drawing is still writing

I want to begin our session by sharing a reflection I wrote. It’s a debrief of notes about the book when I was reading it again. This debrief is also important for me to share because it helps to give a bit of context as well about my curiosity with drawing and how my inquiry into this medium continues to be moulded and expanded through a visual and a text-based form.

I want to highlight that throughout you will hear me use this word – compilation- a lot, because it’s a word that seems to reaffirm a habit that I have of collecting things and somehow, I enjoy knowing that these things that are accumulating can also be alternated, reused and changed. And, a lot of what is in this book is a collection of 1 of 1 drawing, thinking gaps, fragments of prose, descriptions, a poster and some maps. I have also developed a preference with the word inquiry over research. Particularly because an inquiry leaves a gap for uncertainty before certainty, trial and error and flexibility than the latter which for me feels more streamlined and stricter in its requirements.

As I sit with the copy of this book in my hand, I am taken back to the origin of my drawing practice, a period where I felt as if though my drawings were speculations. The last few weeks leading up to this moment, I have been reading my copy as if though I was engaging with it for the first time. My copy now looks exhausted and the corners are starting to bend in.  

As we prepare to get into this expanded idea of a reading and drawing session, I want us to be guided by the following prompts:

    “Draw from life

  Instantly and

   Immediately…”

Since interacting with this book, it has become a resource for when I forget to create an outline, a trace, or a highlight about things that matter in the moment.

It is an invitation that is about proposing an alternative format for engaging and making a drawing.

For me, the idea of drawing is about balancing a perspective of looking out, with looking in. it has become about locating the practice of drawing as a practice that could teach us how to be aware of oneself in relation to the spaces we are in when we are drawn to something – we are attracted to it or when we draw from it- which is to imply that it somehow influences us. When we draw – we take in. replenish.

I must warn you that a lot of how I am thinking about drawing is partly from a sentimental rhetoric, but I am one who does not mind because there’s something beautiful in being able to romanticise the things we desire and to document it on a piece of paper for assurance or a personal affirmation that the thing we want could be real or possible.

The journey of Drawing Is Still Writing comes from a place of wanting to create a book about this medium. This compilation is a kind of proposal towards an expanded imagination around how we speak, think, read and make drawings without discarding some of its traditional conventions and practices. For those who are new to my work, I am an artist and I am also a writer and I fuse both practices together in my work to create alternative worlds. The two become extensions of each other by mimicking this idea of filling in the gaps.

Another reason why it was important for me to make this book is because I was also interested in the ways of archiving a practice that I have been cultivating slowly in the last 5 years, even though I’d been pacing myself in the arts industry for a bit longer.

My inquiry into drawing is what roots my curiosity and imagination. It is a place holder for moments of vulnerability when words aren’t enough to express an intense feeling in the present moment. It has also rooted fragments of my own mark making language that is continuously growing.

Drawing is Still Writing is another format where layers of my doubts, curiosity, talking to myself, propositions and opinions – some that I have not always been confident to share - are contained within these pages. To ground the medium on a more inward note, the drawings in the book are attempts at being confident. They are visual articulations, a slowing down of a thought process and when it moves again rapidly. The drawings are not just conversations that I am having alone anymore, the textures draw me in as a reader to interact, retrace!  to follow a guiding line. To go back to the basics when I’m lost in the rabbit hole.

A Visual Choreography and a Visual reconfiguration. Restoration.

Drawing has guided me to reset, self-define and to self-actualise in no specific order as I gradually started to learn again how to find my way.

What’s come out of this inquiry is that “I am not interested in the performance of holding a pen, pencil or charcoal but I am more interested in the action that takes place when we observe, listen and translate.

I am interested in observations that happen inward and outwardly while we draw. My inquiry is merely an act of looking deeply to propose an alternative structure for cultivating new imaginations.

It is an instinctively tactile curriculum. Practice in Seeing differently. Listening with curiosity, feeling and responding. It is an attempt at humanising a practice. Pausing, again – while granting permission to finish a thought in a visual form. To affirm a creativity. To describe using a visual language.

