tectonik:TOMBWA

- CAFÉ MITO DA UTOPIA

How do we write history in contexts, such as Southern Africa, where history has been erased,
manipulated and changed by competing regimes of power?

Can we use personal narratives and indigenous research methodologies to challenge Western
constructs of historic truth?

Introduction: tectonik:TOMBWA

In 1983, Angolan anthropologist Augusto Zita N’Gonguenho initiated a research project in the
southwest coast of Angola, analysing the ruined history of colonialism “utopian” ideals, by
excavating the rementants of colonial infrastructure in the area. For his research Zita used both
scientific and non-western research methodologies, such as the divinatory practices that stem from
Angolan knowledge systems.

Unfortunately Augusto Zita’s research was interrupted by his sudden death in an apparent car
accident on the desert road from Namibe to the port of Tombwa, in 1987.

Research suggests that the National Intelligence Service (NIS), the secret services of apartheid South
Africa were behind his death. Links were found between Prof. Augusto’s death and operations by
the NIS to camouflage South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Programme.

Angolan composer and sound artist Victor Gama was able to obtain and analyse Augusto Zita’s
partially recovered notebooks and since 2006 he has been retracing and reenacting his research
trajectory through what's left of his fragmented fieldnotes.

This has manifested in tectonik:TOMBWA - a multifaceted research, performance and archival
project by Gama that evokes and explores Zita’s work through instrument design, musical
composition and performance, documentary film and visual art and anthropology. Over the years,
the archive has grown to incorporate new research sites in South Africa, the Antarctic Peninsula and
Deception Island in Antarctica, and screenings and live performances of tectonik:TOMBWA have
been seen around the world, including in Portugal, Angola, South Africa, and the USA.

























tectonik:TOMBWA - CAFÉ MITO DA UTOPIA

Cafe Mito da Utopia is a new iteration of the project that takes the form of a pop up cafe, a
multimedia art installation, a research laboratory, an improvised performance space and radio
studio, as well as an itinerant museum constructed in the ruin of a colonial road maintenance house
on the Southwest coast of Angola.

Part of the ongoing research into the work of Zita, it brings together researchers, artists, musicians
and local communities to retrace Zita's journey in the territory, study and exhibit his field notes and
sketches and reenact his radical research methodologies to challenge "utopian" Western colonial
(and Postcolony) strategies of expansion, development and progress built on injustice, inequality,
extraction and violence.

Operating out of and against colonialism’s ruins and amidst its ecological destruction, the projects
seeks gaps and cracks in the apparatus – learning from the environment, indigenous knowledges,
and spiritual traditions, still alive in nature's rebellion and resistance, and voiced in marginalized
artistic practices: cooking and sharing food, and oral traditions and sound, from voice to music to the
noise of wind in the bombed remains of telephone poles.


TEAM

Victor Gama is a composer and designer of contemporary musical instruments for new music
working out of Luanda, Sintra and Brussels. With an MA in Music Technology, Digital Organology at
The Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design of London Metropolitan University, Gama
has produced projects in his home country, Angola, such as Tsikaya, the first digital music archive in
the interior of the country and Odantalan (2002), an international musical exchange and residency in
Luanda that included musicians and art historians from Colombia, Brazil, Cuba, Angola and Portugal.
Among his most relevant premieres are 'Rio Cunene' composed for the Kronos Quartet and staged at
the Carnegie Hall (2010), Rio Cubango commissioned by the Prince Claus Fund presented at the
Concertgebouw Amsterdam (2011) and his multimedia piece Vela 6911 premiered at the
Harris Theater commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra/ MusicNOW (2012). Vela 6911
premiered in Europe at the Grand Auditorium Gulbenkian in Lisbon (2013). Gama's multimedia
opera 3 thousand RIVERS commissioned by the Prince Claus Fund and the Gulbenkian Foundation
premiered in Lisbon (2016) and Bogota (2017). A prelude of his current on-going composition Aisa
Tanaf: the Book of Winds premiered at the Kennedy Center (2017) with musicians from the National
Symphony Orchestra directed by Edwin Outwater.

