Performance art is particularly interesting in South Africa because the starting date of it is way earlier than in Europe and is anchored in the history of the country and of the African continent. The notion of using the body to transmit a specific signal, and the use of the body in rituals, has for centuries been a part of African culture in general, and South Africa in particular. The cultural practices of healing, shamanism, mourning, initiation and celebration were a part of some local groups long before the colonial and de-colonial era.
I am interested in performance art and in its dualistic concept of body-space as the space, which in South Africa is highly connoted by the question of race. The space is characterised by social and racial groups and, even if in theory the space is open and penetrable, it remains inaccessible in practice. The space shapes the experiences of people leading them to live in their sphere that becomes their reality. As philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy observes in 1992, “Bodies are places of existence and there is no existence without a place, without there without here”
[1]. The landscape and the space are in a deep relationship with the body, one helps to understand the other.