Cashmere Specials – Tsi i ge ge hahe II by Listening at Pungwe

The mixtape, Tsi i ge ge hahe II, is centred on geographies as monuments that are aurally activated to create layered registers in space. These processes contest and shift spatial practices, and enact the possibilities to re-make place. Lena Fender, whose voice is heard from the centre of the room, recites the opening and closing of a story, ‘tsi i ge ge hahe’, a call into and from the story-world. Her voice recorded in Okahandja, central Namibia, is a continuous motif in the audio piece, and is on a loop, alongside Credo Mutwa’s oration. Audio from cities in southern Africa (Dar es Salaam, Bagamoyo, Livingstone and Harare), own compositions and traces from our vinyl collections surround the place, and invoke diverse practices of listening.

Memory Biwa is a historian, and artist. Her work addresses memorial and reparative processes in Namibia, which encompasses a wider discourse on restitution and reparations. Biwa’s focus on oral narratives and performance informs notions of subjectivity and the re-centering of alternative epistemologies and imaginaries.

Robert Machiri is a sound artist and hoarder of sound-related objects. Machiri’s work exists at the juncture of two streams of practice; curatorial concepts founded through the notion of conviviality and art as pedagogy. Biwa and Robert Machiri form the duo, Listening at Pungwe.

The mixtape could also be experienced in the exhibition A SACRED STORY AT THE TREE OF LIFE, 15 September – 22 October, 2023 at ifa Gallery Berlin, curated by Memory Biwa, Robert Machiri, Jumoke Adeyanju, Nikola Hartl.