Gabrielle Goliath – Elegy Performance

Elegy is an ongoing series of commemorative gestures initiated in 2015. Each performance calls together a group of female vocal performers who collectively enact a ritual of mourning.

Responding to the physical, ontological and structural outworkings of rape-culture in South Africa, Elegy performances recall the identity of individuals whose subjectivities have been fundamentally violated – and who are, as such, all too easily consigned to a generic, all-encompassing victimhood. Significant to this is how loss becomes a site for community, and for empathic, cross-cultural and cross-national encounters. Seeking to work around the kinds of symbolic violence through which traumatised black bodies are routinely objectified, Elegy opens a distinctly postcolonial and intersectional space, wherein mourning is presented as a social and productive work – not in the sense of healing or ‘closure’, but as a necessary and sustained irresolution.

Elegy performances are staged in various locations and contexts – each realised in memory of a specific individual.