Professorial Inauguration Professor Kim Berman

Topic: Art as Transformative Practice: Pathways to Engaging Change Date: 3 June 2019

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PREFACEI can easily proclaim, thus far in my life, that this is the most daunting occasion I have ever faced. It is daunting because I am standing not only in front of intellectual leaders, mentors, teachers and my peers, but also fellow artists, students, friends and family who know that I am accepting a hat that I feel does not quite fit me. I am indeed honoured and grateful that I have been robed in this august academic chamber, and it my is hope that I will grow into this space and do justice to the role I have been granted.

I often see myself less as an academic and more as a practitioner and activist for change. I am sometimes an artist, most times a teacher and a leader who believes in impossible dreams. Yet, occupying this space and wearing the professor’s hat in some ways does not feel entirely comfortable. I have arrived in this position from an unusual pathway; mine has not been a conventional academic trajectory, and sometimes I see myself as operating in the margins rather than in the mainstream. Perhaps from this vantage point, I see the opportunity for change in the academy and outside of it. I believe that it is sometimes from the margins that we can re-draw the shape of things.

At the outset, I would also like to acknowledge my own teachers who have walked with me on this pathway, some of whom are in this room, and others whom I continue to acknowledge though the mentoring of students. Thank you to Pam Allara, my teacher and mentor who I insisted should join me here to be part of this ceremony to guide me through yet another rite of passage as she has helped me to find my academic voice. And thank you to our visionary Dean, Federico Freschi who has guided me, sometimes having to firmly but gently push me to where I am today.

I also acknowledge my teachers from the University of the Witwatersrand and the Museum School of Fine Arts at Tufts University, my University of Johannesburg (UJ) and Artist Proof Studio (APS) colleagues and collaborators, and my students past and present. I am thankful to you all for sharing the richness of your journeys that have helped shaped mine. And finally, on a personal level, I thank my Mom, my sisters and Robyn my life-partner, for their love and support of all of my activities.

So today I will talk about this pathway on and around the margins. It is a pathway that sees arts practices as transformative. My book, Finding voice: a visual arts approach to engaging social change was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2017. It is about agency, imagination and resilience. It tells stories of artists and non-artists, students as well as elders without schooling, all whom find their voice and power though the visual arts. It’s about transformational practices, and ways in which artists can help people imagine a better life for themselves and others. When I read Amartya Sen’s 1999 book entitled Development as Freedom, I set out on my doctoral journey to discover how art can support building, deepening and renovating democracy in South Africa.

I will first explain how I understand transformative arts practices, and then share with you a few stories of change. My premise is that the arts can and do promote agency, and because of that, they have the potential to mobilise citizens to take more active roles in shaping positive futures. When successful, they increase people’s capacity to cooperate, to embrace difference and to directly challenge the legacies of colonialism that leaves in its wake socioeconomic class divisions. So much can still be done to mobilise people through expressive and creative arts, amplifying the role of aesthetics in communities here and around the world, honing existing tools and creating new ones.

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WHY STORIES?Marshall Ganz, from the Harvard Kennedy School, a longtime activist and the author of Why Stories Matter (2009), suggests that when you do public work, you have a responsibility to offer a public account of who you are, why you do what you do, and where you hope to go. He cites the first century Jerusalem sage, Rabbi Hillel, who asked three questions that are at the root of leadership and organising:

Ganz calls the response to the first question a “story of self” for relating “why I have been called.” The story you tell of why you sought to lead provides insight into your values and lets others know what they can expect and potentially learn from you. My own “story of self” is complex. My role as an academic at UJ for the past 25 years, cofounder of APS 28 years ago and Phumani Paper 20 years ago, includes roles of insider/outsider, teacher/learner, leader/collaborator and critic/researcher and facilitator. These complex positions often get merged with what comprises, in Ganz’s terms, the “story of us” (Ganz 2009).

Ganz talks about the “story of us” as an answer to when and why we are called: “What experiences and values do we share as a community? What has our community organization been called to do? What are its shared purposes,

goals and vision?” The “story of us” is made up of complex relational webs of students, colleagues, artists, organisations, funders, collaborators and partners. As organisations and collaborators intersect and learn from each other, the belief in the catalytic role of personal agency fuses the self with us.

Finally, Ganz refers to the “story of now,” which he calls (after Martin Luther King) “the fierce urgency of now”: “How do we appreciate the challenges and the conflicts between the values we can aspire to, and the values that actually exist? How do we seize an opportunity and turn it into action?” (Ganz 2009).

In Finding Voice, the “urgency of now” gives witness to the narratives of over two decades of democracy in South Africa through the arts. It starts with the urgency of redress and reconciliation in the founding of APS, traces the development of the Paper Prayers campaign in response to the urgency of the HIV and AIDS pandemic, shows the establishment of Phumani Paper to address the urgency of poverty and job creation, and finally arrives at some recommendations for how a more engaged arts community can help to address the current education crisis (Berman 2017:5).

