INSTALLATIONS
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01
THE ZAMA ZAMA PROJECT
The Zama Zama Project is a flexible multi-media, multi-channel installation that can be configured according to the spatial dimensions and capacities of the venue. Comprised of short videos, prints of various formats and dimensions, with supplementary text that can be accessed as online chapbooks or performed live, the Project is ongoing and relentlessly changing in relation to the situation of its installation and the unfolding lives of its subjects.
The work is the outcome of collaborations on many levels. Among its many contributors, are:
Ebrahim Hajee, cinematographer
Pascal Troemel, editor
Musa Radebe, sound recordist
Dungeon Beach, post-production studio
Christina Wood, Binnacle Films
Rogers 'Bhekani' Mumpande, underground camera
Prosper Ncube, underground camera
Darren 'Jahman' Munenge, underground camera
Fanie Magwaza
Sarah Muchimba
Noel Musokotwane & Tanya Nyathi, translators
Cora Bailey
In different configurations, major installations of the Zama Zama Project and its works have occurred at the Slought Foundation (Philadelphia, 2020), Berlin (Official Selection, Berlinale Expanded Forum, 2021), Montreal (Black Box Theater, 2020).
For more information on the films that can be combined as part of any installation, see the page on this site dedicated to Film and Video.
Documentary is witness, testament and evidence. It is of the order of knowledge, even when it is experimental, and exposing the limits of knowledge or the aporias and violent effacements of history. Poetry, by contrast, aims to cultivate the 'creative faculty to imagine that which we know,' as P.B. Shelley once wrote ('A Defense of Poetry'). The poems and still imagery of this sequence, entitled 'The Deep,' are intended to supplement and reveal the poetic intention of the assemblage-as-work, which does not aspire to completion or finality, but rather asks people to re-imagine what they think they can know on the basis of documentary, and to listen differently.
The prints that form part of the Zama Zama Project are variously formatted and framed or unframed. Those images drawn from the filmwork are jointly credited to the camera operators.
Some of these prints are available for purchase. Inquiries may be made via the contacts page of this site.
The trio of poems from the Berlinale installation can be accessed via the button at the bottom of this page (click on 'The Deep: 3 Poems').
Rosalind Morris and Ebrahim Hajee
En route, Rosalind Morris and Ebrahim Hajee
Shadowland, Rosalind Morris and Ebrahim Hajee
Rosalind Morris and Ebrahim Hajee