What does the future of UK creativity look like? Each year, The Arts Foundation’s Futures Awards take the temperature of contemporary art and design – celebrating and supporting practitioners who are making waves. This year, Aesthetica was delighted to join the Visual Arts award judging panel.
Cornwall-based Libita Sibungu is the 2022 winner of the £10,000 Visual Arts Fellowship, recognised for her practice and body of work to date, which includes exhibition, Quantum Ghost (2019) – a series of large-scale photograms, sound installations and live performances. Mapping a journey through archives related to Sibungu’s heritage, it connects the mining regions of Namibia and Cornwall, revealing how the echoes of colonialism and diasporic migration reverberate through the deep-time of geology.
A: Your practice is multimedia: combining sound installation, storytelling, performance and more. How do you describe your approach to art making? Does the idea inform the method, or vice versa?
LS: At present, I’m tending towards audio-visual approaches. My process involves thinking of ways to transform, imprint and alchemise the feelings I have about the environment I’m occupying at the time. I consider the political in the personal – the personal in the political: bodies of water, bodies of time, bodies under us, bodies inside of us, bodies to come.
I walk and wander, taking in the sounds of intimacy, distance, tension, balance and temperature. I try to open myself up and, when I feel moved to, I read, watch music videos, write notes in my phone, draw, take photos, collect stones. I have a very lanky list of bookmark folders! From this chaos and these acts of gathering, I start to pull narratives and themes together. Then it’s a big shift into the transformation stage – which involves intention and experimentation.
A: The exhibition Quantum Ghost left a lasting impression on artist Oreet Ashery, who presented this year’s award. Can you briefly describe the project, and how you came up with the idea?
LS: Yes, that was wonderful to hear. It’s hard to speak about this briefly as it came from such a deep place and is ongoing: it’s ever growing, dying and being born. The exhibition was an opportunity for me to take up space in a gallery and have a solo show for the first time. I dealt with the gallery by blacking half of it out – turning it into a black box. I tried to approach the gallery as a living body with its own history; I was thinking of caves and subterranean dwellings, and of trauma. I wanted to use its sonic possibilities to express my personal becoming story in a cosmic, shared, universal way.
The Quantum Ghost exhibition was a memory creation and love story – a lament to the journey of Black diasporic peoples across time. In the show, I speak through the lens of my own British-Namibian heritage, and the holes of knowledge I had about my late father’s experience of decades spent in exile – including in the UK as a student, like many other Namibian people. He studied Mining Engineering and spent some time on a placement in Cornwall during the 1980s. Hence the language of mineralogy imbued throughout the exhibition, which comes through in a series of 10 large scale photograms, aura pieces and sonic maps. They depict materials suspended in light: shells, sage, crystals, stones, earth, salt, political papers, letters, stamps, snakeskins and pins.
A: The idea of deep-time geology – and the traces it can reveal – is fascinating. What did you discover whilst working on this piece?
LS: There’s a lot of darkness surrounding the roots of western geological cultures, including the systems of power and pervasive language of whiteness within the field. So, when I was thinking about tracing a mineral’s perspective – its journey through states of transformation, being taken out of the earth and prematurely birthed into industrial production – I began to consider the poetics of that as a way to speak to the violence endured by Black and indigenous colonial communities, who were dehumanised and rendered surplus in the making of modernity.
Whilst looking at archival photos of these individuals, I began to think about their humanity and imagine their embodied systems of knowledge – which were ruptured by colonialism. This helped me work backwards into an imagined pre-colonial and pre-human time, to begin to find a way to transcribe possible testimonies of the landscape and to liberate another telling of history.
I collaborated with sound designer Jol Thomson on the creation of a sub bass section in a 21-minute looped audio piece. This anchored the Quantum Ghost installation. He helped alchemise my research and thoughts into a conceptual score that translated philosophical ideas about black noise, absence and presence. It explores the scarring of the land as told through the decay of minerals: uranium becoming lead, for example. We also considered the inaudible and audible depths of sub40hz bass to hold all of this together. The hope was that it would transmute into the viewer through deep bodily listening: speaking to the frequency of deep time and the vibration of life itself.
A: How does this project tap into your wider practice? Is there a particular driving force that runs through your body of work?
LS: Audre Lorde’s speech The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action comes to mind. I’m motivated, driven and inspired by those words.
A: What’s next for you? Any new projects or exhibitions lined up for 2022?
LS: I’ve been quietly working on a new body of work; I feel called to make ambitious, healing environments. I’m super happy about some new and ongoing commissions and collaborations, including a site-specific artwork with Nina Royle for Hospital Rooms, London, as well as working with StArt Art Gallery, Namibia, for a group exhibition later in the year. I have some exciting longer partnerships in the UK and South Africa which will see me delve into geological archives, producing some vinyl records with Bhavisha Pancia of Nothing to Commit Records. This is a total dream of mine, and I’m super happy to have the opportunity to work with such amazing people and organisations.
The work of all Arts Foundation Futures Awards 2022 Fellows and Finalists – plus the online ceremony – can be viewed at artsfoundation.co.uk. All Visual Arts Finalists received £1,000 for their artistic practice and included: Rhea Dillon, Sadé Mica and Shenece Oretha.
Image Credits:
1. Libita Sibungu, Quantum Ghost (2019), Detail
2. Libita Sibungu, Quantum Ghost (2019) Installation view, Spike Island, Bristol. Originally commissioned and produced by Gasworks, London. Courtesy the artist. Photographs by Max McClure.
3. Libita Sibungu, Quantum Ghost (2019), Detail
4. Libita Sibungu, Quantum Ghost (2019) Installation view, Spike Island, Bristol. Originally commissioned and produced by Gasworks, London. Courtesy the artist. Photographs by Max McClure