Twenty-eight years after the founding of APS, the “fierce urgency of now” in South Africa involves the activism around the university students’ protests for free, quality, decolonised education in the universities. I further add the urgency of addressing the crisis of humanism in this age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) that potentially widens the vast gaps between the rich and educated and the poor.

If I am not for myself, who am I?When I am only for myself, what am I?And if not now, when? (Wisdom of the Fathers cited by Ganz 2013)

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THEMES OF THIS TALK

My lecture today addresses three broad themes that relate to the responsibility of telling the story of public work that I described earlier.

First, the theme of Leadership as the story of self; second, the challenge of de-colonisation in higher education, as the story of us, and third, the crisis of humanism in the age of the 4IR as the fierce urgency of now. In addressing these themes, I emphasise public scholarship as a means for the academy to further democracy.

SELF AND LEADERSHIPBeing an artist is a key part of my own identity. For me, making an artwork has a physical and emotional impetus that permits me to find a visual and metaphoric voice. I chose to be a printmaker and to teach printmaking because of its accessibility. I believe that printmaking is the most democratic of artistic media. While, in some ways, my artistic voice is quieter than my activist/educator voice, it is nevertheless an essence that feeds my energy, restores my sense of self, reconciles my spirit and my practice, helps me achieve balance, and gives me the fortitude to be resilient (Berman 2017:6).

In addition to my identity as an artist, my various roles include activist, student, teacher, founding director, researcher, connector and communicator among and between project sites and organisations. Situated among these multiple positions, the concept of “self”

becomes fluid, even fraught. Central to my understanding of self is a commitment to a democratic, co-creative, co-learning practice. I am intoxicated by the notion of transformation – that arena for radical change and creative reinvention. Making art is a physical process of imaging and shaping possibility. It can be seen as a kind of working, as well as acting

and projecting the change you want to see. Projective agency also entails interactions with specific contexts, and like conversations, these interactions are not always uncomplicated but can involve scepticism, fears, dilemmas, and the ambiguities of evolving situations (Berman 2017:6).

Ganz’s notion of “leadership in practice” (Ganz 2013) is helpful in understanding transformative and creative leadership.

Transformative leadership in this context relates to Ganz’s framing of leadership from the perspective of a ‘learner’ – one who has learned to ask the right questions – rather than that of a ‘knower’ – one who thinks they know all the answers (Ganz 2013).

Leadership is about enabling others to achieve purpose in the face of uncertainty. When there’s certainty, when you know what to do, you don’t need leadership. It’s when you don’t know what to do that the art and creativity of leadership matters (Ganz 2009).

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I would like to share some stories of change by way of illuminating some of these ideas:

I co-founded APS with the late Nhlanhla Xaba in 1991 with the fundamental beliefs and values that underpin my teaching philosophy. My own story began as an intern and then a printing assistant at a co-operative printing studio called Artist Proof in Boston, where I worked for seven years while a graduate student and an anti-apartheid activist for the ANC in exile the 1980s. My dream of establishing a cooperative printmaking studio came to be when I heeded Mandela’s call in 1990 for all South Africans to return, and when I met Xaba who shared my vision.

Established as a post-apartheid, Public Benefit Organisation that paralleled the establishment of a new democratic Constitution, APS’s vision statement includes a commitment to educating for change that transforms passion into possibility and promotes the active commitment of talented individuals to shape a better future for themselves and their communities. APS artists are trained not only to be technically proficient in the range of printmaking skills, they also need to acquire diplomacy, organisation, management and partnership skills, and an acceptance of the messy, unpredictable and complex nature of community art work.

The vision and mission are consistent with the democratic ideal of an open access organisation committed to the promotion of human rights, equality and redress. It provides subsidised quality education to talented and passionate art students and artists who, due to economic and educational inequality, would otherwise not have access tertiary training. APS has graduated over 500 young artists over the past two and a half decades. APS has given them the skills to be able support themselves and their families and contribute actively to the creative industries and the local economy. My own mission as a leader of APS has always been to build capacities among students and staff, identifying work-placement opportunities, exhibitions and sales to achieve economic and personal empowerment. Social transformation has become fundamental to our shared educational mission, and as an organisation, we have remained committed to engaging with communities through our transformational arts practices. These include mural painting projects, as well as the Paper Prayers programme, an HIV and Aids awareness and action campaign partnering with local organisations in gender and social advocacy drives. The resilience and longevity of a cultural nongovernmental organisation such as APS can be attributed to its ability to be responsive to the varied challenges of the South African educational and social landscape (Sarra & Berman 2017).

