HEAT Festival
06.08 - 16.08.2025

HEAT Festival curator, Voni Baloyi, considers the role of speculation when we can’t agree on the status quo or the past.

To agree on a progressive future, you would think we need to agree on the consequential past. As we take history for granted in this era of post-truths and fiction as fact, our conceptions of individual, communal, national, and global histories are beginning to differ, with violence being the means to a disintegrating end.

There is currently a dilution of consensus and a division in national and unifying sentiments. We differ on how we see the past, and ultimately, we differ on how we could envision the future.

With this conundrum, I accept we have fractured and polarised memories and, in turn, the conceptions of national and collective futures are incoherent and cushioned within a perpetual state of nervous conditions. Economic futures find the wealthy afraid to part with land, wealth, and security, while our most economically vulnerable are growing violently impatient for restoration and compensation that was benevolently promised – yet never delivered. Whether it is the story of the victor or victim, one point of commonality stands – insurmountable feelings of loss lie at the centre of how and why we have arrived here today, whether this is based on fiction or fact.

The 2024 iteration of the HEAT Winter Arts Festival explored Common Ground, which we believe works as a brilliant precursor to this year’s interrogation of futures with the theme Other Worlding, which will most strongly manifest in over 13 art exhibitions across Cape Town’s city centre. Our theatre, music, comedy and talks programme, which all take place from August 6 to 16 in galleries and cultural centres in the city, will further tease out this theme.

Last year, the main objective underlying the inaugural HEAT Winter Arts Festival, aside from activating Cape Town during a slow winter, was to find foundational articulations of what we consider community and how we can find such formations while in community.

As I put forward in our curatorial statement of 2024: “(r)evolutionary or libertarian acts most likely fall flat without the central moment of cohesion; a sticking together, a merger, a union under a common cause”, this year I surrender to the reality that cracks do exist in the concept of commune, with futures splintering away from one another in favour of the historically victorious.

As the future is informed by the fragility of the marginalised archive, due to colonial erasures of African lives, families, communities, joy, pain, and power mean that to memorialise our past we have had to fiercely enact different modalities that replenish the hollow memory bank. This is where speculation becomes pivotal, a filling in, to form futures that move towards abundance for the historically erased. The antidote to this dearth, vulnerable to the precarious psyche of the present, is speculation as a process.

Scholar and literary activist Saidiya Hartman (Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe, 2008) offers sobering words on this topic, suggesting that where, “loss gives rise to longing, and in these circumstance, it would not be far-fetched to consider stories as a form of compensation or even as reparations, perhaps the only kind we will ever receive”.

Speculative practice considers prospective and retrospective journeying, with the end goal being an imaginative means of refiguring life in this world. Informed by the past and this empirical lack of marginalised and indigenous histories, the speculative practice propels us towards futurity accessed through reparative decolonial discourse, culture, and knowledge production. This juncture between speculation and restoration builds another world where Blackness and other fringe identities attached to our ontological form are seen to be free, safe to embody, elastic in its aesthetics, and all-encompassing in its unapologetic nature.

Hartman calls this speculative approach “critical fabulation”, emphasising that histories marked by loss open up space for imagination to help fill the voids the troubling archives cannot recover.

Futurity in the context of decolonial speculative practice is integral to reparative other-worlding with knowledge production that pulls from the past and the future.

African writers like Zimbabwe’s Christopher Mlalazi, in his novel Langabi: Season of Beasts, tell the story of African political futures through his excavation of folklore and oral tradition, which informs the setting of an ancient kingdom where fabulating becomes the literary methodology of the day (Mlalazi, 2023). Oral, aesthetic, and literary tradition, folklore and customs as much as they take us back in order to reclaim, invoke and connect us to ancestors, which then guides us to construct our futures assisted by the spiritual and the intangible.

The same could be said for many other modes of Black futurity, namely Octavia E. Butler’s dedication to Black science fiction, and the sonic and illustrative duo of Drexciya and their creation of an underwater empire built by the descendants of those enslaved peoples who defiantly resisted capture by jumping overboard from slave ships to their deaths.

Scientific and traditional forms of learning relegate the speculative to mysticisms and fields which do not concern themselves with the formal analytical studies of humanity and/or ontology. At its core, knowledge production is a practice that not only shapes our futures but also informs us about our current community standing and our aspirations for the future.

Speculation does not concern itself with naivety, toxic positivity, or constant concentration on individual progression and material success. Speculative decolonial reparative work does not essentialise the extraction of the African body or mind into locales of perceived contexts of success constructed by white neo-capitalist standards and economic inequality, a practice that has become dominant in our visual and political cultures on the continent and the diaspora today. Rather, the speculative assists in finding the unearthed truths of African life, informed by our past, which may provoke us to shudder in discomfort, gain unexpected perspective, continue the necessary work, and find the light in the historicised darkness.

In our living history of democracy and dogged explorations of restoration, artists, authors, musicians, and theatre makers across Africa have continued to ask what our lexicon that articulates African futures should look like.

In this other-worldly commune, processes of performance, the sonic, and the archive consistently exist in and among one another. This dynamic presentation encourages a speculative exploration aimed at creating new imaginaries.

The HEAT Programme, with the participation of galleries and museums in Cape Town’s city centre, promises to be an energetic period where Other Worlding and event-as-process are the key and recurring themes. ArtHARARE takes on artistic and economic speculation through their show Reserve Bank of Art. Reflecting on the precarious nature that has historically been attached to currency in Zimbabwe, gallery owner, curator, and artist Richard Mudariki is facilitating a space where artists transform monetary currency into a means of cultural exchange. This is mediated through the practices of artists like Dan Halter, Chelsea Mahlangu, and Mandlenkosi Mavengere.

Play and process-as-event continues with the solo exhibition THEME PARK, which is a culmination of Oupa Sibeko’s residency at Lemkus Gallery, curated by Jared Leite. As an artist and performer, Sibeko has embodied these identity markers within his work as he shows pastel abstracted creatures traced through the bullets of targets he and other individuals – some friends, some strangers – he engaged with throughout the residency, shot at a shooting range. In addition to his target creatures, within this dark room which mimics the energy of an arcade, he invites audiences to engage with these striking pastel panels of work that can be slid in and out of a three-section frame in order to assemble new works, with every moment of shift and play constantly creating new figurations and possibilities that depend on process as the event, more so than just the production or material, as the focal point.

But this is just a glimpse into the potential of commune-based future building. This event or generation hotspot, that is the HEAT Winter Arts Festival, will house multitudes of centres and peripherals simultaneously, advocating for a process of becoming which then culminates into a psyche-driven archive rather than a material-driven storage place. This process aims to produce renewed thoughts, challenged assumptions, harmonious spaces, and contested territories, all through the contact of different stakeholders, spaces, and cultural outputs. What can we learn about where we intend to go from here, there, and everywhere? What does my construction of the future look like alongside yours? 

This is an edited version of a text that will be published in HEAT: Emerging Artists You Should Know.