#03
Paul Goodwin & 
Tumi Mogorosi

13 07 2021

Paul Goodwin is a curator, researcher, urbanist, educator and director of TrAIN Research Centre (Transnational Art Identity and Nation) at University of the Arts London. He has a multidisciplinary research and curatorial practice and studied Marxist urban geography, with David Harvey as one of his professors. He developed the concept of Black Urbanism, a field of study framed around understanding black creative practice in the production of space, as an urban design strategy and a methodology for reimagining cities. Current curatorial projects include: W.E.B. DuBois: Charting Black Lives (House of Illustration, London, UK, 2019), We Will Walk: Art and Resistance from the American South (Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK, 2020) and Untitled: Art on the Conditions of Our Time, Chapter 2 (touring, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, UK, 2021). Goodwin is a passionate jazz enthusiast and in his misguided youth he was a scratch DJ who occasionally played with UK Old School legends Freshski & MoRock.

Tumi Mogorosi is an artist, jazz musician, researcher and activist-theorist in the realm of Black Studies and Jazz studies. The publication Deaesthetic: writing with and from the Black Sonic anthologises his writing on the black sonic as it pertains to critical theory and emancipatory practices. Mogorosi recorded Project Elo in 2014, and his practice is often collaborative and collective, producing albums with Gabi Motuba, Pule Pheto (including visuals with artist Mzwandile Buthelezi), The Wretched, Group Theory and forming part of Shabaka and the Ancestors band. Working very much at the intersection of art, music and theory, he has produced sound art in response to research on the Njelele shrine with Kupakwashe Mtata as part of Future Africa Visions in Time at Iwalawahaus in 2015. Mogorosi is based in Johannesburg.

#03
Paul Goodwin &
Tumi Mogorosi

in conversation
podcast                                   1’ 01’ 16”

In a rendition of words attributed to Miles Davis, “music is the space between the notes,” Goodwin and Mogorosi meditate on the in-between spaces of jazz, geography and urbanism. Sade and the song Jezebel, forms the opening to contemplate the poetics and politics of sexuality underpinning black radicalism. Reflecting on the notion of improvisation, they discuss black creative practice in the production of space and making of place, collapsing geographies across SA, UK, France and the Atlantic. Together they examine ruptures in humanism, the role of black revolution in the global project of freedom and ways to think the world anew.