| ABELUMBI
Abelumbi, a multi-media teaching tool for learners and communities
in the greater Durban area, is based on an exhibition, “Abelumbi:
Untold Tales Of Magic”. This is a collaborative project between
the Campbell Collections and the Durban Art Gallery. The project
brings together two teams in applying digital technologies to the
construction of an exhibition and in producing a teaching tool on
skills entailed in the story telling around the exhibition and its
theme.
The teaching tool is a CD that contains the selected art works from
the Abelumbi: Untold Stories of Magic Exhibition, the visual clip
of interviews with artist explaining their works and the accompanying
stories. The selected stories and artworks can be used by the three
groups of experts, the organic intellectuals in the community, university
experts on folklore and the classroom teachers to come up with a
teaching tool for the classroom and the communities. Out of these
group will come out materials on the indigenous techniques of story
telling and their application to the curriculum.
Durban
Art Galley hosted an exhibition, Abelumbi: untold tales of magic
in April 2002. The exhibition centred on the theme of magic, both
in its positive sense of mythology/ folktale and in its negative
sense of witchcraft. While the exhibition drew upon the multi-cultured
community of KwaZulu-Natal artists, the demographics of the region
meant that some eighty percent of the invited artists are African,
the majority Zulu. In regard to this grouping, the theme of myth
and magic often relates to the daily realities of their lives, and
usually it is interpreted and validated by reference to the Zulu
world-view. The fact that many of the artists are African Christians
means that the Christian religion will also impact upon much interpretation
of the topic. Further, for a fuller appreciation of the artwork
(graphic, painting or sculpture) it is not possible to divorce the
works from a telling of the “magical tales” (folktales
or witchcraft incident). This is especially so because the Zulu
artists are referring back to a story telling, narrative culture
and thus the artist is acting in his role as both artist and performer
(story-teller).
The project builds upon the existing partnership between Durban
Art Gallery and the Campbell Collection of the University of Natal
in regard to the exhibition. The project is a selection of mainly
Zulu artists’ works, the videotaping of such `artists as performers’
around the theme of the exhibition (myth, folktale and magic). The
supplying of comment from identified persons who are considered
expert in the fields or Zulu oral literature and performance, anthropology,
history and fine art.
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