Collaborative printmaking has been at the heart of the project. South African printmakers have exploded onto the world stage, led by William Kentridge and followed by a new generation of young black printmakers, many of them APS graduates. Kentridge has been a consistent supporter, co-publishing work, assisting us to reach new heights of excellence and become economically viable. Collaboration can occur in any domain where people seek to create value together that they could not create through individual effort. In true creative collaborations, everyone emerges with a sense of ownership.

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Figures 1 and 2: Nathi Ndladla printing and binding Triumphs and Laments for William Kentridge (2018)Printing Sizwe Koza’s monotype in the Pro-shop at APS (2017)

APS challenges its graduate artists with ‘paying it forward’ as leaders and agents of change. In some situations, successful alumni get seduced by the marketplace after financial success and do not look back, but become productive players in the creative cultural economy. It is often difficult to balance the reality of young people’s material aspirations and the more idealistic goal of teaching for active citizenship. However, the diverse stories of the careers of artists who have made their way through APS are rich with possibilities and lessons. I present a few examples of artists whose wildest dreams come true (Berman 2017).

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Phillemon Hlungwane joined APS as a young artist from Giyani in 2002, with no prospects. Today he is arguably one of South Africa’s highest earning artists. Hlungwane occasionally returns to APS to co-publish or contribute works for student fundraising benefits.

Figure 3Phillemon Hlungwani: Drypoint with hand-coloring printed by Artist Proof Studio 2018.

Nelson Makamo graduated from APS in 2007. He was a shy young man with no funds from a rural village, who was sent by his teacher to study art at APS. After graduating and working in the APS gallery for two years, he was offered multiple solo exhibitions and has since become internationally renowned. While Makamo has not returned to work with APS, he remains a role model to many aspiring artists of achieving the dream of financial success. In February one of his images was on the cover of Time Magazine and recently he has been an artist in residence at Harvard University in Boston.

Figures 4a and bNelson Makamo, APS alumnus: Cover page of Destiny Man Magazine 2016.Cover page of Time Magazine: “34 people changing how we see our world” (Feb 2019)

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Mongezi Ncaphayi graduated from APS in 2009, worked in the APS gallery as an intern and was supported as an exchange student at Tufts University in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 2012. In spite of his success on the commercial circuit, and his numerous international art exhibitions, he has found more engaged ways to ’give back’ to APS. Now living in Cape Town, he has returned to co-publish a series of work towards an APS exhibition and mentor some emerging young printers. This generates significant funds for the studio and models an active engagement with the next generation of emerging artists.

Fig 5a and b. Mongezi Ncaphayi : Right Here Right Now, colour etching co-published with APS (2017)Mongezi Ncaphayi: Wisdom of Uncertainty, colour etching co-published with APS (2017)

Part of my teaching mission at UJ has been to mentor students to embark on post-gradu-ate studies and assume leadership positions in the art and design industries. Today, three of the APS studio managers and an additional three educators are UJ Visual Arts graduates and were at some point, my research assistants at UJ. They are now active citizens in com-munity change efforts and exemplify the skills that graduates need to lead that process.

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Figure 6APS Management Team 2019 (Left to right)Nathi Ndladla, Pontsho Sikosana (pro-shop), Lydia Zungu (Gallery): APS graduates Rene Mathibe (Educa-tion), Shannin Antonopoulo (Studio Manager), Nathi Simelane (Marketing)

I maintain an active relationship between the academic institution and community by engaging my senior UJ and APS students in collaborative exchanges. This engenders a healthy and productive environment that extends learning across the diversities of race, class, economic status and gender, and fosters leadership. In two cases, master’s students have used their teaching experience at APS to inform their research studies. In addition, my colleague Vedant Nanackchand will consider APS as one of his case studies in his PhD study for human rights awareness through arts education. (I am also delighted that the FADA Gallery is currently hosting an exhibition that showcases this relationship we call co-creation).

I see my challenge of self over the next few years to embrace active mentoring of young colleagues in their positions as the next generation of leaders at UJ and APS who are able to embrace their own sense of agency and possibility. Letting go of my current leadership will enable me more expansive spaces for developing my own artistic voice in the studio.

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THE STORY OF US: CHALLENGES OF HIGHER EDUCATIONThe second part of this lecture focuses on the challenges of Higher Education – the Story of Us.

Research happens in the elite world of higher education, while activism and community engagement happen on the ground. Mark Taylor has recognised the importance of bridging this divide: “Theory without practice is empty; practice without theory is blind” (Taylor 2003: 233). Perhaps, as the American critic Lucy Lippard suggests, it is best to think of ideas rather than theories, which tend to lock “ideas up into boxes to which not all of us have the key.” The best theories evolve organically, from practice (Lippard 2005: xxiii). The stories I will tell unlock some of those theories and contribute to a bottom up approach to an activist education.

