LionHeart

Carnival, as described by Mikhail Bakhtin, is where ‘life is subject only to its own laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom.’

Those With Walls for Windows (2023), is a meditation and exploration into the ‘laws of freedom’. Through poetry, an art form with its own relationship to freedom and control, the work investigates the space of diaspora, a place where forgetting, remembering and reimagining act as architectural devices in the urban planning of the diasporic psyche.  

 For LionHeart, Carnival is a space of recovery and emancipation, a place of cultural and psychological real estate, a space to dwell, rest, repair, grow, and evolve.

Those With Walls for Windows is an aural-visual-textual-oral tapestry that uses performance, rhythm and erasure as structuring devices, a ‘call to arms’ for sonic way finders who seek Carnival’s joyous, redemptive liberation.

‘In South Africa – where fierce battles over language, custom, ritual, and memory are still being fought – a unique opportunity exists for architects, and architecture, to play a different role, using different tactics and tools to stitch together conflicting accounts, possibly even to resolve them.’

- Lesley Lokko (Excerpt from African Space Magicians)

This installation is a poetic call to action:

A referendum for remembrance:

A requiem for the carnivalesque:

Those With Walls for Windows (2023), exhibited at the Venice Biennale (Arsenale).

Written & Directed by Rhael ‘LionHeart’ Cape

Supported by 180 Studios, African Future’s Institute, InDetail Studios, British Film Institute (BFI), A-COLD-WALL*

Archival Footage Usage: © Crown / Courtesy of the BFI NationalArchive’ (Proud City A Plan for London); ‘© Arts Council England / Courtesy of the BFI National Archive’ (Grove Music)

Photography courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia for the 18th International Architecture Exhibition.