Time will tell if “Day A” will be a term that will be used to recall the landing in the African continent. The week of Argentinian Culture in South Africa starts today in Johannesburg, Soweto and Pretoria, cities are preparing the details to be part of the photographic, musical and theatrical flood that will be coming with Adriana Lestido, Gustavo Germano, Rodolfo Mederos, Lucía Laragione and Andrea Servera, and the Group of Argentinian dance (CAD). The message is to integrate and mix, produce and achieve a greater relationship between countries. Contrary to the initial name, this event will last 15 days. This Sur-Sur organization artistically speaking is already working with Cooking with Elisa, a play by Garagione directed by Princess Zinzi Mhlongo, performed by the South Africans Patricia Boyer and Lurdes Laice, that is being played at the Auto & General Theatre in Johannesburg and at the NAF of Grahams town. This exchange will continue in Buenos Aires and many other cities in the country when in 2015 the week of South African Culture is confirmed.

“Culture is not only a foundation of identity and sovereignty, it is also a source of social inclusion” says Magdalena Faillace, Director of Cultural Affairs of the Foreign Affairs Office that organizes this event together with Argentinian Embassy in South Africa. This project is part of a Bilateral Agreement that the Foreign Officers of both countries signed on August 1, 2013, to strengthen the relations of reciprocal friendship and understanding. In the cultural area, a Biannual Plan 2014-2015 was created to encourage the permanent presence of Argentinian and South African artists in the main music, theatre and dance festivals, book fairs, academic circles and other cultural events. “The motto under which we thought of this event is due to the twenty years of South African independence and the 30 years of recovered democracy in Argentina. For that reason, many of these activities are related to a social vision of culture that seems unavoidable in emerging countries such as ours. Culture has to help the development of our countries, it is not a symbolic superstructure” states Faillace to Página/12.

Adriana Lestido´s photographic exhibition “What is seen” will open in the African Museum of Johannesburg. “Adriana is a great artist and it is not the first time that we take her abroad. In her work she shows how, in spite of the environments of reclusion or exclusion, there is an observation so pious and humanitarian with the beings she photographs that she brings them in. Without creating an ideal of the world she photographs, they are very poetic images” Faillace explains. In the same museum Absences by Gustavo Germano will unfold, pairs of photographs where he will show the before and after of the disappearance, the result of state terrorism during the last civil-military dictatorship. “It has a high impact: it expresses the most with the least, it reflects the emptiness left in any family after one of its members disappears” reflects Faillace. Lestido and Germano will give workshops with South African photographers and artists to enrich the exchange.

The bandoneón as front and back sides of past and future nostalgia will imprint the fingerprinting of sound. Rodolfo Mederos will start with two concerts on July 25 and 26, at the Soweto theatre and at the Brooklyn theatre in Pretoria with Miagi, the young South African orchestra. The Argentinian Dance group will make four presentations together with the South African group Forgotten Angle Collaborative Theatre, directed by the choreographer Peter John Sabbagha, on Friday 25 at the Fountain Piazza, Kingsway Campus, of the University of Johannesburg, and in the theater of Soweto. On Saturday 26 the will do it at the Nelson Mandela Square and in Diepkloof Square, of Johannesburg. The program Theatre in Translation turn into English Argentinian theatre plays, started last year when the South African Luz Verde of Mike Van Graan was translated into Spanish by Patricia Labastié and premiered at the Payro theatre, with Leonora Balcarce, Veronica Mc Loughlin, Marcos Moreno Martínez, Vicente Santos and Carlos Da Silva, and directed by Joaquín Bonet.

Faillace told the Argentinian Ambassador in South Africa, Carlos Sersale, that there were no requests for translations for the Sur project. “He told me that the only well-known writer is Borges because the books arrive mainly from the English printing houses. We agreed on organizing some activities with South African printers, the idea is to make a round table about Borges with an Argentinian publisher, an Argentinian author and Maria Kodama. We have already 754 works translated in four years and a half. South Africans want to participate in our Book Fair 2015, with their own booth. This cultural exchange with South Africa is already on its way.”

Página 12, July 22, 2014.

back