Twelve (Queer) Labours

Abstract

In the first six months of 2022, the small South African town of Makhanda became the location for a series of queer public performance interventions. These interventions were framed as acts of civic labour and involved a diverse group of queer artists, students and allies labouring alongside local artisans and citizens. The project, entitled 12 Labours, was conceived by performance artist Gavin Krastin, and created in collaboration with the collective of labourers, who appeared, guerrilla-style, dressed as garden gnomes in brightly coloured overalls and with pointed hats, in several public places throughout the town. During these once-off interventions, the gnomes would work together, often for several hours, performing a range of mundane tasks for an incidental audience of passers-by. This paper positions the project as a departure point for wider consideration of some of the ways in which mundane acts of public labour, when approached as opportunities for queer performance, can become spaces for the expression of queer transgressive joy. The discussion critically reflects on three of the twelve labours: the communal repainting of a bus stop, the planting of a public garden and the laying of flowers in a derelict cemetery, as a means to consider how the public performance of mundane tasks by queer artists presents an intriguing opportunity for the performance of queer joy, and Black queer joy in particular, in contexts and spaces not typically associated with queerness and with queer bodies. The discussion also considers how the archiving of these labours, as a public exhibition of filmed documentation, constitutes an ‘archive of feelings’ (Cvetkovich 2003) that seeks to document experiences conjured through the performance of mundane labour, rather than merely archiving the act itself.

Notes

1 The University Currently Known as Rhodes, or UCKAR, is a name sometimes used by researchers and academics in reference to the institution officially known as Rhodes University. Its usage began in 2015 after student protests calling for the decolonizing of institutions of higher learning erupted on campuses across South Africa. As a university named after the British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes, many students and academics have continually called for a renaming of the institution. Until such time as the name is officially changed, those who support the renaming use this phrasing to refer to this institution.

2 12 Labours combines both intimate and public labours. Some of these are performed by Krastin, alone, while others are presented as collective public interventions. For more information on the project and those labours not discussed in this article, see the video trailer https://bit.ly/3Tqrj8s or contact the artist directly through their website www.gavinkrastin.com.

3 I use the term ‘colonial hauntologies’ in line with Ayo Coly’s theorizing of hauntology, after Derrida (1994), in her book Postcolonial Hauntologies: African women’s discourses of the female body (2019). Coly uses this term in reference to the lingering, often racist, ideological perceptions of the black female body that continue to haunt its representation and interpretation in postcolonial art created by black women.