It is vital that educators become leaders for change. The student campaigns, including the #FeesMustFall student-led protest movements in 2015 and 2016, brought into sharp focus a growing call for agency. Innovative approaches are needed in order to build on this momentum to achieve social justice and wellbeing not only for students but for other individuals and their communities. It also becomes important to integrate these approaches into curricula and pedagogy as well as livelihoods. As Carolyn Shields so appropriately proposed in her article entitled ‘Leadership for Social Justice Education’, the “need to deconstruct and reconstruct knowledge frameworks that [currently] perpetuate inequity and injustice” is a necessary condition to effecting deep and equitable change.” Shields argues that organisational leaders, educators and students must heed “the call to exhibit moral courage, consistently striving to balance critique with promise” (Shields 2014: 30).

The foundational base for the model of teaching and learning which is geared to build active citizenship starts with the existing knowledge of the learners or the participants, and the connections between them. Brenda Leibowitz and Vivienne Bozalek emphasise this interwovenness of all aspects of teaching and learning in social justice principles and ask, “If students are expected to collaborate and share, can their teachers do that?” (Leibowitz & Bozalek 2015).

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT PROJECTS (CEPI will now present some examples of community engagement projects that I initiated in the university that actively seek to organise themselves around African-centred principles that disrupt a colonial model of hierarchical higher education. In these examples, service learning is not seen as helping the poor in a charitable way, or development as parachuting in to solve a community problem by bringing in the academic experts. The model is community-led, participatory and collaborative. Learning is an exchange between formally educated participants and a rediscovery of African-centred and indigenous knowledge. Visual storytelling forms the heart of the approach in which democratic participation in learning processes empowers people.

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PHUMANI PAPER

In 1995, I read an article in Hand Papermaking magazine about a project initiated by Susan Gosin and her organisation Dieu Donné Papermill in Ecuador in 1992. The papermill made handmade paper from the sisal that was no longer used for coffee bags after multinationals introduced plastic bags into the area. I received a research grant to visit Ecuador in 1996, which led to the beginning of Phumani Paper and the introduction of hand papermaking to South Africa as a new craft industry for job creation.

Phumani Paper has a very long and complex story narrated extensively in Finding Voice (See Berman 2017: 73-106). Briefly, it was established as a Section 21 company in 2000 through government funding awarded to the former Witwatersrand Technikon (UJ) to establish a series of projects using available technologies for Poverty alleviation. The Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the Department of Arts and Culture (DAC), as well as UNESCO, the Ford Foundation, the National Lottery Foundation and the SETAs awarded UJ (former TWR) over R12-million over a period of six to seven years to create and train hand-papermaking as a new cultural industry for South Africa. My students wrote the learning programmes and trained over 1 000 participants across the country. Twenty-one small enterprises in paper craft were established in rural and semi-urban sites in 7 of the 9 provinces, creating 420 jobs. Thirteen years after funding ended, between 6 and 8 projects were still operating independently as small businesses. Five master’s research projects received research support and innovated new research in hand papermaking, including work on archival papers for the art and heritage industry, craft paper from local and invasive plant fibres, and job creation. For example, paper production for William Kentridge’s APS projects, which sources sisal fibre from a small project in Lehurutse in the North West province has supported the Archival Paper Mill @ UJ for over the past five years.

Figures 7a and bSisal fibre pulp-sheets from a Phumani paper project in Lehurutse, NW ProvinceDumisani Dlamini, papermaker at the Phumani Mill @UJ with sisal papers for Kentridge projects (2019)

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As part of my research for my PhD research, the Ford Foundation and NRF funded a research project called Cultural Action for Change, an ambitious initiative to reduce the deaths from HIV and Aids in 16 of the Phumani Paper Projects. Over 25% of the rural women working in Phumani Paper projects had died during the height of the epidemic and before antiretroviral treatment (ARVs) was available. Cultural Action for Change formed the core thesis of my work that used arts-based approaches, including Paper Prayers, Photo Voice, Mapping and murals to successfully reduce the stigma and to promote voluntary testing and counselling. Many of the women involved in the projects became advocates for the use of ARVs in the early days of the campaigns. We found that art can not only lead to change, it can also save lives.

I am inspired by Arjun Appadurai’s (2004) notions of “the capacity to aspire” and “futurity” as navigating a pathway out of poverty. I extend Appadurai’s thinking by applying the process and metaphor of mapping for participants to draw maps and images that can physically navigate pathways out of spiritual, emotional or economic poverty. An example of mapping described in Finding Voice, was through one of my UJ masters students projects in 2010. Ra Hlasane worked with the geographically and economically marginalised community group Kutloano, part of the Phumani Paper collective, on the outskirts of an abandoned mining town in the Free State. We found that if a rural woman in one of the sites could plot her journey to work each day and record the places around her as potential assets, resources or markets, she would be able see herself in relationship to her environment. When the site she passes every day is seen as an asset to her business, that possibility could generate innovation or creative possibilities. This map pinned on the wall of their project, became visually richer, growing with new contacts, clients and collaged materials. Hlasane is currently a lecturer at Wits University and co-founder of Keleketla! Library, a radical centre of cultural activism in Johannesburg.

