Threnody for the Khoisan

Garth Erasmus is a visual artist, sound artist and musician whose work focuses on South Africa’s First Nation people, the KhoiSan, which is his heritage. He is best known for his innovative use of materials and has extensive experience as a facilitator and teacher. His audio-related explorations and experimentations utilize the self-made instruments and sound objects he has created from mostly recycled materials and based on the inspiration from indigenous knowledge systems.

He taught at the Zonnebloem Children’s Art Centre, District Six in Cape Town, from 1982-1997. He is a former chairperson of Africa South Art Initiative (ASAI) and during the Apartheid-era was a founder member of art projects such as Vakalisa Artists Group; Community Reflections Arts Performance Group; and is one of the founding artists of Greatmore Street Artists Studio, and the Thupelo Artists Workshop-Cape Town. One of his large-scale mural artworks is included in an installation depicting First Nation peoples of the Western Cape at Artscape Theatre, Cape Town. His audio installation, Autshomato,  is at the Robben Island Museum (Nelson Mandela Gateway, Cape Town). It is based on the life of the first man to be imprisoned on Robben Island by the Dutch colonizers in 1659, and the only one to have ever escaped.

Garth is part of the indigenous activist music and poetry group, Khoi Khonnexion, who toured European music theatre festivals in 2018-19 with the production House of Falling Bones on the Namibian genocide of the Nama and Herero people by the German colonialists. He is also part of the free-jazz group Riempie Vasmaak.

Garth’s sonic collaborations with flutist Esther Marié Pauw enacts forms of decolonial aesthesis, and interventionist curating amidst publics, institutions, art, and music-making. They have presented sound events on Roesdorp forced-removals (2015), on Dutch-Khoi colonial encounters (Khoi’npsalms, 2018, with organist Francois Blom), and Something in Return (on DARK DARK GALLERY by Greg de Cuir Jr., 2020). In 2020 Garth initiated the Africa Open Improvisation Collective at Stellenbosch University’s Africa Open Institute (AOI). The idea behind this decolonial exercise is to create a nexus between Western Classical and contemporary indigenous African musics and break down heirarchical structures and attitudes. The collective’s free improvisations can be heard on SoundCloud.  Garth is also a member of the Khoisan Gypsy Band whose theatre production Die Poet Wie’s Hy? dedicated to the work of SA poet Adam Small won Best Production at the Stellenbosch Word Festival 2020. Garth was part of the group exhibition Oscillations at Akademie der Kunste, Berlin. This SA-German project looked at artists` sonic inquiries and practices.

A selection of his music can be heard on SoundCloud and Africa South Art Initiative.

With Opened Mouths: The Podcast is produced by Agnes Etherington Art Centre in partnership with Queen’s University’s campus radio station, CFRC 101.9 FM.

Hosted by Qanita Lilla
Produced by Danuta Sierhuis
Episodes are edited and mixed by Chancelor Maracle, CFRC 101.9 FM
Original music by Jameel3DN, produced by Elroy “EC3” Cox III and commissioned by Agnes Etherington Art Centre, 2021
The graphic for the podcast is created by Vincent Perez
Recorded at Agnes Etherington Art Centre and distributed by CFRC 101.9 FM, Queen’s University

Season three of With Opened Mouths: The Podcast is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts; the Ontario Arts Council; the George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund, Queen’s University; and the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Fund.