Make that two afternoons, and 10 hours in total, of Vusumzi Nkomo, Fernando Damon and Rowan Smith’s durational live set at Under Projects in Cape Town. The Dead Symbols performance marked the third show at the project space that opened on the 15th of September on Roeland Street. The opening Pilot Group Show also featured work by Nkomo alongside a loose assortment of other experiments. A month later, Smith’s name appeared on a long list of contributors that formed part of the second exhibition, titled Sculptures of Cars. True to his word, curator Mitchell Messina assembled an eclectic selection of model car sculptures sourced from across the fraternity of young artists in his orbit. The openness and levity of the space is refreshing and perfectly suited to the improvisatory style of Dead Symbols, even in their more sullen moments.
The group’s practice does not lend itself to easy categorisation. Perhaps their Bandcamp bio can suffice: “A Cape Town based critical sound collective committed to dangerous thinking and sonic vandalism.” Their catalogue of recorded work includes five accomplished suites that shift between experimental dub, dissonant IDM and jazz inflected breakbeat. At the forefront of the undulating sonic terrain that Damon and Smith lay out before the listener, Nkomo’s distorted voice delivers fragments of poetry and other dangerous thoughts. “I was just a boy who liked to read and now I am in a band,” the frontman coyly reminds us, though he never looks out of place. The trio have an effortless chemistry between them and an intuitive command over even the most unusual placement of a vocal cadence, a sonic distortion or a clanging cymbal.
The programme for the two day performance seemed pretty informal from the promotional material and was indeed very accommodating of viewers coming and going. The artists themselves slipped in and out of performance, swapped places at times and toyed with the various gadgets lying around. I arrived about halfway into an introductory conversation between Nkomo and jazz drummer Tumi Mogorosi, who went on to play a monumental show with his ensemble at Chimurenga later that evening. And there was an interesting theoretical continuity between the performances that Nkomo and Mogorosi respectively led. Most notably, it is a shared commitment to the framework of black studies that puts their practices in dialogue.
The final question from the audience posed the following: if we accept the argument that blackness represents a failure of signification, what then is the role of the black artist or cultural worker? The speakers could only speak around this quandary, but it points to some of the concerns articulated in Mogorosi’s collection of essays from 2021 titled DeAesthetic. In the author’s words, black artistic performance is consigned to a position of “homelessness outside language” that necessarily cuts against the institutional significance of art. However, the audience question perhaps too readily assumes that artmaking is supposed to provide some kind of positive significance. This seems to both over and underestimate what the artist is actually doing. On the contrary, one might say that artmaking intervenes precisely there where words fail, which is also an opening.
Dead Symbols position themselves at this very threshold. Despite the heady theoretical atmosphere that surrounds them, the group is not particularly interested in trying to say something or discover some untold meaning. As their band name clearly indicates, Dead Symbols is preoccupied with the shortfall of language. Their improvisations can be seen as a kind of inductive research that probes an epistemic edge. The notion of “dead symbols” also suggests that the group’s inquiry is necessitated by the bankrupt symbolic world they have inherited. The double entendre of “symbol” and “cymbal” finally quilts the symbolic and sonic interests of the group together. It is worth noting that Damon’s percussion rig replaces ordinary cymbals with a set of angle grinder blades, which produce a dense, heart-stopping toll whenever he beats down on them. The sound reverberates into your chest, but remains heavy and close to the floor. In contrast to the enlivening clangour of a crash or a ride cymbal, Damon’s blades stop dead.
One wonders, then, what the role of Nkomo’s spoken words are, particularly when most of them get lost in the mix. Yet somehow they feel indispensable, even if only as a texture at times. Their imperfect, glitchy transmission is most likely what makes them stick. He will often pick up one of the many books that lie strewn across the room and read us a passage or two. As the artist himself notes, his misreadings and errors make for some of the most interesting moments. To borrow from the psychoanalytic parlance that underlies much of Nkomo’s discourse, these mistakes or slips could be approached as parapraxes that betray the speaker’s desire. I have been wondering about a particular discontinuity within a passage from William Modisane’s Blame Me on History (1963) that was repeated on both days of the performance. On Saturday, the speaker talked of being “devoured by South Africa,” and on Sunday, he was “devoured by this country.” Regardless of what lies behind this nonalignment, whether intentional or not, it is another small instance of language alluding to its open-endedness. The desire of the speaker cannot be written by the words imposed upon him.
At the very least, the literary component of Dead Symbols’ practice allowed for a very studious atmosphere to emerge. Especially on the Sunday, when fatigue was clearly setting in and the sessions weren’t quite as sharp as they had been, many of the audience members began to peruse the selection of books on display. Soon enough the project space turned to a makeshift reading room and audience members found themselves engrossed in Hartman, Manganyi and Rampolokeng. As my mind wandered, I also noticed a copy of Steal This Book (1971) by Abbie Hoffman perched on one of the ceiling beams. Other texts were stacked on top of abstract sculptural forms, many of which featured in Smith’s 2018 Dead Centre exhibition at WHATIFTHEWORLD. Three framed shirts marked with the Dead Symbols insignia also hung as a sort of centrepiece. The creased white school shirts defaced with an inkblack emblem encapsulate the spirit of youthful vandalism that inspires the work of Dead Symbols.
The unsung hero of the group, it must be said, is Fernando Damon. His work behind the boards is perfectly judged and potent. It is Damon that grounds the exploratory fancies of Dead Symbols and keeps their improvisations measured. Smith is perhaps the most expressive performer of three and a joy to watch whenever they happen upon an particularly satisfying groove or sonic confluence. His witchy keyboard melodies set just the right atmosphere for Nkomo’s line readings as well. Between readings, Nkomo also plays around with a slide whistle and small melodica, among other exotic instruments. Whatever the effect, it is extremely amusing to watch these guys do their thing. To see them absorbed in their own enjoyment, before darting eyes across to a fellow performer for confirmation. It is always satisfying to observe an unusual synergy of forms, but especially so in performance, when very different performers are able to find each other and fluently speak their coded language.