Sylt Quelle Cultural Award for Southern Africa announces the 2009 winner
This year the Foundation kunst:raum sylt quelle, in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Südafrika, held the second annual Sylt Quelle Cultural Award for Southern Africa. The competition is open to artists of all disciplines from Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Swaziland, and sets out to discover how writers, artists, choreographers, musicians, film-makers and others, see their art form in the context of the society they live in.
The independent jury consisting of Berry Bickle, David Koloane, Indra Wussow and Bridget Pickering met in Johannesburg to choose the winner and were impressed by a number of proposals. It was however Mozambican choreographer/director Panaibra G. Candas’s proposal ‘Time and Space’ that won their favour.
‘Time and Space’ looks at issues of power and military force in context of Africa’s burgeoning democracies. Not only a response to corrupt states, but also probing definitions of African democracy, the piece is intended as an act of resistance. The dance performances will be developed and first performed within colonial fortresses along the Mozambican coast. Candas’s engagement with fortress spaces is site-specific and begins to trace a history of power and violence from colonial domination to contemporary subjugation and the negotiated, even compromised, African democracy.
‘Time and Space’ is set to premier in May/June 2010 in Mozambique, with the idea that it will travel to other fortresses along the coast of sub-Saharan Africa.
Panaibra G. Candas is a key figure within the Mozambican contemporary dance scene. As the choreographer and artistic director of CulturArte, which he started in 1998, he has had a significant impact. His work has been shown in USA, Africa, Europe and Latin America. In 2006 he won a 2nd prize at the African Choreographic meeting in Paris, with the piece ‘Inside of me another island’, and in 2008, a ZKB Patronage Prize in Zurich/ Switzerland with the work ‘Mafalala 2’.
As winner of the Sylt Quelle Cultural Award for Southern Africa 2009, Panaibra G. Candas will be awarded 10,000 Euros to finance the production of ‘Time and Space’. Documentation of the project will be presented at the kunst:raum sylt quelle in Germany and other venues after it has been realised.
