MEDIATHEK

With ‘Khoi’npsalms’, the bringing together of historically impossible relationships of music-making help us to re-imagine intimacies and care amidst remembering. These intimacies, portrayed in the film on the music theatre production, lie at the heart of decolonial arts projects that move through troubling history to traverse into archaeological, improvisatory and unexpected engagements with the present. Genevan psalm melodies and psalm texts, translated into Dutch, were brought to South Africa by the ‘Hollanders’ of the Dutch East India Company/ VOC in 1652. In 1937, Totius—Afrikaans poet and Afrikaner-political activist—translated the texts into Afrikaans; texts still used today.
 In ‘Khoi’npsalms’, South African Khoi music on bow, saxophone and blik’nsnaar is played by Garth Erasmus. His music laces into fragments of 16th century Genevan psalm melodies played by Marietjie Pauw (flute) and Francois Blom (organ). There is no explicit dialogue. The psalms are woven into memories of Khoi music to engage with shared, violent histories, including imperial genocide and violence from apartheid social engineering of people, legislated in 1948—harms that still persist.
 Accompanying programme notes suggest a narrative. The six selected psalm melodies are hereby referenced and translated freely from the Afrikaans texts and contextualised by Khoi remembrances. A sound recording of the final performance (8/3/2018, Stellenbosch, 45’) is at https://soundcloud.com/francois_69/khoinpsalms