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A new collective brewing in Hillbrow is getting a fresh kind of art conversation going. Garreth van Niekerk speaks to Lindiwe Matshikiza and some of the other JHB Massive members
I find Lindiwe Matshikiza on the steps outside Hillbrow Theatre – a famous actress without a stitch of make-up on her face, smoking a cigarette and wearing tie-dyed harem pants. For a second, I nearly mistake her for a first-year arts student. But look closer, her crown of hazelnut curls briefly lit by a reflecting panel above us, and you’re transported to those images you’ve seen of her looking glamorous on screen and the red carpet.
She smiles and waves me over and, with a quick cheek kiss, steers me towards the theatre where she’s taken a break from rehearsals for her current stage show to talk to #Trending.
“I think it was built around the same time as the Alex Theatre,” she tells me as we walk around the main theatre of the building where her late father – playwright, author and poet John Matshikiza – performed his famous Julius Caesar, among other works, during apartheid.
The theatre is where she grew up. She is as much a part of it as the red-velvet chair she’s leaning on while calling down to the crew, who yell back “Sanibonani” in unison. She giggles at them under the house lights with a confident yet pensive charm that’s so unique to her I can’t help but think back to the last time I saw her smiling like that, nearly two years ago now, during the heady release of Long Walk to Freedom. She played a tender Zindzi Mandela, the on-screen daughter of Madiba, played by Idris Elba. That performance established her as a serious actress.
I want to talk about that, but she’s on a mission and won’t let me dawdle in the past. I told her on the phone that we wanted to profile her career for Women’s Day, but she wasn’t having it.
“I’d like the interview to focus on JHB Massive at Chale Wote,” she said. “I’ll tell some of the others to be there.”
With no time to waste, we head out into the sun, where two of the 16 JHB Massive crew members are waiting. On the way, I see a hand-painted sign above the ticket desk. “Trust the process,” it reads, a line from a show she wrote, directed and starred in called Donkey Child. I take note and proceed.
WHAT IS THE COLLECTIVE?
“JHB Massive is a temporary collective of independent artists who do, I suppose, a range of what I think are interesting kinds of work that often involve community and history and language, and being engaged with the present and what it means to be South African, human or whatever.”
We sit in a circle on the floor of a studio at the shiny Outreach Foundation Community Centre that opened earlier this year. We’ve had to take off our shoes for the sake of the beautiful springboard floors. Matshikiza is flanked by performance artist, gender activist and documentary maker Dean Hutton, who’s lying on his stomach on the one side, and Pule Welch, the infamous linguist, comedian, and TV and radio presenter, on the other.
JHB Massive is performance artist Vishanthi Kali; sound artist João Orecchia; theatre designer Noluthando Lobese; guerilla radio group Mushroom Hour Half-Hour (Andrew Curnow and Nhlanhla Mngadi); Mpumelelo Mcata and Tshepang Ramoba from the band BLK JKS; curator Lavendhri Arumugam; arm wrestling performance artist Anthea Moys; puppeteer and performance artist Naomi van Niekerk; frontman of genre-bending band The Brother Moves On Siyabonga Mthembu; and multimedia graffiti artist Breeze Yoko.
They’ve come together to get to Chale Wote, a major street-art festival taking place on the weekend of August 22-23 in Accra, Ghana. Their efforts started out on crowdfunding site Thundafund by exchanging photoshoots and original works of art for financial support. Private funding groups have sponsored eight plane tickets, which will help some of them to get there, but others might need to participate online.
Hutton tells me: “Typically, as artists we get invited or push to go to a lot of European festivals, but I think we really need to start focusing on working within our continent. But it’s also just a really exciting festival. It’s huge.”
Adds Matshikiza: “One of the requirements for the festival is that participants arrive early to collaborate with other artists who are there, allowing people to create together on the continent, which really fits with what we all do.”
Says Welch: “It’s what is now – the future of collectives. It’s really what the future of art is, I think. It’s something we still need to work out by asking how you actually ‘do’ a collective.”
Their questions have gone from funding, to structures, to how they present the ideas of a group of brilliant young experimentalists. Their work is unified by the idea that “we all share a common purpose and that’s to make artwork that extends beyond the aesthetic”, explains Hutton. “That connects to the community. I think we’re all pushed to create public work more than anything else, but for me I want to see a space where creative workers are making things that are bettering our own community with a definite sense of politics.”
Yet after a passionate conversation about art, love and life, I still can’t really connect with the project. They have been purposely vague up to now, so I ask: “What exactly will JHB Massive be doing at Chale Wote?”
The question echoes around the white studio like a gunshot.
Welch is looking at me as though I just asked if he lives in Fourways. His lips are drawn back, teeth revealed, eyes stretched wide under the brim of his bucket hat. Matshikiza and Hutton are silent too.
Finally, with all the effort Welch can muster, he says: “It’s like a muti pot. You throw the different things in, and then ... poof.” He demonstrates a gesture like smoke rising.
Hutton adds: “It’s good to be confused about the experience.” He says the JHB Massive idea will offer art that is about “the joy of adding something to public space”.
“People are not drones walking from place to place, and if we can inject imagination, joy, a breath of freshness that brings a bit of creativity into another person’s day ... well, then I don’t know how people will live without it after that.”
Contribute to JHB Massive at thundafund.com, and follow the journey on Twitter as they take over the streets of Accra
