Dumama
Cape town, South Africa
Gugulethu Duma (she/her), also known as Dumama, is an artist, performer and sonic researcher born in South Africa.
Her transdisciplinary practice involves consciously deconstructing and critiquing archaic modes of representation of Southern African/African sonic and performance culture. Ritualising modes of togetherness, Dumama is concerned with the ways in which new forms can organically emerge when collaborations can center in intimacy and openness.
Her interests intersect as practice based performance research, and interdisciplinary, collaborative bodies of work centred around political-poetic imaginations. As a compelling storyteller and lyricist, she works to seamlessly to mend together the divide between traditional South African oral culture and futuristic globally-oriented poetics, with a delicate care and awareness of the value of both. As one part of the duo dumama + kechou, Dumama released her debut album [buffering juju ] in 2020. Weaving together childhood songs, stories and personal memories with electronic hues and gestures, she resists typical archival practices around oral traditions and advocates for a recalibration of our transcendental, futuristic Black and African sense of being and belonging.
As an emerging curator and cultural organiser, Gugulethu intentionally works to bring artists together in immersive sensory experiences. Her debut curatorial venture [ancestral body noise,] produced in collaboration with Oyoun Berlin, is a testament to this. This performance workshop and exhibition brought together artists from the diaspora based in Berlin, challenging them to dig into their individual opaque ancestral relations to the African continent, and bring them into the present in order to generate contemporary and relevant forms of ritual and ceremony for the future.
Her current ongoing process as an artist in residency with[ [Solo Magic Radical Black Femme Project,] is a personal reflection on digital ritual, mourning in the morning and voicing what hope owes to the night.
Over the course of Dumama’s residency, Dumama will be engaging with her own cellular storage units, and moving through the matters of her own ancestral body noise. Her residency will see her in conversation with members of her maternal ancestry, communities and self, creating soundscapes for her process of attempting to creatively engage with her grief and healing.
The residency process would hold Dumama’s unfolding of the voice & consolidation of her writing and loose fragments over the last year, engaging intentionally with the lessons that have come with shaking off the linearity and attachment to cohesion and expectation. Dumama has also been invited as one of 5 female identifying artists and activists working within fields of gender equality to present themselves and their work at the 2021 Gender Equality Forum happening in Paris, June 30th - July 2nd. The Solo Magic Residency will also hold space for the behind the scenes experiences for that, and conversations that emerge. Audio visual portals and works in progress will be shared, honouring the gestation period marking this phase of her artistic and healing journey.
Through the transdisciplinary fields of conversation, movement, music and archiving, this residency archives her re-learning her own rhythm again after immense loss, trauma and reformation of new pathways.
