breath of Fire,” the latter with a music video developed as part of their involvement in the Postnatural Independent Programme in 2023. Alongside working on their debut album Love Created Death, The Jehovas host a pirate radio station called the[R.V.E.R]. Embedded with fantasy and science fiction, the[R.V.E.R] brings its listeners into a sonic world where frequency eaters chomp up radio waves, giving abrupt endings to transmissions. Recently The Jehovas took part in the Kilele Summit, where they curated a sound installation of the[R.V.E.R]’s broadcasts so far. This was accompanied by a zine on frequency eaters.

Join our event on 27 March 2024 at 17h CET via this Teams link.

We look forward to seeing you soon.