Abstract
Jordache Ellapen’s Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy (2018) is a visual art project that explores erotics as an epistemological and methodological frame to think through race, diaspora, memory, history and desire in/of contemporary South Africa. I argue that Queering the Archive is invested in beauty as a project of sensuous memory, pleasure, movement and relation that works through and against geohistorical logics and conditions of race, diaspora and coloniality. Through a photo essay based on a close reading of the visual art, and a companion piece of an interview with the artist, I argue that Queering the Archive challenges our logics of the legacies of indentureship by centring those bodies who were used as labour and raw matter for global racial sexual capital. Ellapen re-imagines and re-images brown bodies as alive and beautiful in motion and in relation with erotic energy, playful desire and intimate joy. Ellapen crafts relations between colours, textures, forms and genres through mixed media practices, including layering and juxtaposing family photographs with staged photographs. These relations put the photographs in intimate tension and contradiction with one another as much as in beautiful, sensuous motion together, the edges of each highlighted as much as blurred through these relations. I read these relations as evocations and provocations of the histories and memories the photographs are dense with and made fragile by. These histories and memories include indentureship, colonialism and migration as structures and processes of power that shape intimate relations between peoples in South Africa. Ellapen’s focus in this project on different brown bodies in relation to one another through erotic feeling and touching is embedded within these histories and memories, but these erotics are not determined, bound or regulated by the colonial and imperial infrastructures of power. In Queering the Archive, hegemonic colonial and postcolonial aesthetic regimes are disrupted and the brown body becomes a brown body in desiring and joyful movement and relation, re-imagined and re-imaged as elegant, beautiful and sensual towards different futurities.