Figure 8Mapping workshop with Phumani Paper project recording assets (2006)

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Felicia Vukaya, the leader of a Phumani Paper project in Giyani, Limpopo province, provides another example of the power of aspiration and visualising a dream through drawing it. One day I received a cell-phone-text from her, seven years after the project was initiated:

Kim, remember when you came to our village in Elim and we all dreamt where we will be in five years’ time? Some of us said we wanted a car and everyone laughed. You said what colour will your car be? Well today I got my car, and it is blue. (Berman 2017:174).

I also love to tell the leadership story of my former student David Tshabalala as an example of self-creation. He was the first member in his extended family to go to university. He was also one of the first black master’s graduates in our faculty in the former Wits Technikon. David was an excellent practitioner and activist, but he had academic challenges and

was regarded by the system as academically “unsuitable” for a master’s degree. I used his case to present new criteria for evaluating students working in community-based research who contribute to the public good. These assessment criteria are still used by the university’s Department of Visual Art today. Tshabalala’s resilience, tenacity

and achievement were remarkable. He acted as a manager of Phumani Paper as well as a national trainer, and today is the acting head of department of the Visual Art Department at Durban University of Technology. His story leaves the door open for new possibilities to self-create in the ongoing quest to apply the creative arts to foster leadership, what Appadurai identifies as “self-governance, self-mobilization and self-articulation” as vital to achieve “deep democracy” (Appadurai 2004: 82).

Building on the lessons of Cultural Action for Change, I received a four-year National Research Foundation (NRF) grant in 2011 that funded students embedding social change objectives directly into the curriculum of the fourth-year BTech programme at UJ. Since that time, my fourth-year students continue to attend a learning programme as part of their curriculum to expose them to participatory action research, visual methodologies and arts counselling, including empathic listening skills and techniques for facilitating community arts practices.

In this interactive and dialogical forum, we discuss notions of ethics, engagement, and academic hierarchies. The idea of the academic ‘expert’ teaching knowledge to students as opposed to the approach that learners and researchers are co-creators is vigorously debated. Students write short reflections on how they understand and define participatory methodologies, as well as the power of local knowledge through collecting stories through visual methods such as Photo Voice. The notion of visual voice and arts approaches are interrogated and contrasted to inherited paradigms of research. While this module prepares students with the tools for participatory and respectful engagement for community interventions and research, the real experiential learning happens in the field.

Kim, remember when you came to our village in Elim and we all dreamt where we will be in five years’ time? Some of us said we wanted a car and everyone laughed. You said what colour will your car be? Well today I got my car, and it is blue. (Berman 2017:174).

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From 2011 to 2015 we embarked on one-week field trips together with my PhD advisor Lara Allen, who was a co-founder of Tshulu Trust, the research site in HaMakuya, a geographically remote Venda region of Limpopo province. The local health clinic requested support from our UJ research programme in the form of awareness campaigns in the schools and the local clinic on HIV and Aids, TB, bilharzia, gender-based violence and children’s rights. We partnered with Wits Drama-for-Life to design campaigns to work with the home-based carers in the village. They and some teachers were trained to develop and include children in “drama for life plays” that highlight and role-play specific social issues. For example, a play about welcoming a pregnant teen back into school, giving her support, and exposing the risks of child-headed households of orphans as a result of HIV and Aids. Khaya Mchunu, my master’s student, established a self-sustaining sewing collective that still supports the livelihoods of five women and their families in HaMakuya. Khaya is now a lecturer at Durban University of Technology.

Other approaches included Paper Prayers arts workshops in schools and public murals that provided visual aids and resources such as contact numbers of support organisations to assist individuals to seek help from high incidences of rape and domestic violence, which because of cultural stigmas remains largely invisible (Figs).

I understand that years after the UJ intervention ended in 2015, theatre and music is still the primary education method the volunteers use for their health campaigns through the HaMakuya Clinic.

Figures 9 and 10Khaya Mchunu (MTech 2014) with HaMakuya Sewing collective and students painting the Stop Rape mural on the municipal building in HaMakuya (2014)

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More recently, UJ’s Faculty of Art Design and Architecture (FADA) has established a collaboration with the Lotlhakane community near Mahikeng in the North West province. This flagship community-engaged project has become an ideal forum for integrating inter-disciplinary community engagement with a participatory approach. The partnership was the result of a conversation that Dean Freschi had with Lerato Shadi, a graduate artist (currently working in Berlin) when she was awarded the Dignitas award for distinguished alumna, and Kgosi Seatlholo, Paramount Chief and UJ alumnus. FADA Architecture & Visual Art, together with other departments, conducted a feasibility field visit in 2017, and has committed to continue the engagement to co-design and co-build a Communal Care Centre (CCC) at Lotlhakane with the local community over the next four years. Students from across departments will co-design the centre and healing gardens, using local indigenous techniques as well as responsive and sustainable solar energy and contemporary designs.

