Association for Visual Arts | Ityala aliboli

IItyala aliboli, an expression that loosely translates as ‘a debt [that] doesn’t wither away, rot or die’, is an ongoing project that takes as its point of departure the São José Paquete d’Africa shipwreck (1794) in Camps Bay (South Africa) in order to speculate on the political, economic and libidinal effects of racial slavery. It looks at the notion of debt to probe its conceptual, psychic and political properties, as well as indebtedness pertaining to Cape Town’s unresolved history of slavery.

Looking at the objects from the shipwreck, particularly the iron ballast, this work explores the problem of value in relation to systems of violence, particularly racial slavery. The ballast is referred to by historian Lolita Buckner Inniss as “a marker of slavery”, that was “both a key material object as well as a symbol of the transatlantic slave trade, international law, and the suffering of captive Africans”[1]. Nkomo extends his inquiry into maritime insurance, value, exchange, currency, money and the speculative dimension of financial abstractions within the context of the trade in ‘human cargo’.

Considering that half of the enslaved persons in the hold of São José Paquete d’Africa perished close to the shore and about half (the ‘survivors’) were sold to the Cape Town’s White slave-owning community, this body of work will ask us to reflect on the persistence of the violence of slavery and anti-Blackness as constitutive of the city as a polity/political community.

The conceptual sculptures, leaning towards abstraction, make ethical demands on the viewer, heightening one’s sense of space and time, and what it means to ‘be’ (or not to ‘be’) in the world.

[1] Inniss, L. B. 2018. “Ships’ Ballast”, in International Law’s Objects, edited by Jessie Hohmann & Daniel Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press; 431-442.