The “party” is about a moment of suspension. Feeling a rigorous sensation in the body, a pulsating tip-to-tip… Like pins and needles all prickly across the skin’s surface and a slow numb that calls attention to each beat of the heart, harder and harder. And the Sensation, conjured by this dance, is void of history, geographic location and pain.
— Ecstatic Resilience, Sable Elyse Smith
In her genre-bending essayistic poem , perhaps poetic essay, “Ecstatic Resilience”, Sable Elyse Smith writes about nightclubs as sanctuaries for queer liberation, where sensation is conjured by dance, that is to say, a void of history. Smith offers us, through Audre Lorde, a lyric of movement;
“for those of us who live at the shoreline,
standing upon the constant edges of decision…
for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice…”
…Because to be free and to feel safe requires the creation of sanctuaries, what Sandra (Brutus) of the Zagaza Collective reflects on as the “urge to not be extinguished, to seek freedom in movement.”
Zagaza is a creative laboratory whose practice melds performance art with alternative mediums to explore co-existence and co-creation. Comprised of members Shalanda, Tanya, Hirma and Sandra, the Swiss-based collective celebrates diasporic histories and connections through djing, storytelling and performance, steeped in the foundations of what they term, “Black collective art consciousness” — said in another way; artistic expression as acts of resistance and the acknowledgement of our bodies as political.
Below is an excerpt from an email conversation with the collective members.
Nkgopoleng Moloi: Can you tell us about the origins of that name — Zagaza — what it means and where it comes from?
Tanya: The origin story of the name “Zagaza” is pretty interesting. It actually derives from the surname of our member, Hirma. We came up with the name after an encounter with train staff. I was on the train in Switzerland with Hirma’s sister and we were having our train passes checked so the person checking us, a white man, decided to randomly pronounce their surname [Ndayiziga] out loud and completely butchered it and splurted out, “Zagaza”. It was so random and sudden that we laughed out loud and repeated “Zagaza Zagaza’.
At that moment, we realised that it was an act of reclamation: we were so used to white people making it seem as if our surnames were so hard to pronounce that we took that name and ran with it. Like Warsan Shire said, “give your daughters difficult names. give your daughters names that command the full use of tongue”. Mostly, it made us realise how powerful, fluid, continental and diasporic African languages and linguistic systems are. After doing more research about the name Zagaza, it became clear that this terminology was used in so many languages, from Jamaican patois to Sierra Leonean Krio. It had the power to embed itself in our collective consciousness.
We always say that our name was a gift from our ancestors. We give meaning to this name by seeing it as an energetic entity that represents salutation and praxis of embodied freedom and creative chaos — it’s a way of life, a declaration of our connection to a lineage of African descendants from around the world, who created languages and communal art practices before us.
Nkgopoleng Moloi: How would you describe the work you do?
Sandra (Brutus): Our work is sensational, sensitive, expressive and performative. It has become a matter of creating sensations through our expressive being. Through Djjng, storytelling & performance, we celebrate our bodies, our history, our trauma, our community and our individuality. It’s almost like a renaissance of our essence, and a continuous definition of what it means to be a Black queer and/or femme.
So far, we showcased mostly club performances, but there are plenty more projects to come and to share. Our work exists through space and time, [and] with space and time. We are a continuous evolution.
Tanya: I would describe the work that we do as creative care work — it is work that holds space for the celebration of historical Black femme queer art forms and performance arts. It places “care” as a praxis of preservation that allows us to place creators at the centre of this process.
Because we live in a racialised capitalist world, Black art forms are always under attack and constantly at risk of being completely absorbed into this machinery through commodification, whitewashing and erasure. All the while, emerging Black queer artists struggle to make a living, struggle to survive as their art is being exploited, continuing to sustain white cultural industries.
We consider Black femme and queer creators as cultural workers and labourers who deserve to be cared for in the process of creating their art.
Nkgopoleng Moloi: How do you think about music, art and dance, in relation to queerness and queer histories; how you would define that relationship?
Shalanda: American academic Patricia Hill Collins talks about marginality as a space for creativity and liberation that impacts every single part of personal life, community life and general society. Exploring the margins allows us to create radically new imaginations and ways of existing collectively that transcend the hegemonic order of anti-Black and anti-queer violence. Queer communities and especially Black queer communities had to find ways to continuously pursue freedom in oppressive spaces. We believe that liberation in relation to these systems of power, racism, sexism and classicism, cannot manifest from the fallacy of equality and inclusion, it has to be born from the creation of new spaces of existence and resistance.
These spaces of existence also mean physical places that become sanctuaries for liberation where one can fully exist, be celebrated and express joy through the celebration of our histories of art, music and dance in Black femme and queer communities.
Nkgopoleng Moloi: What exciting projects are you working on at the moment?
Hirma: Personally, I would say our archival project “Club Secrets” which began in Ghana in April 2022 in collaboration with Pro Helvetia & Shap Shap. We were able to reconnect with the artists we met there in London during the last Carnival and now we’ll see what’s next for this winter — we will be developing the second part of residency through our production in Accra and Geneva.
This story is produced in the context of an editorial residency supported by Pro Helvetia Johannesburg, the Swiss Arts Council.
