Season 4 : Episode 5 - Aika Swai

Welcome to Season 4 of the ICA podcast, where we interview African artists and curators who perform and curate live interdisciplinary works. 

Our fifth episode features an interview with Aika Swai about her performance lecture titled Uncharted Dialog, which she presented at the ICA Scholars showcase last year. In presenting this work she speaks about her approach to what she calls ‘languaging’ in her work and the value of African languages as inherent knowledge.

Uncharted Dialog was based on Swai’s dissertation which is centered around an imaginary conversation between American Indian and African language artists and includes speculation of what would happen if the two groups found ways of speaking to each other. In the performance Swai slowly revealed the absence of what may seem like an obvious and potentially powerful conversation, foregrounding the pervasive, deleterious and sometimes invisible traces of ongoing coloniality. In the podcast she talks through her construction of this.

Swai’s research interests extend to themes of translatability, translanguaging and cultural transliteration in African and Caribbean literatures, the communicability of highly subjective experiences (such as the ones tied to race and gender), and the tension between ‘magic’ and ‘real’ when reading African, Caribbean or American First Nations literature through the lens of magical realism.

Season 4 of the ICA Podcast comprises interviews conducted by Nkgopoleng Moloi and  produced by Atiyyah Khan.

This is an initiative created by the Institute for Creative Arts which is based at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Thank you for listening.