By gathering together, today’s event is really an invitation into gathering differently together as I quote my publisher Francis Burger- and we will be drawing differently together as we facilitate this session.

As I conclude, I want to share a list of what drawing has taught me about learning to describe things with images.

1.     That it is an Illustration

2.     Its Clues

3.     Its A notebook

4.     An impression

5.     An unravelling of suppressed and compressed opinions and suggestions

6.     Its dada

7.     Its cryptic/coded

8.     Its unending

9.     It’s a guide

10.  Its reassurance

11.  An existential mapping about the everyday, how drawing was never separate from our daily routines. Whether you are signing something, or playing the lotto. It’s A text-based print of your parking ticket.

12.  They are affirmations of ideas and interactions

13.  Its textural

14.   The blank page is a space for defying expectations when one is being asked what is this about?

15.  It’s a practice into translating the thing that is being looked at without thinking too hard about it.

16.  It calls us to be present. to be more aware. To familiarise.

17.  We are outlining the detail and filling it in.

18.  It’s an imprint on that piece of wooden furniture. A mistake you may need to sand away.

19.  Drawing is about finding a way.

20.  It’s about Being present

Fin.

Draw

Introduction:

My name is Nyakallo Maleke. I am an artist, a writer and a cyclist from Johannesburg. My studio is based in Fordsburg, at the Bag Factory Artist Studios. I work across disciplines but my practice is specifically grounded in drawing, printmaking and installation. My work explores ideas that relate to migration and moving by way of mapping space, it is rooted in vulnerability even though it is embedded in a material language. My drawings are attentive to mark making. Drawing becomes a form of writing and writing becomes a form of drawing and fiction. 

I’ve prepared a reflexive text that is intended to guide me in how I articulate what the practice of drawing is for me. In contrast to this discussion, I want to share my perceptions with the collective with regards to how I am approaching my own work around this medium, how its definition goes beyond a 2 dimensional form of representation. In other words, my practice seeks to make sense of the same story through convention and in a manner that is palpable and wholly material.

Since the emergence of my drawing practice, I’ve realised that drawing becomes a practice for dialogue making, and for grappling tangibly with form, line, texture amongst detail – the principles and elements of design and drawing. Even though I work in an abstract form, my practice is not a rejection of the convention, but acknowledgement because these rules construct my compositions. Making in conversation with these principles allows me to significantly locate and to stay present not just with my sense of self and my imagination, but with hope, in the present and in the future.

I am interested in how the physical language of making a drawing, is a material centred conversation even though its final form relates to or becomes about a broader sense of thinking about mapping and place making in relation to myself. This talk/text is also about considering how the process for creating a drawing unfolds through space and time, through materiality, migration, and the vulnerable. 

I’ve chosen to ground my practice in drawing because I felt that we weren’t seeing enough drawings, but also I was thinking about this medium as a form of archiving one’s practice. Here, I mean that the practice of drawing is about archiving a pattern of how I process information, emotion, migration or place – all of this information (either personal or shared information) that I’d been internalising for some time. 

Having mentioned this, I would say that I understand drawing to be a form of referencing in a visual sense – engaging with mark making in a physical and in a literal way, but again, drawing is about truth telling – when we draw a portrait of someone, or a plan about a place, we are in essence representing a truth or something that likens the truth. Another example that I would like for us to consider, is if we think about the guideline that is used by dress makers, the pattern design which gives the hand an opportunity to retrace, and to imitate without an error. The pattern template trains the eye to not just observe but to outline, or cut out with precision and proportion in mind, in the same way that one would go about drawing from life or from still life. Although different in subjectivity, the intention behind the approach is to translate what is already templated. To practise repeatedly in the event that the hand does not forget. if we go back to the example of the pattern design, let’s say one is making a pair of pants, the hand cuts the draft for the right leg, and it repeats again a similar gesture of mark making on the left hand side.

