(Be)Holding a thought: South African rock art and the ethical ingenuity of the Barrydale puppet parade and the social achievement of techne in Africa

Kurt Campbell

doi:10.59391/6cwc6462

Authors

Kurt Campbell University of Cape Town, Michaelis School of Fine Art

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.59391/6cwc6462

Keywords:

Rock art, therianthrope, ethics, puppetry, apartheid, techne, mnemotechnics

Abstract

The text traces how rock art in southern Africa has been constrained by disciplinary frameworks and the attendant consequences. The argument proposes an alternative approach that renders San rock art multigenerational and intercultural through the concept of ethical ingenuity developed through a sustained engagement with the example of the Ukwanda Puppetry and Design Collective’s work in South Africa. The argument culminates in a call for a critical imagination that allows for the productive intermingling of knowledge and desire, thereby opening new possibilities for ethical engagement with the past in the present. This possibility lies in a contemporary engagement with San cosmology of the therianthrope and how the visual and embodied unity of puppet and puppeteer reactivates the human–animal hybrid as lived, performative experience and mnemotechnical envoy. This activation invites the viewer into an act of “beholding”, a dynamic that reworks the ethical imagination of the post-apartheid.

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