Paula Nascimento is an architect and curator with degrees from the Architectural Association School
of Architecture and from the LSB University in London. Has collaborated with architecture studios in
Oporto and in London before funding with Stefano Pansera Beyond Entropy Africa
[https://www.paulanascimento.com/en/about/#beyond-entropy-africa] in 2011 – a research-based
collective network that operates on the fields of architecture-urbanism-visual arts and geopolitics.
Paula has also been a consultant on a variety of projects including the Angola Pavilion for Expo
Milano 2015 and often collaborates with different artist institutions and collectives, both on the
continent and abroad. Paula curates the African Galleries at Arco Lisbon 2019 and 2020 and is a
founding member of Colectivo Pés Descalços [https://www.paulanascimento.com/en/about/#pes-
descalcos], a Luanda based multi-disciplinary collective developing projects in the cultural field.

Paulo Azevedo is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Luanda. He works worldwide, directing
cinema, television, advertising, video art, and photographic projects. Paulo Azevedo studied film at
the Afda Film School in Cape Town, South Africa. Currently, he teaches Film Appreciation and Film
Editing at the Metropolitan University of Angola. Having lived in Luanda, Lisbon, London, and Cape
Town his work explores different frames and he uses diverse cinema techniques in his short movies.
Paulo’s work engages with society at large and with key issues that confront us all today – he makes
art that matters. Paulo’s work is socially and politically focused, using different media (photography,
video, film) to express his vision and confront critical questions, such as democracy, civil rights,
corruption, environmental problems, and capitalism. His art is optimistic because he believes one
person can change the world, even if that world is a short film!

Stacy Hardy is a writer, an editor with pan African collective Chimurenga and teacher in creative
writing at Rhodes University in South Africa. Her writing has appeared in a wide range of
publications, including Chimurenga, Ctheory, Bengal Lights, Evergreen Review, Drunken Boat,
Joyland, Black Sun Lit, and New Orleans Review and a collection of her short fiction, Because the
Night, was published in 2015. She regularly collaborates with Angolan composer Victor Gama on
multimedia works that have been performed around the world and her experimental performance
piece, “Museum of Lungs”, created together with Laila Soliman, Neo Muyanga and Nancy Mounir,
premiered in Johannesburg (2018), followed by dates in Europe (2018 - 2019). She is currently
working on a research-and-performance-based collaborative endeavor with Chicago-based
anthropologist Kaushik Sunder Rajan and South African musician Neo Muyanga exploring
biographies and geographies of breath, through a focus on the colonial histories and postcolonial
politics. She is also writing the libretto for a new opera with composer Bushra El-Turk and director
Laila Soliman, which is booked for Aria’s festival, Royal Opera House Londen and Festival d’Aix-en-
Provence, among others, in 2021.

















A CAFE IN THE DESERT

Cafe Mito da Utopia brings together artists and researchers from diverse disciplines and local
communities to expose and challenge the dominant modes of colonial and postcolonial thinking and
practice which have produced catastrophic results for the planet and its species, and in their stead
to forge new, imaginative, improvised yet sustainable and community driven ways of thinking and
knowing about ourselves, our worlds, and the many imbricate relations through which life on earth
comes into being and dies.

Refusing the traditional boundaries between science and art, Western and indeginous knowledge,
and art and daily life, the project seeks to forge new community driven and communal forms of
practice, that we believe are necessary to address the complexities of the current global ecological
catastrophe.

Working from the local animist belief that plants and animals also have spirits, together with
contemporary forms of cutting edge forensic ecology, we will engage the environment (plant,
animals, rocks, sand and even the wind) as an active participant in the project, and as a witness to
the destructive power of colonial expansion and postcolonial development. We will place its voices
in direct conversations with the living memories of local communities,to tell stories that strengthen
ecological response-ability in a world characterized by ongoing environmental irresponsibility that is
both appallingly murderous and spectacularly profitable.




















HISTORY

In 1983, late Angolan anthropologist Augusto Zita N’Gonguenho initiated a research project on a
road along the southwest coast of Angola. Using both scientific and non-western methods such as
divinatory practices and animism rooted in Angolan knowledge systems, Zita’s research interrogated
and critiqued colonialism’s “utopian” vision of expansionism, development and progress built on
extraction, oppression and violence.

His unfinished thesis titled “An anthropology of Utopia: formation of Utopian identities” sought to
understand colonial expansionism’s devastating impact on his country’s people and environment by
analysing closely what motivated it.

