Isheanesu Dondo-Ancient Storytellers

Ancient Storytellers

/Xam Fortuin-The Newsprint 8

The Newsprint 8

/Xam Fortuin

/kwerre /xum (praise cloud)

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SKU
-xam-fortuin_-kwerre-xum-praise-cloud
More Information
Frame None
Medium Video
Height 30.00 cm
Width 44.00 cm
Artist /Xam Fortuin
Year 2022

/kwerre /xum, 8min (5 available prints)

directed by /Xam Fortuin

cinematography by Visule Kabunda

video still, D Block prison cell Robben Island, South Africa 

"Whilst growing up and listening to my father’s stories, I noted how he was able to overcome his fear of death by becoming a freedom fighter. His life contained countless instances of danger. From navigating the ganglands of the Cape Flats, to picking up arms against the apartheid regime. But there was one fear I sensed in him - being vulnerable. Perhaps this fear came as a consequence of surviving capture.

To survive, he needed a Ronde Taal that fit the extreme conditions of the prison. I finally understood that the trauma that comes with surviving these conditions, is ‘transferred’ into indigenous communities once the captured return home.

As I stepped outside the cell, closing the gate and then the door, I knew that it was my vulnerability that was required to tell this story. I realised that the prison’s victims of capture, must have all faced the same paralysing fear. By being stripped down to their naked bodies, they had been made to feel vulnerable. The childhood imprint of my father’s experience had been living through me up until that point. The fear he had warned me against, was the same fear he had felt. This was my opportunity to transform that memory." (FORTUIN, 2022:79)

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