SWOP Lunch Break at the National Arts Festival

The lunch break marks a pause in the working day … a time for rest from production … for forms of exchange not, yet, for-profit… for relations to be, but, in common, often shaped by reciprocities … learned at home … not work … but, yet work that matters to be … differently …

Hosted by the Society, Work and Politics Institute, the Lunch Break will be a space to be together in common …  to eat together … for dialogue and discussion … to imagine what might yet be… At the centre of the ArtTalk will be the idea of restitution. Restitution returns to our collective past, acknowledges the inequalities of our present and seeks paths to a different yet to come … Yet … the formal, legal and institutional processes of restitution have not taken full account of what was dispossessed. It has reduced the land to a capitalist commodity, forgetting that work was dispossessed along with the land, and looks away while dispossession continues. The conversation will draw on the work of Simon Gush’s films and artworks around the dispossession of land and work in Salem,  Niren Tolsi’s work on the enclosure, land dispossession and cricket in Salem, Eastern Cape, contained in his book, “Writing around the Wicket”, and Dineo Skosana in her recently published book “No Last Place to Rest,” which addresses ongoing dispossession and grave relocations in mining-affected communities in post-apartheid South Africa.