Working from a number of “utopian” texts including Thomas Moore’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s
The New Atlantis to more recent texts, all of them from European philosophers, historians and
thinkers, Augusto Zita deducted a pattern of thought, a system of values and a vision that, he
argued, led to the administration system, urban planning, infrastructure and social organization of
his country during colonialism from Portugal.

Zita never completed his research - he died mysteriously durig a fieldtrip in what many believe was
an assasination by apartheid South African security forces.

Since 2006 Angolan composer and musician Victor Gama has been retracing and reenacting his
research trajectory through what's left of his fragmented field notes.
















THE CAFÉ

A continuation of this research and a new sub-set project of tectonik: Tombwa, Cafe Mito da Utopia,
will bring together researchers and artists from diverse disciplines, as well as the local community to
construct a temporary pop up cafe in the ruin of one of the Portuguese colonial road maintenance
(or Cantoneiros) houses in the desert of Namibe, along the road from the city of Namibe to the port
of Tombwa where Zita based his research.

Our aim is to draw on Zita’s thesis and research methodologies to reveal how the destructive
practices of colonialism expansionism have been replicated and exacerbated through global
multinational expansion, communist industrialisation and capitalist development strategies.
People and nature are integrally connected, and woven into notions of body, landscape, society and
nation. We seek to explore these complex entanglements, and how they are defined by the
ideologies and systems of thought which govern them.

Drawing on Zita’s thesis that colonialism was a utopian project, we engage the ideals of
“development” and progress, and explore the destructive force and ultimate failure of their utopian
pretensions. In their stead the project proposes a different approach rooted in local knowledge and
expansive community practice, that views nature as an actor and active participant. Prior to the cafe
opening, we will camp at the site and work with local artists, artisans and builders from Tombwa to
build a temporary structure on top of the existing ruin.

A functioning cafe that serves good coffee, locally brewed beer and local food prepared by women
from local communities, and provides eco friend toilet facilities for users of the road, Cafe Mito da
Utopia will also be:

An exhibition space that curates and displays Zita’s field notes and sketches, making his research
and thinking available to the local audiences, and placing it in conversation with photography, video
and audio recording and a short film developed during Gama’s previous research, as well the
growing archive of new research that will be conducted over the course of the project. The
exhibition will tell Zita’s story, and explore his radical thesis and methodologies. It will also celebrate
the area, its varieties of landscapes, and the resilience and creativity of its environment and people.

An itinerant museum where we share our research findings with local communities and engage with
people living in the area who have additional knowledge that can enrich the project.
Here we ask: how does one curate a museum in the absence of an archive, when voices such as
Zita’s have been silenced and peoples knowledge excluded? How do we know, 'without the thread
of history? We thus seek to forge a new speculative approach that challenges the division between
fiction and fact, storytelling, history and museumocology. Our aim is to create a space to look, hear,
and experience the language and facts of history and science as more than evidence, but the stuff
we are made of, the songs and silence of life itself.

A research laboratory that reenacts and reimagines Zita’s research methodologies in the present so
as to explore the inevitable decay and ruin of colonialism’s unsustainable “utopian” vision; draw
parallels between colonial expansion and postcolonial development in order to critique the later;
and map the ongoing ecological change that has taken place in the region in the 38 years since Zita
conducted his research. The lab will also invite local communities to directly participate in the
research by recording the living memories and experiences of those who both use the road and live
in the area.

A performance space and online radio studio that invites local musicians and performers to jam
along with us, and broadcasts talks, interviews and performances to the world via the internet so as
to build the kind of local and international solidarity that is needed to address pressing ecological
concerns and transform the socio-economic hierarchies that caused it.

A community kitchen that prepares the food sold in the cafe and celebrates marginalised forms of
women’s knowledge. The kitchen brings together local women to explore food as knowledge,
cooking and preparing food as performance and sharing food as a way to bring diverse people
together and create new communities. We hope to explore food as a carrier and communicator of
history and knowledge in and of the area, and animate its direct relationship with science, nature,
ecology and the environment. The kith will also document and perform traditional recipes, research
food security in the region and celebrate the extraordinary improvisational skills and creativity of
women as they continue to adapt and forge new strategies in the kitchen, to make life and to life
with joy and creativity in the face of ongoing destruction of traditional food chains, resources and
communities.