But to not steer too far away from my practice, and the purpose of this talk – I just wanted to leave you with that thought and to layer it again by threading together the moments that take place in the drawings that I have produced in the last 5 years.

Slide# :3 – 6

Drawing has become a deep and personal way of working. The feelings and processes that I undergo to decode my reality is articulated through this medium. It triggers my ability to respond in the moment and to generate a reaction that is introspective. The final outcome of the work is a translation of that ongoing introspection and in a way this trajectory is continued currently.

Drawing is about the immediate. The now, and how important it is to desire joy, and to make it tangible. To desire peace and to make it tangible. To desire liberation and to make it tangible. Its triggered impulses and emotions, as well as an instinct because drawing is about being able to resonate in the moment. And through a very meticulous form of mark making, I am able to meditate on the feelings that I encounter on a daily basis. Mostly, drawing enables me to be present in moments that make me feel absent and to block out the noise when I start to feel like I am not myself. The works that echo this sentiment is in Shine your light (2020)- which is made up of amorphous figures that pan across the surface of the page, motioning from both ends as they tug at bold and abstract forms. Untitled (2020) – a kind of colour study, abstract and bold constructs a dramatic colour effect. Enclosed (2020)  refers to an enclosing form. and Deep Imagining: A mapping of collective desires (2023) a collection of manifestations, favourite things to do and evidence of experiments that have succeeded. The  drawings were made with cotton or metallic thread, pencil, oil pastel, charcoal and watercolour. When I started my drawings, it was important to go back to basics. Relearning the elements of design and its principles in order to construct an image. In a way this was an instruction – if we think about the Fluxus movement. This methodology grounded my point of departure for how I started to re-engage with this medium. I must also mention that all if not most of my drawings are produced on wax paper. Because of its vulnerability and its influence for how I developed my mark making language. What would begin as a kind of study would evolve into what we see now in front us. The way that I work is not in a stringent way. I’ve always worked in fluidly – by listening to the work and listening to the materials, the creases, the rhythms – in order to understand further what these instructions for drawing mean when we create.

Slide #7 – 8

Sometime in May, I participated in a residency at Transwerke, located at constitutional hill in Joburg. Our constitutional court is located onsite  at the outskirts of the city, and it is surrounded by an environment that is rapidly decaying. Infrastructure, human rights violations, basic service delivery needs etc, and I was invited by a young artist to participate in their project at the venue. The idea was to think about collaboration in relation to memory and I worked with Dudu Bloom More (paper discs), Mbali Mthethwa (beaded works) , Sibabalwe Ndlwana (naturally dyed tapestries) – whose works are seen and included in the space. And part of the process entailed a conversation which allowed me to get a sense of how we were all thinking about ourselves and our practices in relation to the city, if we still are interested in this idea of making work about the city  like our predecessors – which I can unanimously confirm that we weren’t. in different ways, we were creating, always and thinking about a particular place or space, but it never included Johannesburg. Instead, each work that was contributed in the space carried individual sentiments and influences that belonged to a history, a heritage and an intergenerational way of working, which has found its space in the contemporary. I resonated with all of the women’s work because of a shared imagination to want to build alternative spaces even when we’re changing and adjusting with the current. From that process, I realised that each of the contributions came from a gentleness and a deep love for their making, it is the idea of the organic, the flora and fauna of the natural enviroment that informs the process for how we establish our relationships to both, place and self, and nature and self. The results that you see consisted of an installation mural, works on paper and beaded works. 

