This episode of The ICA Podcast features an interview with Gabrielle Goliath who provides a rare and compelling insight into the research and creation of her monumental work ‘Elegy’, which had its first iterations at the ICA Live Art Festival in 2017.
‘Elegy’ is a long-term commemorative performance initiated by Goliath in 2015. Staged in various locations, each performance calls together a group of female vocal performers who collectively enact a ritual of mourning, sustaining a single haunting tone over an hour.
Responding to the physical, ontological and structural outworking(s) of rape culture in South Africa, ‘Elegy’ invokes the absent presence of individuals whose subjectivities have been fundamentally violated, and who are all too easily consigned to a generic, all-encompassing victimhood. Each performance commemorates a named, loved and missed woman or LGBTIQ+ individual subjected to fatal acts of gendered and sexualised violence.
Significant to the work is how loss becomes a site for community and for empathetic encounters with and across difference. Refusing the symbolic violence through which traumatised black, brown, femme and queer bodies are routinely objectified, ‘Elegy’ opens an alternative, relational space, wherein mourning is presented as a social and politically productive work, not in the sense of healing or closure but as a necessary and sustained irresolution.
