Analogue resistance

I recently had the immense privilege of sitting down for two interviews about my creative practice.

While one chiefly dwelt on my novel The President and the other was part of a feature on South Africa's zine renaissance, both shared a preoccupation with how making and consuming art – particularly its tactile, analogue forms – offers a powerful (and empowering) means to make sense of and respond to the dark and difficult parts of our current moment.

A couple morsels

In my chat with Nadia Shahbaz for her incredible newsletter, Writing Into History, I shared:

I sometimes feel with the deluge of AI slop and amount of content one is exposed to, one has a sense that the powerful want us to be overwhelmed and lose a feeling of agency and hope. Steve Bannon has used the phrase flooding the zone.

But anytime you’re creating something, you’re resisting this temptation and saying: I’m showing up against attempts to silence or freeze me out. I’m resisting overwhelm and apathy.

I also spoke with Ciaran R. Maidwell for his wonderful low altitude feature, "'Print Feels Like Resistance': Why South Africans Are Making and Buying Zines Again" where I similarly noted:

“As useful as one’s phone and laptop are, screens are very slippery. Digital stuff has an unbounded quality. And you can’t hold a PDF the way you can cradle printed pages in your hands. There’s also the attention factor. When I’m scrolling or passively consuming stuff on a screen, it can be overwhelming or depressing. It feels passive, and I feel kind of helpless.”

I suggested that, on the other hand, to buy a zine and support a zine-maker’s work, – or to actually make zines as I've been doing – offers a ways of exercising in agency, something that “feels empowering, a way of not letting the algorithm and Big Tech dominate. It shrinks their power. Print feels like resistance.”

(An important caveat: in offering the above sentiments, I'm not trying to infer that making/buying cute zines are a substitute for the kinds of brave and radical actions we need to dismantle oligarchy/technofeudalism and build a more just, equitable and healthier world. Rather, I'm trying to suggest that art offers tools that can help us take those brave actions; it can offer succour, community, support and inspiration; it can undermine the efforts to transform us into apathetic, algorithm-numbed slaves to screens.)

I'm so grateful to Nadia and Ciaran for these respective opportunities to reflect publicly on the political dimensions of making, publishing and consuming art. Here they are if you'd like to read them in full:

• "Where there is backlash, there is art: an interview with the author of The President" by Nadia Shahbaz
• "'Print Feels Like Resistance': Why South Africans Are Making and Buying Zines Again" by Ciaran R. Maidwell

Waiting for the sun to come

At Bakoven with an Olympus Trip 35 film camera.

I've been really enjoying getting (back) into film photography... not just for the end results (pictures that so often feel less artificial and more textured than their overly automatically optimised smartphone siblings) but also for the process... the way that wielding a film camera is an invitation to slow down and consider your surroundings (and the picture you intend to take) in a different, weightier way... the limited number of frames on a film roll heightens the stakes a little, makes one a more conscientious observer (and picture taker). And this quality – of slowness, of care – means relating differently to the present, perhaps being more immersed in it. There is also the whole delayed gratification thing. The not knowing whether the photo was any good; did I screw up focus; was the lighting off? And so each depression of the shutter release is a gamble – but also an exhilarating gift to one's future self, one you can't fully vouch for but are hopeful about anyway.

One last thing

Earlier this month, a poem of mine was featured on Queer Poem-A-Day. It's called "At the Sunday Night AA Meeting in Plummer Park".