Slide#: 9 - 14

I began to draw out of a need to develop an archive that documented a movement during 2017 and 2019. Some of these moments lead to questions around home, and rootedness. What does it mean to be uncomfortable, and how does one go about cultivating stability within the discomfort? A range of questions would be conjured and manifested in real time to make sense of the present. How does one go about realising home? How does one firmly place their feet on the ground in unfamiliar territory? What is the best way to mediate and make tangible, the desires that one might experience in the present with what one imagines to sustain for themselves in the future? And so this is how the work Code Switching Duologue emerged. It was a work that drew from multiple experiences that occurred within a geographical location. 

the medium of drawing does not exist only as a visual practice, it is textual. It needs to be read in unconventional approaches. The work needs to be read intuitively and with the body. Rooted in abstraction, my work is made up of shapes, textures and forms that are compiled together to generate a unity. Each work unearths fragments of a reality and fragments of an alternative world that is also fictional because I am interested in creating alternative spaces and worlds that could coexist with the present. When the noise gets too loud in the real world, I can escape and feel liberated elsewhere. Beyond communication and translation, my drawings become a guideline for worldmaking, and for being sentimental. Each mark that is being made is a statement, that is consolidated through line or a texture and materials. If drawings could speak back they really will echo, “Notice Me!”, “Recognise Me”, “Everything starts with me!”. Incidentally, I would come to terms with the possibility that drawing is capable of personifying. 

With code switching duologue, I was invested in the idea of code switching by translating a confusion, an anxiety, an doubt, a push back and a reclaiming and grounding of self through this 15 m installation. The work almost became a diary about my experiences in a different country and negotiating space for myself. In contrast to this, the drawing served as a notation for space, and the rhythms of intensity that resound in space.  I wanted to have a work that also allowed people to participate, or to walk with the work as a way of being a part of it. The work was shown as part of my post graduate project but it was also included in a group show titled Territories between us curated by Tshegofatso Mabaso, at IZIKO, a national museum in cape town.

Slide#: 15 - 19

The project: The Things we made for the things we did not know (2022 - 2023), is a work that I think starts to communicate this idea of the textual and only through participation from an audience, will the works reveal its meaning or lack thereof. The things we make for the things we did not know is a project that considers the idea of uncertainty, in full throttle. What does it mean to make work for something that isn’t too sure of its becoming? It is a project that uses trial and error as a method of approach, because its moulding and adjusting to the circumstances of space. The process of this work was working in situ at the Javett Art centre UP, in the capital Pretoria where the exhibition, Scenorama, curated by Gabi Ngcobo and Gillian Fleischman was held,  The museum became a studio that I would work from for a duration of six months. I would spend the day drawing, organising, laying out and building the installation. I worked with a number of artists for this project who contributed different works, sound, text and a dream catcher, work that belonged to their own practices. I am still navigating through my ideas around collaborations and collective work, and figuring out my position and labour in relation to these formats but I think when I started to work this way I was really interested in thinking about how do we allow artistic practices to continue during a time where we were all isolated? And how can a collective or collaborative approach function as a safety net for artists and their practices? I think the project then draws itself out as what you see. The second iteration took place in Durban, at the KZNSA Gallery in Kwa-ZuluNatal. My collaborators were Matsehlane Xhakaza, Caterina Giansiracusa and Crista Uwase, Billy Langa, and Sandile Radebe.

I have not been too fascinated by the performance of holding a pen or a pencil, a chalk, a charcoal, an oil pastel or a soft pastel but observation remains important. I observe the principles and elements of design as they accumulate into an image. My drawing practice continues to be consumed by the perspective of going back to basics and understanding the nuances of each detailing element.

Drawing is partly intuitive yet, it is fully held by intimate gestures – like the closeness of feeling the textures of my drawing materials, and the smell of burning glue, the wax paper crinkling and observing an embossed outline that is left behind due to a fold.

With this being said, Drawing is an inquiry of looking deeply.

Drawing involves feeling and listening deeply...

Slide#: 20 - 24

I continue to be obsessed with lines. 

Lines create and organise multiple perspectives to converge on a two dimensional surface. They will always be the first gesture that I make on paper when I am working on a new drawing. I have learned through lines the various ways of crafting them, and how they navigate place in arbitrary ways. They pin point somewhere from the inside and then they point out like an extension. Even though they may appear flattened, lines can also be sculpted.

I am Drawn to behaviour. I am drawn to sound.  Even though I don’t know how to make music. My drawings often come out as notations for a sound.

