Goethe-Institut South Africa announces LAPA residency recipients

LAPA is a collaborative residency space that is designed to promote regional exchange in Africa and present new opportunities for mutual learning, growth and change. LAPA came into fruition as a result of more than a decade of a working relationship between Goethe-Institut and the Visual Arts Network of South Africa (VANSA).

The paired recipients are Gugulethu Duma and Maf, Lamis Haggag and Mina Nasr, Lara Sousa and Nair Noronha. The artists will spend three months researching and developing their proposed work. Each residency hosts programmes and events unique to the artists and is announced via the LAPA Instagram page.

“Just to speak on the elemental, these resources that Africa has a huge supply of but also in their use are quite limited,” LAPA residency selection committee member Bernard Akoi-Jackson said. “A lot of scientific orientated people don’t think that artists have a say in these things [but from an African context a lot of noise is made through the arts]. Let’s see how we can really make a point of these things.”

LAPA is a communal, experimental thinking space that is open to publics. It ideates and hosts forms of gathering and being together. It is an offering for reflecting on restorative artistic and communal pan-African histories and practices. To reinitiate the space for Season II, LAPA invites artistic duos, acknowledging that great things come in pairs and more can be done when we work alongside each other.

It hosts the Goethe-Institut team as well as organisations and publics as parallel and connected programmes for the intersections of artists, communities and cultural organisations, to develop sustainable exchange. This new space and residency is conceptualised to address the need for communal space and art infrastructure within Johannesburg which promotes regional exchange in Africa and its diaspora. Housed in the Breezeblock building in the suburb of Brixton, LAPA makes an immediate connection with the community and asks what kind of potential could we encourage when we are housed together.