crazinisT artisT (Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi), Giulia Casalini and Niya B, I AM HERE, 2021. Performance. Photo: Niya B.

In the book One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, Miwon Kwon identifies how disenfranchised social groups in community-based collaborative art projects often mobilize to create their own cultural representations not just as an artistic experiment but also as a political strategy. perfocraZe International Artist Residency (pIAR) is an example of this kind of collaborative art project that is informed by its locality—the historic city of Kumasi, Ghana. pIAR is continually evolving as a site for activist-led performance art that is entwined with a politics of place. Kumasi, the country’s second-largest city, was the capital of the Asante Kingdom, one of the richest, most powerful, and most enduring dynasties of West Africa, and it was a key site of the Ashanti uprising of 1900, the infamous anticolonial war between the Ashanti and British over land and control of Ghana’s coastal region. Today, it is also home to Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), which has cultivated generations of innovative artists.

During our conversation, pIAR’s founder, Ghanaian-Togolese performance artist crazinisT artisT (aka Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi),¹ described the residency as “an interdisciplinary program centered on performance that operates as a safe space, incubator, laboratory, and interactive platform fostering exchanges between local and international artists, activists, researchers, curators, writers, and thinkers. There are no formal spaces to study performance art in Ghana, so I transformed my studio into pIAR. . . . I want people here to come to terms with seeing performance art as part of their lives, so I intervene in public spaces for this purpose.”²

Lélle Demertzi and Martin Toloku, The World Between, 2020. Performance. Courtesy of pIAR.

In August 2019, I spent four weeks in Ghana as part of a West Africa-focused research trip funded by Arts Council England (ACE). I’d followed Ghana’s art scene for several years from afar, including the Chale Wote Street Art Festival in Accra, which brings performance art to the streets of the city’s Jamestown district each year. The city becomes an active site for interventions and local festivities that are free and accessible to all.

I first came across photographs documenting a work by artisT in 2018, on a trip to Lagos that coincided with the ninth edition of LagosPhoto Festival. Titled FroZen (2018), the photographs document artisT in a process of becoming, which they describe as acts to “unlearn maleness.” These images depict the artist’s nude or clothed body and capture daily rituals, including bathing and getting dressed, as metaphors for cleansing and becoming—acts that contribute to the daily transformation of the self. Each act is deconstructed through performance, as the artist explores birth-assigned gender in relationship to politics, identity, and social constructs. The work was also exhibited in 2017, as part of Rituals of Becoming, curated by Maria Rus Bojan, at Gallery 1957, in Accra. The exhibition transformed the gallery’s white cube into a large-scale installation resembling artisT’s studio and featured ritualistic performances drawn from the artist’s everyday experiences, objects, and videos that questioned the strict categories of gender and the construction of identities. According to the artist, “This series marks the beginning of a journey into documenting my everyday lived experience of deconstructing gender and the politics around that experience, as I am neither he nor she, and I use the biopolitical pronoun sHit.”³ artisT isn’t performing for the camera but rather turns their attention to their own body as a site for interrogating identity and gender constructs. The artist thus stakes a claim for sHit’s visibility and, by extension, bringing visibility to other nonconforming bodies in a wider global context in which oppressive systems seek to render them invisible.

Mawuenya Amudzi, reinKarnator, 2020. Multi-media installation. Courtesy of pIAR.

Since artisT founded pIAR in the spring of 2019 as an extension of their studio practice, their home and studio has been reconstituted as a safe and community-focused environment, described by the artist as a “hatchery,” welcoming local, regional, cross-continental, and international artists. The space consists of communal indoor and outdoor areas for talks, events, screenings, and other gatherings and interventions. Located in the Nsenie residential area about fifteen kilometers from the center of Kumasi, pIAR accommodates up to nine artists per month over its eight-month (January–August) residency duration.

pIAR joins a region with a history of artist-led residency programs, including Treehouse Lagos, RAW Material Company, Dakar, and the newly opened G.A.S Foundation in Ijebu-Ode/Lagos, Nigeria. What sets pIAR apart is its focus on performance art as an expanded field rooted in local activism. It is also unique in favoring process over realizing work. Eventually, artisT seeks to fully integrate pIAR as a social space for the local Kumasi community. To date, an impressive cohort of over sixty cross-disciplinary artists from many countries, including the United States, Germany, Switzerland, France, Nigeria, Togo, Brazil, Portugal, United Kingdom, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, France, Spain, Tanzania, Brazil, and Ghana has passed through pIAR. The residency’s inclusive acceptance policy extends to practitioners new to performance art, which reinforces its founding ethos as a space for experimentation.

