Nirox Residency 2023: Kaushal Sapre
Kaushal Sapre was the first artist to be supported by Inlaks at the Nirox Foundation in South Africa. Kaushal is a Delhi based artist and researcher. He is interested in how technology reconfigures social and individual experiences, especially in the context of the digital milieu. He responds to these questions by hacking into technological artefacts using programming, DIY electronics, image and sound processing and other creative research based practices such as drawing and text. He is also especially interested in sound and makes his own digital and physical instruments. Sapre has an MA in visual art practice from Ambedkar University, Delhi (2017) and has a background in engineering and physics.
This blog post is an account of his time at Nirox and how he was able to connect his DIY internet radio station in Delhi to a community recording studio in Johannesburg.
I arrived in Johannesburg on the 19th of June. It was a chilly morning, and I was glad to escape the 43 degree Delhi summer for the next few weeks. Nirox Sculpture Park is about 40 kilometres outside of Johannesburg, in the Cradle of Humankind. The first few days while travelling to a new place are always incredibly full of adrenaline and alertness - one tries to catch a vibe, learn the ropes, find cracks that allow you to slip into a new way of navigating life. Everyone at Nirox - the artists, staff and community - were incredibly warm and welcoming. In my first week there, I encountered the meditative work by Jeremy and Colleen Wafer and a sharp and provocative performance by Fareida Nazeir, who were all my co-resident artists at the time. Eventually I was joined by Thuthuka Sibisi - an artist, composer and a wonderful human being - as a co-resident in the month of July.
Phelelani Mthembu on guitar and Wandile Ndlovu on the mixer during Mix Signal Traffic Jam
I was coming from one of the busiest cities in the world, and perhaps the toughest thing in the initial few days was getting used to the lack of crowds and noise. But then, you could hear the lions, jackals and hyenas from the neighbouring nature reserve, and randomly encounter a herd of zebras while driving on the highveld dirt roads in the night. It was an incredibly surreal experience. I spent the initial few days reading, playing the piano, exploring the nature reserve, learning how to build a fireplace and making a few drawings as a way to orient myself. It would be difficult to travel to the city due to lack of public transport, and I would often rely on friends for a lift. Over the next few days, I felt more and more confident navigating between Nirox and Johannesburg.
During my time at the Nirox Foundation, I got a chance to spend more time in the city through a ‘mini-residency’ facilitated by Nirox at Studio Lang de Moun Mon (LDMM) in Johannesburg. LDMM is a Haitian community space and recording studio located between the neighbourhoods of Observatory and Hillbrow. It is here that I was able to realise my proposed project, research around internet infrastructures and their entanglement with life, through music.
Scenes from Mixed Signal Traffic Jam, Studio LDMM, Johannesburg
Music really allowed me to absorb the experience of South Africa. For me, it was often a conversation starter and also a destination. I learnt about the incredible jazz history of South Africa, which is intertwined with the history of anti-apartheid resistance. A cab driver told me about the inimitable Dollar Brand (Abdullah Ibrahim) - ‘He used to play here’ - he said, pointing to a neighbourhood. I was schooled in the genres of maskandi, kwaito and gqom. One of the most memorable experiences I had in South Africa was going to the Sawubona Music Jam in Soweto. Sawubona is a self-organised music venue that hosts jam sessions every Tuesday for the past ten years. It is an incredibly warm place, bustling with energy and an improvised drive. All these conversations and experiences fed into my work with radio roohafza - an internet radio station running out of a DIY, self-hosted server that I help manage in our collective studio in Delhi. They led to a series of live radio broadcasts from LDMM in Johannesburg into radio roohafza that centred around making sound together and thinking about the techno-politics embedded in its modes of circulation.
Scenes from Mixed Signal Traffic Jam, Studio LDMM, Johannesburg
The sound engineers at LDMM - Mzu and Wandile - were amazing humans and superb guides to the city. They were instrumental in producing ‘Mixed Signal Traffic Jam’ - a jam session made up of sounds, noises, conversations and silences produced by various contributors that was broadcast live on radio roohafza. Through Mzu, Wandile and Sven Christian’s, curator at Nirox Foundation, networks, we invited musicians, artists, poets, producers and DJs to spend the day at the studio. We planned a technical setup for the sound that could accommodate multiple instruments and could be flexible enough to improvise with. The jam began at 2 pm on 20th July and went on till around 10 pm. It was an atmosphere dense with energy. Jazz guitar mixed with ambient electronic soundscapes over a percussion section of djembe, isigubu drum, mbira and a drum machine, making way for spoken word or song by multiple voices. The vibe travelled through undersea internet cables to be caught by various listeners in Delhi, Cape Town, Berlin, Bengaluru and Bern among other places around the world.
Contributors to Mixed Signal Traffic Jam: Thunzi, Phelelani Mthembu, Simba, Felix, Noa, Vinny Victory, Andrei Van Wyk, Ntozabantu Azigugi (AKA Thobeka), Lebo Soul, Qiqa Bacela, Silvia, Concussion 101, Nyamekela “Mzu” Nhlabatsi, Wandile Ndlovu, Kerline Astra and others.
Cover Image: Kaushal during Mixed Signal Traffic Jam