Figure 11FADA students interviewing the Kgosi (Paramount chief) and elders outside the kgotla (village meeting place) regarding the design of a community centre using indigenous knowledge, Lotlhakane, NW Province (2019)

Students experience structured learning opportunities in cultural contexts very different from their own. Most of all, students learn empathy, and in the process, many emerge from these educational experiences committed to working toward social justice.

We continue to confront the social and economic problems of poverty, deprivation, racism, xenophobia, crime, gender violence, corrupt leadership and political violence. These are all debilitating obstacles to the future wellbeing of South Africans, and the lesson I draw from the Story of Us is a challenge for all of us in the academy to become more active in mobilising agency for change. The transformative power of the arts and humanities can yield richer understandings of humanness and capacities for collaborative problem solving. It seems that publishing articles in peer-reviewed journals that earn subsidy points to maintain the university’s rankings becomes our primary mission in the academy and keeps us detached, critical experts giving opinions from the margins. How can students and academics mobilise the energy of the tension in constructive ways to make decisive strides towards socioeconomic justice?

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THE FIERCE URGENCY OF NOW

In my third and final part of this lecture, I want to talk about the fierce urgency of now. The humanities and the arts are increasingly in crisis yet have never been more needed. What if we saw leaders as artists, and the gathered wisdom of humanities theorists and practitioners as informing progress toward more equal, functional and vivid futures? The seeds of transformative potential were sewn when humankind first started drawing on the caves in which they lived millennia ago. From this we understand across time that belonging and material communication of interdependence is important to human thriving. These first drawings bring connections with others and the possibilities of transformation. American educational reformer John Dewey (1934) calls art the most effective mode of communication that exists, pointing out that identities, beliefs and knowledge are created and transmitted through the arts.

In 2013, I was invited by Professor Michelle LeBaron to be among an inspirational team of researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver that explored the question of resilience and peace-building through the arts from interdisciplinary perspectives. This extended to four years of one-month fellowships and two colloquia at Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS) that focused on the theme ‘On Being Human Today’. In this context, we examined the renewed relevance of arts to humanise social relations and catalyse transformation. The emerging field of Social Transformation and Arts engages change agents, artists and cultural leaders, thought leaders and policy makers in developing and implementing innovative and potent approaches to enhancing the wellbeing of communities and the quality of human life. One recent outcome was the book Changing our Worlds: Art as Transformative Practice which I co-authored with Le Baron and two other STIAS research fellows. Just last month I was invited to be part of a team that will use our findings of transformative arts practices, to apply in the preservation of the Aquifer in the Cape Flats as a sustainable water source for the city of Cape Town. The challenge is to build social cohesion in a fractured and deeply conflicted landscape through collaboration and exchange using the arts.

Conflict and managing conflict are, after all, an essential part of human and natural existence. Without them, life stops – not only bloodshed and suffering, but also wellbeing and progress. The key to conflict fluency – which is the ability to befriend even the most threatening conflicts – is to understand it as a force that brings change. LeBaron emphasises the potency of this symbolic domain. Symbolic aspects of conflict are often what keep conflicts stuck and because of that art is powerful as a way of negotiating conflict (LeBaron et al 2018:32).

Strangely, universities, sites of learning, often turn away from pedagogical opportunities in the face of intense conflict. For example: in South Africa, artworks have often provoked political controversy as part of ongoing negotiation that underlines their symbolic potency. Recently, the toppling of the Cecil John Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the burning of the artworks there sparked hostility and outrage, leading to the destruction, removal and censorship of various artworks on the campus. The students’ actions led the UCT Vice-Chancellor to remove approximately 74 works of art from the university’s collection by some of the country’s acclaimed artists “on the grounds of their vulnerability to potential damage” or because “some members of the campus community have identified certain works of art as offensive to them – for cultural, religious or political reasons” (Powell 2017). These responses by the UCT administration were not about art or learning. The students’ and university workers’ anger and frustration resulted in violence

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and destruction of property. If both parties had been open to what LeBaron and I termed “aesthetic negotiation”, there might have been more integrative and satisfying outcomes for both sides. Shutting down dissenting voices with strong-arm tactics is damaging on all sides.

Given their contested meanings, how can we use the symbolic power of artworks as a pedagogical strategy for repair, healing and social justice? Healthy democracies must be spacious enough for aesthetic negotiation to shape and be shaped by ideals of social justice, so that art works and processes themselves can become focal points for communal cultivation of moral imagination (Lederach 2004). When an art object’s political and social resonance sparks debate and protests, it becomes a leverage point from which understandings and dialogue can be deepened. Our best avenue to navigate perilous conflict may be through respectful and generative aesthetic negotiation, drawing energy from the potency of artworks.