Slide #: 28 -32

My drawings are compositions and manuscripts for space. 

I am reckoning with the idea that drawing contains with it, a social and personal responsibility. Drawing is an act of service, and a space for hopefulness and faith. It is a moment between freedom and belonging and it is a moment between doing and undoing - being in conversation with convention and tradition, and being against a comfortable norm.

My drawings hold space in the face of fear, the illogical and the confusion of the world, which causes us to be deliberate as we own the marks that we make on the drawing surface. Drawing has always been conversational, an outspoken friend. So in this ongoing drawing series Manuscripts, I have been drafting a body of work that is involves a process of collaging with materials that I have worked with or continue to work with. In a way it’s like a retrospective on materials. And each drawing is constructed and produced as an assemblage of techniques of making. I write what I like sometimes, and there was a point where my drawings where extensions of the things that I wrote and vice versa. Even though I have not written at length in a long time, manuscript kind of continues that idea of writing visually.

Slide #39 – 40:

This place is in my head all day is an installation that I produced for the Aichi Triennale last year. I was interested in using drawing as a space for manifesting a place and so I produced a number of drawings and sculptures for the show. The influence for this installation from (1995) came from Moshekwa Langa’s work whose practice influences my own greatly. I had also created a similar iteration of this work in 2017, as part of the outdoor mural project at a Stevenson gallery in Johannesburg.

 Alongside the works of Kay Hassan, Dineo Bopape, Donna Kukama, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Thomas Hirschorn amongst the list of artists whose practices also influence my own. I had also created a similar iteration of this work in 2017, as part of the outdoor mural project at a Stevenson gallery in Johannesburg.

We aren’t drawing enough, Or a lot.

We should be drawing more.

Draw was first read as part of my guest presentation for the University of Lincoln ( 17 October 2023)

Girl(after Jamaica kincaid)

This is how you engage anxiety; pack it all in a brown bag sis and throw it away; throw it all away; be prepared to meet people, different people and, know that you will most likely be having dinner with them and drink rosé; order something neutral, vegetarian. Make the compromises, you have to put your pride aside. Know that you will discuss; know that you will need to reflect; this is how conversations are conduct- ed; you will need to listen a lot; don’t wallow in your insecurities; this is not how you behave; you will move around, a lot. Know that you will need to contribute some money, and sometimes not. Make the compromises, you have to put your pride aside. Sit in the middle, maybe to the side. Rehearse in your head, rehearse your gestures, don’t laugh too loud and don’t gulp down your drink too fast; don’t eat too little and DON’T EAT TOO MUCH ‘PETUNIA’!; Make the compromises, you have to put your pride aside. You know them, they know you; convince yourself to stay calm; be aware; pay attention and listen; you will be put on the spot; made to think on the spot; or speak on the spot; you will have to come out of your shell; Make the com- promises, you have to put your pride aside. You will never be used to it regardless of how many times you do this; it’s ‘maaklik’, ‘pap n vleis’! Make the compromises, you have to put your pride aside. You will find your feet, you will laugh, they will be pa- tient; they are. Make the compromises, you have to put your pride aside. You always get nervous each time you see people you know; it’s just how things go; Smile, you could engage in small talk; be friendly; exchange a casual smile of acknowledgement; you will be inspired; you will be in awe; you will be a little tough on yourself for catching on later; these things never make sense immediately; tell me that you don’t want to be that girl who lost out because she was too afraid!

First published in the School of Anxiety (SoA): Autopoiesis, Entropy or Redundancy and other terms (2018) A project conceptualised by Moses Serubiri in collaboration with Awuor Onyango, Sanyu Kiyimba - Kisaka and Nyakallo Maleke for the 10th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art/ KUNST-WERKE BERLIN e. V.

segopotso sa gomora: a form(less) archive

Refiloe Namise. 2022. Episode 1: Conversations that happened at #39 -. image courtesy of the artist

I’m about to rewind to a number of scenes fromEpisode 3: Ditshwantso Tsa Rona – translated it means “Our Images”. Segopotso sa Gomora is an exhibition by Refiloe Namise and it is laid out as a trilogy that follows a sequence of contemplations around embodiment, meaning making, collecting, feeling, materiality and translation with the Alexandra township archive. 

