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MADEYOULOOK

MADEYOULOOK is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Nare Mokgotho and Molemo Moiloa. Their amorphous and expansive practice draws from the deep knowledge and radical methods that characterize everyday Black life in Johannesburg; their approach is marked by long-term research commitments and collaborative engagements where distinctions between research/practice; content/form; artist, artwork, and audience are blurred. In place of these distinctions, MADEYOULOOK draw our attention to modes of practice contiguous with everyday life where questions, answers, and audiences are inseparable and always co-constituted.

This revision of conventional senses of how, where, and with whom artworks function is evident in Sermon on the Train (2009–10), MADEYOULOOK’s public lecture series held on commuter trains in Johannesburg. The work recalls Train-Church (1986), Santu Mofokeng’s photographic series documenting Black commuter practices in which train carriages are temporarily transformed into churches holding sermons and prayers during the long trip into the then white-only city of Johannesburg. In Sermon on the Train, academics deliver university-level presentations to more or less interested travelers on their daily commutes. This ambiguous scenario asks us to consider who is being transformed here—the lecturers or the passengers? Who is performer, who is audience? Or perhaps what is at stake is the collapse of this distinction altogether.

This deformation of conventional structures reflects MADEYOULOOK’s broader interest in questioning art’s relation to audiences and publics. They recast artwork as an ordinary cultural act amongst other cultural acts. Disregarding notions of art as a privileged mode of practice, their work finds meaning alongside travel, prayer, learning, being bored, falling in love, arguing, dreaming, and other routine acts. Rather than elevating or relegating forms of practice, MADEYOULOOK fracture and redistribute meaning in intimate relation with everyday practices of Black life.

In Izwe: Plant Praxis (2019–20) and Ejaradini (2019–ongoing), the scope of this orientation is widened to consider Black urban relations to plant life and the natural world. Relations materialized in Black gardening practices form models for reimagining and reclaiming landedness alongside pleasure, (food) security, and communal resilience. In this cycle, historical research, discursive programming, and collective knowledge sharing are mobilized in a matrix which stretches the parameters of Black social life to include compost, imphepho, bees, and other non-human agencies of the garden.

MADEYOULOOK encourage us to view ourselves and artworks as nodes in networks of meaning where all vertices are absolutely vital and radically impermanent. Their works are microcosmic models of larger world-making processes: some propositional; some speculative; all transformative. They are also macrocosmic indexes pointing to relations beyond colonial assumptions of value: toward everyday relations which make knowledge—and its ungovernable twin, transformation—possible.

Text: Nolan Oswald Dennis