During the disruption to university campuses as a result of the #feesmustfall protests in 2015 and 2016 I partnered with Professor Shahana Rasool in UJ’s Department of Social Work. We met with other concerned academics to design a creative response that would stimulate dialogue and provide support responding to the trauma experienced by students and staff. The proposal sought to facilitate a series of arts workshops we called Creative Conversations using Paper Prayers that would provide creative spaces for dialogue and support. Unfortunately, this did not take place on campus due to security restrictions, but workshops were offered in small pockets in the classroom and off-campus. I believe these kinds of initiatives could be effective if integrated into a greater commitment to engaging students more directly and with shared public purpose.

Figure 12Making a Paper Prayer

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THE ACADEMY NOW

In trying to unravel the dilemma of the dislocation between the 4IR and humanism, Achille Mbembe asks: Who is the citizen in these rapidly changing times? He contends that “the humanistic and Enlightenment notion of the rational, liberal deliberative subject is being replaced by a new archetype of human primarily concerned with consumption”. He argues that these new humans will be “constituted through and within digital technologies and computational media”. He continues: “In a world set on objectifying everybody and every living thing in the name of profit, the erasure of the political by capital is the real threat. The transformation of the political into [the corporate] raises the risk of the elimination of the very possibility of politics” (Mbembe 2016).

This issue goes to the heart of the crisis in the humanities. In his 2018 book Awakening Democracy through Public Work: Pedagogies of Empowerment, Harry Boyte advocates for citizen politics and public work as “antidotes to hopelessness”, emphasising a constructive understanding of politics as the work of building a common life across sharp lines of difference (Boyte 2018:6). Polarised politics in America and elsewhere have escalated political crises, “objectifying everybody and every living thing in the name of profit” (Mbembe 2016). Boyte suggests that emphasising public aspects of work helps institutions look outward, opening spaces for collaboration across differences. Public work, writes Boyte, counters “the culture of irresponsibility that arises when citizens are seen and see themselves simply as consumers” (Boyte 2018:6).

The theme of increasingly technocratic social spaces also infuses the academy. Professor Tshilidzi Marwala, Vice Chancellor of UJ, cautions against “human irrelevance in a new automated world” (Krige 2018). He cautions that 4IR, “like each of its predecessors comes with a very real shadow side, which will be felt most clearly in the way in which we work, or more likely, don’t work. Marwala elaborates, predicting that “the fourth industrial revolution requires a new prism through which to view the world – with new theories of psychology and economics being paramount to the well-being of humanity” (Marwala 2017).

Art’s transformative power can yield richer understandings of humanness and capacities for collaborative problem solving. Today the humanities become even more vital resources for inculcating essential values in youth. Emergent arts processes are a needed counterpoint to forces that would reduce humans to algorithms and democracies to technocracies.

Current global emphasis in primary and higher education on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) makes developing new educational theories more difficult. Yet, a growing movement recognises the need to value artists’ and designers’ expertise on innovation and creativity, reconceptualising STEM as STEAM by bringing ‘art’ into the acronym. Yet, the hegemony of the sciences continues to edge out the arts and humanities in universities.

The timing could not be worse. While climate change, disease, economic stress, war and other social and environmental crises have scientific dimensions, none of these is without aesthetic and ethical aspects. None can be addressed effectively without our whole selves, both individual and collective. Humanities scholars look differently for answers than their more technically oriented colleagues. Listening to the silence between the notes that makes music compelling or the impact of what is not stated directly in a powerful poem, arts and humanities scholars notice nuance, possibility, connective tissue and innovative potentials that arise in creative practices.

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I am more convinced than ever about the central importance of arts and humanities in the academy, as well as in social and public life. The key is to find a way toward curiosity and away from defensiveness or a sense of threat. The arts show us how. The fierce urgency of now is to galvanise that tension of the crisis in the humanities and interweave transformative approaches in responding to the challenges currently facing our human family.

CONCLUSION

To conclude; I want to argue for the idea that, as citizens, artists and educators, we need to be able to dream of different possibilities for our future and inspire others to join us in this journey. Appadurai stresses the value of “futurity” as a cultural capacity, in his recognition that “by bringing the future back in ... we are surely in a better position to understand how people actually navigate their social spaces” (Appadurai 2004:67). In this context, futurity is the ability to continually grow and change and is thus essentially about sustainability as a practical outcome of aspiration. I believe that creative practice is a core component of self-actualisation and should be widely accepted a fundamental pillar of freedom and democracy. South Africa is still a young democracy. It is pushing the limits and experiencing moments of chaos and threat. If meaningful change is to be sustained in order to achieve full expression of human rights and freedom, members of our society require complete participation in that freedom of expression. In a political climate of intolerance and fear, the arts can be harnessed to creatively and productively engage citizens to realise their own democratic future (Berman 2017: 182).