The trilogy, like a mise en scene, crossfades between different media, texts, drawings, performances and video works that each bookmarks iconic events that took place in Alexandra Township. Episode 1: Conversations that happened at #39, Episode 2:Bus ea ko 7, The Inauguration and Episode 3: Ditshwantsho Tsa Rona are events that entail the bus boycott movement, the housing projects of the 70s and the mass migration to Johannesburg. Colloquially known as Gomora, Alexandra is a place that is predominantly a black settlement where many migrant labourers from rural South Africa settled when they worked in the gold mines of the city. Gomora is a space that is characterized by the precarity of its housing infrastructure and living conditions. It is located on the outskirts of the wealthiest suburb in Johannesburg, Sandton. Due to the marginalisation of Alexandra township a veiling of its own struggle narratives during Apartheid South Africa have been invisibilized, furthering a singular story about this place.

Going back to these scenes;- the artist centre stage is adorned in a red outfit. For the artist, Red is a character whose form shapeshifts into hand painted texts, costumes, a red bus, a shovel or a red “stoep”- veranda. Red is a recurring vessel that locates the past to the current re-enactments that are re-performed by the artist in Alex and in the gallery. 

The artist is photocopying handmade bricks that were made in Episode 1. The grating sound from the copier is amplified in the background as the public enters the Point of Order, the gallery of the Wits School of Arts. Immersed in the compilation of the “findings”, a video of a second figure, also in red, dances in an open veld. This body moves with softness against a dry and dirtied terrain. 

A series of A2 sized, black and white posters- coarsely grained depict proclamations that mirror the societal tensions in present-day Alexandra. In them you will find statements such as “Talking Walls of the voiceless” and photographs of the police presence in the community are plastered on the walls of the gallery. In conversation with Refiloe, the artist narrates the exclusivity of the Alex archives, and the difficulty behind interacting with its contents. She describes how this particular archive that she was engaging in was not permitted to leave the premises of the Cullen Library at the University of the Witwatersrand where she studied. The limited proximity to the archive generated a broader questioning around belonging and for who it was intended for and negotiating the inaccessibility via re-enactments from the archive.

Her reinterpretation of the archive engages the politics of authorship that determines which spaces, and which people become worthy of being acknowledged or memorialised in Gomora. A photocopier as a technique allows the audience permission to claim a piece of the archive by giving back reproductions of this knowledge. A copy of the river sand brick, in a banal representation, still carries an elusive meaning to the public regarding how it was made and where its materials were sourced. This contradiction could speak to the unobtainable knowledge(s) and basic skills gap that have perpetuated the high rate of youth unemployment in South Africa. The loose bricks contain a connection to the construction of the houses that were built using the river sand, but they also become symbolic of the protest culture whereby infrastructure is often destroyed with them. 

Taking its influence from media formats like television and documentaries, Namise’s recollection of the archive is “republished” in a visceral material language. She transcribes the house plans from the archive into a life sized charcoal mural drawing that towers over a dropsheet of dried river sand bricks laced with gold leaf that she made by hand. Buckets containing the brick mixture remain in the space as remnants of the labour. These gestures become a negotiation for the artist in how to embody and to care for the space. 

The exhibition through the medium of materials offers a moment for stillness and carefulness. Most of the re-enactments see the artist wearing a dress and safety gloves which contrasts the rigidity of the materials that she works with like cement and finished bricks. Reused buckets and dust residue from the bricks is contrasted by a video of the artist sifting the waters of the Jukskei river that runs through Gomora.