A roving anthropology conference - we are in conversations to partner with the University of the
Western Cape in South Africa to host a small mobile anthology conference and workshop with
leading anthropologists from around the world. Drawing on Zita’s work, the conference will explore
the moral and political horizons of anthropological inquiry, and the creative and transformative
potential of an experimental practice. This will be an independent but affiliated component to the
project, and UWC will take full responsibility for organising and funding it.

The cafe will open for 2 weeks, during which we will run the kitchen, serve beverages, conduct
research and roll out a flexible and ever evolving programme of activities and events, that are open
to the public.
The construction of the cafe, its activities together with our research will be documented via film,
photography and sound recordings.






















CONTEXT

Situated in the ecologically rich Namib Province, in Southwestern Angola, close to the port cities of
Namibe and Tombwa, the project will draw attention to the ecological destruction of both colonial
expansionism and reveal how this is continued in the contemporary via capitalist industrial
development projects including industrial fishing, a canning industry, oil excavation and mining,
which have had catastrophic effects on both local communities and the world they inhabit.

At the same time it seeks to celebrate the ongoing creativity, adaptability and improvisatory skills of
both nature and people in the area and propose a new multidisciplinary, multispecies approach to
both research and practice.

At a time when both the environment and local communities are increasingly threatened by climate
change, capitalist global expansion and extraction economies, it seeks re-engage and reimagine
imaginative, liberatory and sustainable possibilities of local beliefs and artistic practice to forge new
ways of making life, both for and against the destruction wrought on the environment.

The project targets local communities, as well as researchers in diverse fields including
anthropology, ecology, food security and artists, musicians and architects in Angola, Southern
African and the world. It seeks to bridge these diverse worlds by operating locally, in a region often
excluded from art and academia activity, while broadcasting globally.

We will reach local audiences by directly involving them in the construction and running of the cafe,
the preparation and serving of food and its adjacent activities including research and art practice.
They will work with us to curate the exhibitions and construct and perform a lively program of
events open to local publics and broadcast globally.

We also aim to attract chance visitors, travelling on the road, many who work in construction, fishing
industry and mining in the area, through our affordable food and beverages, public exhibition and
toilet facilities. Once they stop we will invite them to contribute to our research, through a
questionnaire and interviews with those prepared to share their knowledge and experiences of the
road and the environment.

We will also partner both local government and civil society organisations to gain access to people
and resources and with art organisations and academic institutes in Angola and South Africa to
ensure a diverse multidisciplinary set of activities.

















AIMS

1. To expand on tectonic: Tombwa and continue the important work of reconstructing and
interpreting professor Augusto Zita's research and thesis “An anthropology of Utopia: formation of
Utopian identities” from his fragmented notes, to resurface and make publicly available his
thoughts, concepts and analysis to local audiences, as well as wider audiences in Southern Africa and
the world. Aside from its local relevance, Zita’s life and work highlight important historic links
between Angola, South Africa and Namibia. This provides us with new perspectives on our shared
history that can facilitate new networks and forms of solidarity in the contemporary that challenge
divisions highlighted by the recent outbreaks of xenophobic violence in South Africa.

2. Build on the speculative archive started by Gama in 2006 which is based on Zita’s radical research
methodology and includes recording of sounds collected with a specific device, photographs and
videos of the maintenance houses, electric poles and several features along the road from Namibe
to Tombwa, and specimens from nature (sand, rock, plants etc). Specifically, we aim to add the
voices and knowledge of local communities and those who use the road. Our objective here is to
create an alternative archive that tells a different history of colonial expansion, and postcolonial
development and proposes new approaches to making life and ecology.

3. Work with local communities to construct and create a functioning cafe that explores and actively
performs food as knowledge; invites participation from local artists and musicians through regular
talks and open jam sessions; and provides a tangible coming together point for the diverse people
and communities involved in the project. The cafe will also serve as a research tool and site that
prompts passersby and road users to stop and invites them to participate in our research.

4. Develop and experiment with new research methodologies and forms of knowledge production
and art making that challenge traditional boundaries between disciplines and schools of thought.
Challenge the divisions between centre and margins by staging an international art event outside of
Luanda.

5. Revive and preserve previously marginalised and silenced forms of knowledge and celebrate their
ongoing relevance by actively using and developing local systems and strategies so as to prevent
them from being ossifying into “tradition”. Place marginalised knowledge systems into conversation
and communion with art and science, and work directly with local communities to develop new
strategies to live, work and make life and art in ways that are generative and sustainable.