The arts have a role to play in building legitimate political leaders and institutions, harness productive resources for development, manage and negotiate conflict, assist in recovery from trauma, and enhance the agency of individuals and communities in tackling inequality and injustice.

I pledge to use this hat and gown bestowed upon me today for academic activism and mentorship; and to continue developing curriculum and pedagogy to support and develop active citizenship skills in the service of social justice.

REFERENCES

Artist Proof Studio website: http://www.artistproofstudio.co.za/about-aps Accessed April 10 2019.Appadurai, A. 2004. The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition in Culture and Public Action, edited by V Rao & M Walton. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press: 59-84.Berman, Kim. 2017. Finding Voice: A Visual Arts Approach to Engaging Social Change Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Boyte, Harry C. 2018. Awakening Democracy through Public work: Pedagogies of Empowerment. Nashville: Vanderbildt University Press.Dewey, John. 1939. Art as Experience. New York: Capricorn Books, 35–37 https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/an-experience.htm>. [Accessed 20 February 2019].Ganz, M. 2009. “Why Stories Matter: The art and craft of social change. Reprinted from Sojourners Magazine.Available at http://www.climateaccess.org/resource/why-stories-matter-art-and-craft-social-change. Accessed 10 April 2018.Ganz, M. 2013. “What is organizing?” Organizing notes. Harvard Kennedy School, Spring 2014.Available at http://www.harvardseed.org/ Accessed 10 April 2018.LeBaron, M. 2003. Bridging Cultural Conflict: A New Approach for a Changing World. San Francisco: John Wiley

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LeBaron, M and Sarra, J. (eds) 2018. Changing Our Worlds: Arts as Transformative Practice. Stellenbosch: Sun Press and STIAS.Leibowitz, B and Bozalek V. 2015. “The scholarship of teaching and learning from a social justice perspective. Teaching in Higher Education 21(2):1-14. Routledge. Krige, Nadia. 2018. “Human irrelevance’ in a new automated world.” UCT News, 11 October https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2018-10-11-human-irrelevance-in-a-new-automated-world [accessed 15 December 2018].Lederach JP. 2004. The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace . Oxford: Oxford University Press.Lippard, LR. 2005. Shaming the Devil in Critical Perspectives: Writings on Art and Civic Dialogue, edited by C Atlas & P Korza. Washington, DC: Americans for the Arts: xvii-xxix.Marwala, Tshilidzi. 2017. “SA must connect to the fourth industrial revolution” first published in The New Age (South Africa), on 27 December 2017. https://www.uj.ac.za/newandevents/Pages/Opinion-SA-must-connect-to-the-fourth-industrial-revolution.aspx [accessed 15 December 2018].Mbembe, Achille 2016, The age of humanism is ending. https://mg.co.za/article/2016-12-22-00-the-age-of-humanism-is-ending [accessed 15 December 2018].Mbembe, Achille 2017, Negative messianism marks our times. https://mg.co.za/article/2017-02-03-00-negative-messianism-marks-our-times [accessed 20 November 2018].Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies. https://pwias.ubc.ca [Accessed April 10 2019].Powell, I. 2017. ‘Behind UCT’s Removed Art: the Writing on the Wall’ Artimes August 2 http://arttimes.co.za/behind-ucts-removed-art-writing-wall-ivor-powell/ [accessed 15 December 2018]Shields, C. 2014. Ethical leadership: A critical transformative approach. In CM Branson & SJ Gross (eds). Handbook of ethical educational leadership. New York: Routledge.Sen, A. 1999. Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS) http://stias.ac.za [Accessed April 10 2019].Taylor, M. 2003. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.Zolli, A. and Healy, AM. 2012. Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back. New York: Free Press.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Appreciation to Pamela Allara, Marie Ström and Robyn Sassen for their edits and comments.Thank you to Artist Proof Studio for some of the images.

KIM BERMAN

Short Biographic Details

Kim Berman is a Professor in Visual Art at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) and Executive Director of Artist Proof Studio (APS), a community-based printmaking centre in Newtown, Johannesburg which she co-founded APS with the late Nhlanhla Xaba in 1991. She received her B.F.A. from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1981 and her M.F.A. from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/ Tufts University, USA in 1989. She completed her PhD at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2009. She has lectured and exhibited widely in South Africa and internationally. She is committed to engaging arts for social change through her activism and teaching. Her book: Finding Voice: A visual approach to engaging change, is published by the University of Michigan Press.

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https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=KiT2jeYAAAAJ&hl=en See: Artist Proof Studio: http://www.artistproofstudio.co.za https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSS93ZCO3qU