NOMBUSO MATHIBELA

FLIGHT TIME LETTERS AND SONGS

Hi My Friend,

There are a few things I wish to share with you, under different circumstances we would not need words this desperately to express things that have always lived outside of this form of articulation but this distress and spectacle that has formed around us has left me with little choice. These are some thoughts and sounds that I hope can help us both hold on to the sacred space of imagination and allow us to move through this forced landing. As we both sit and coddle the questions of our lives, I only ask that we do this in total furious rejection of naturalised isolation. While I recognise that movement can no longer freely express itself in physical space its distortion, however can only be an invitation for other extensions to arrive.

The body needs to be met through another avenue of motion.

If you and I think of physical space as a body, we could say that right now a parasite has descended and made a home in the body’s stomach. It has taken up so much space that there is no longer an appetite in sight and the body unwillingly meets itself at the mercy of this parasite’s starving effects.

So the body needs to be entered through another avenue of motion.

Motion as the social productive force that undergirds rhythm.
Rhythm being this momentum propelled by a collective instinct for worlds unknown and imbedded traditions. Rhythm has always had a fugitive and disruptive presence that questions the stability of border logic technologies and colonial infrastructure.

You and I have always had rhythm and it cannot be contained by this strange moment happening to us. Rhythm as a portal for mobile consciousness and a space for surrealist expressions of the unconscious, otherwise ways of living across borders, across pandemics and across the loneliness that has made a home in us.

Wherever you and I may be, here is a piece of momentum through sound, may it keep you strong and vulnerable to your power in isolation, may it hold you in your vortex, lovingly, as we chase for hope and love each other through this new world.

Yours across them all,

A Friend.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Nombuso Mathibela is a Johannesburg based feminist educator, writer, vinyl collector and selector. Her sonic research interest span across folk, anti-colonial, nationalist and feminist music histories, and political aesthetics. She is part of an African ecofeminist collective that works on anti-capitalist ecological justice political education and histories.