The Collective Accountability in How We Remember: 

Episode 3 offers a critical lens into the habits that often impact the relationship(s) that ordinary citizens have to the spaces they inhabit. These spaces made up of homes, vacant land, abandoned buses, or rivers that have over time become polluted, carry memories from the past. Namise reflects on multiple moments where the act of remembering is faulted by a neglect from the state. Remembering should not be an event that becomes a spectacle but rather, it should be a gesture that is invested in finding other means for communicating and commemorating the past even in simplistic approaches, however subtle or overt the gestures may appear, how can we hold ourselves responsible for our own remembering. 

Segoposto sa Gomora was shown as part of Refiloe Namise’sMFA in Creative Research submission at the point of Order in Johannesburg.

shorter version of the review was published on the SARN newsletter: https://sarn.ch/publications/microreview-segopotso-sa-gomora

Images courtesy of the artist

Refiloe Namise. 2022. Episode 3: Ditshwantsho Tsa Rona. image courtesy of the artist

Refiloe Namise. 2022.Episode 2:Bus ea ko 7. image by Reshma Chhiba 

Refiloe Namise. 2022. Episode 1: Conversations that happened at #39. image by Reshma Chhiba 

Drawing is still writing: a visualization of punctuation Marks

Props:

- a yoyo

- A bag of elastic bands

- Builders line installation

- Funnel, dry brown beans and a tray

I want us to take a moment to think about lines or a line. Feel free to visualise it through the objects that will be in the space. Of course you are also welcome to visualise this line in your mind. I am just going to take you through a moment of visualising a line through punctuation marks.

(select a member from the audience. Instruct them to play with a yoyo and pause)

I’ll start Between and Ellipses and a full stop  

(rolling of a yoyo)

A Line, 

gravitates towards the centre of an unfamiliar surface.

moving,

and alluding to other meditations.

Some speculations, perhaps an alteration of place and A Re-orientation of space. 

(Observe the yoyo player)

This line is a Translation of the gestures of an impulsive hand.                                                  

a validation of presence- and maybe more

collating at various points. 

that will eventually slow down.

(select another member from the audience. Instruct them to make elastic band chains and yellow lines. Place them at different points. Pour out the strings)

Exclamation Marks 

Read in tempos

(elastic band chain)

Starting! Learning! Stopping! Going! Adding! Skipping! booking! manufacturing!

balancing! resting! standing! Awkward! Folding! boxing! Evading! Rewiring! displacing

Navigating! breathing! Waiting! Not enough! Pointing! Burning! Fixing! replacement!

retracing! Being! Building ! knotting! Spotting! Layering! Escaping! coining!

clarity! Rhythm! Subtracting! Tripping! Dotting! fixing! becoming!

suggestions are created and

through sequences, they demonstrate

patterns that repeat their own form continuously,

at fluctuating tempos

within the margins of the surface.

From this, 

A compilation of interpretations.

Options!

Hints!

Are Broken down

And Exposed

Into tiny particles.

Footnotes

(select another member from the audience. Funnel and tray. Place them at different points. Maybe another person can make an elastic band chain)

To be intuitively guided and held by lines

Obsessions with the illegible

a structure for comfort,

a repository of pathways,

That invokes multiple interactions cautiously.

Demanding space as well as demarcating it, 

(pause)

some preparations need to proceed.

So here is A checklist for a visceral collage.

Let the lines become a culmination of a collective experience.

an act of distributions.

Traces of a union

That can either be Drawn from or drawn to something.

Merely an object existing into something else.

Recognisable

Mundane

Arbitrary.

it twists, loops and spirals into disorder.

scraps and fragments should be shifting between details, moments and delicacies.

I want to see a variation of scale and textures.

an intimate collection of unwanted things.

A line extends out between the voids.

Round lines. Fluid lines. 

Hollowed out,

Standing,

Rotating,

Spinning,

Turning, 

Endlessly

coiling back into itself at a much slower pace.

Script for the intervention Drawing is Still Writing. A visualisation of Punctuation Marks for Vleeshal curated by Nomaduma Masilela and Thiago De Paula Souza.