mukalap
live performance and audio installation (loop)
wooden wall with chairs, text projection, 2 speakers, floodlight
8.48 min, 2018
Mukalap is based on an unique audio recording from the Anthony Traill Khoisan Collection that captures a spoken message from a man named Mukalap in the Khoe langiage !ora. In his mother tongue !ora Mukalap calls on an European audience to just for once listen to his beautiful language and to him. The message was played in 1938 during the Third International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Ghent. Mukalap's message is not only an urgent appeal for recognition, he also asked the audience to respond and send him a message in return. No trace of a reply can be found. Within the work Westerveld responds to his request after all. As the last known !ora speaker that linguists worked with died in 2013, there seems to be no one left to learn the language from. Speaking in Dutch, English, Afrikaans, as well as fragments of !ora, the dialogue between Westerveld and Mukalap unfolds through a multitude of languages and translations through which the legacies of colonialism resound.
audio installation
The work Mukalap exists as an audio installation and a live performance. Pictured here is the audio installation during the group exhibition Language is the only homeland (2018) at Nest, The Hague in 2018, with Parastou Forouhar, Newell Harry, Marcel Pinas, Moffat Takadiwa and Tintin Wulia. Guestcurator: Manon Braat. Language expert: Simone Zeefuik
All photographs of the audio installation Mukalap are taken by Jhoeko photography
performance
The work Mukalap exists as an audio installation and a live performance. Pictured here is the performance that took place during the Live Art Festival in Cape Town on 13 September 2018. The Life Art Festival is a biennial interdisciplinary festival curated by the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA) at the University of Cape Town, directed by Jay Pather.
CREDITS
The audio recording of Mukalap’s message is part of the Anthony Traill Khoisan Collection and used by permission of copyright holder, the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
The translation of Mukalap’s message from !ora to English was done by Wilfrid Haacke and Eliphas Eiseb, published in ‘Extinct South African Khoisan Languages’, a CD and booklet compiled by Anthony Traill and the Department of Linguistics, University of the Witwatersrand in 1997.
Bradley van Sitters assisted in matching the English translation to the spoken message in !ora.
Realized with the support of Nest, The Hague, Institute for Creative Arts, University of Cape Town and the Mondriaan Fund www.mondriaanfonds.nl