CAN WE SING TOGETHER AGAIN, OLD FRIEND?

What do they tell us – the gesture, the breath, the recurrent fragrances of Mawlid nights? Where do they come from – the familiar chants, the smell of roses, the muffled voices of Allah’s worshippers?

Thania Petersen is a storyteller who appeals to sensory narratives. She tells a story of rites and emotion, wherein words might matter less than rekindled feelings. First, cut the lemon tree leaves. Then, smoke it with luban. Add musk, scented oils, and orange blossom water. Finally, split the mixture into thousands of tiny organza bags.

Hands fiddle around, tongues get loose, words start flowing, dhikr or jiker begins and the tradition survives.

This practice dates back to the Southeast Asian populations who were forcibly displaced to the Cape by Dutch colonizers in the 17th century. The fragrances, though, are reminiscent of North Africa, and tell us a different story of cultural and religious interactions between Asia and Africa. What matters to the artist is the movement, the endless circulation of sounds, melodies, rites, and rhythms that have survived through the ages and across the seas, carried by travelers, messengers, prisoners and displaced people.

While identity has become an obsession, the crucial question lies elsewhere: in what is moving and fleeting, rather than identical; in what is fluid and intangible. Thania Petersen makes the answer a constant quest. She draws from ancestral memory, digging up myths and symbols that she resignifies and sublimates to write up a spiritual rather than national history, and to carry, in the relentless repetition of the gesture and the breath, the search for one’s origins, for the divine, for the being as being, for the One.

Through the creation or transgression of reality, the artist takes us on a healing journey. For we must heal from the shame, fight the fear, embrace the absurdity, and accept nuance and doubt. Each one of her pieces carries simultaneously both pain and grace, heritage and future, and the idea of the absolute necessity to restore the forgotten bond.

It is time, she whispers, to free ourselves from suffocating narratives – dominant as well as victimizing. Another story can be told, where the key will be friendship and remembrance.

“Let’s sing together again, old friend.” It might be the only way to recover dignity.

Camille Lévy Sarfati, curator of the exhibition