From studio to residency, pIAR has evolved into a testing ground for liveness, informality, and collaboration. The residency program centers on restoring—or rather countering the disappearance of—the coevolutionary dynamics that have long linked artists to communities and places. Additionally, it is a site of and for cultural activism, where creative practices and activities challenge dominant interpretations and constructions of the world while presenting alternative sociopolitical and spatial imaginaries for art, politics, participation, and spectatorship.

I interviewed crazinisT artisT earlier this year, and we have had an ongoing conversation about pIAR’s evolution for over two years. The conversation that follows has been condensed and edited for clarity.

JAREH DAS: What motivated you to establish perfocraZe International Artist Residency and transform your studio into a communal and collaborative space for Ghanaian and international artists?

crazinisT artisT: pIAR is really an extension of my practice. It’s like a baby in infancy, as it’s also the most recent part of my practice. It needs time to grow and develop. The residency was founded out of urgency for a critical interdisciplinary safe space for art in Ghana. I wanted the program to deal with the politics of this place but also extend across borders to have communal and collaborative exchanges. A lot of personal changes have also fueled my need to create a safe and critical creative space, including my transition and my renunciation of conservative faith-based and homophobic attitudes, as well as the legacies of colonialism that still govern daily life.⁴ pIAR invites creatives from all over the world to converge and have necessary conversations about politics rooted in race, gender, power, and class differences.

DAS: How do your artwork and the residency program speak to a politics of place in relation to LGBTQIA rights and performance/live art practices in Kumasi and Ghana as a whole?

artisT: As a queer person, I’ve always operated from a place of agency. I’ve had to overcome struggles just to show my work and gain visibility, especially around the wider political conversations that my work raises. It became critical for me to create a space for a younger generation to counter some of these difficulties, particularly young queer artists, because there’s also this very warped idea of queerness as entertainment, i.e., things you watch on screen, such as drag. Once this activity moves into real life, homophobia comes into full view. This has led to a wider studio practice confronting everyday homophobic oppression and mobilizing to counter this as a means of survival.

DAS: Could you explain this notion of the residency as not just an extension of your practice but also permeating beyond the physical walls of the studio and into the city? You have described this as a virus contaminating the city through radical performance in public space.

crazinisT artisT (Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi), reThinking-naZa, 2014. Performance. Courtesy of the artist.

artisT: pIAR might be viewed as an extension of my practice, which is outward and community led. I turned to interventions in public space as a way to extend an internal dialogue outward, into the landscape and with other bodies—human and non-human entities—that all coexist within spaces. If I create a space, I’m allowing these things to multiply into different conversations, like a contagion. The residency is rooted in this ethos of encouraging multilayered conversations that extend beyond the space and into the city of Kumasi and beyond.

DAS: Why Kumasi?

artisT: It was important for me to create the space within Kumasi, although it is not my region or my hometown. I came here to study at KNUST.⁵ After I finished, I stayed on in the city. This space might be viewed as building something on an alien (foreign) land, you know? I mean this in a sense that it’s an inclusive and safe space outside of the main center with an emphasis on public interventions and fostering exchanges via a residency that isn’t separate from but is in dialogue with the community that it is sited within. I also had this idea of creating a space in Kumasi because it is part of the Ashanti region of historic bearing, with its infamous roots in rebellion. But the everyday realities of its intolerance of difference make it quite an antagonistic city. This made it even more important for me to stake my claim of belonging here.

DAS: When I visited just after the inaugural residency in 2019, you framed it as opening up and transforming your studio into a hybrid space for experimentation for nine months. The rest of the time you planned to develop your own work or participate in performances outside of Ghana, as a touring performance artist of sorts, in order to fundraise for what you do. This was pre-pandemic, of course. How has this model worked out so far?

Sunny Pfalzer, When the Bats Fly, 2020. Performance. Courtesy of pIAR.

artisT: I started this residency with a very limited budget, and it is self-funded from my work as a performance artist. Everything is coming from my resources, which is very difficult, but at the same time encouraging. There have been four residencies since 2019. This year—2021—is the third year. I didn’t really know how the residency would evolve when I started, but I am determined to continue. I envision it outliving my tenure and being taken over by others, once it has been developed enough.

Of course, you know, there’s been a pandemic. I don’t want to dwell on that and the restraints too much. What have been really positive are the exchanges that have happened so far, bringing together artists from Ghana, across West Africa, the continent, and internationally, ever since the inaugural residency. We have had a really interesting mix of people. The core concept for participants is that they have a keen interest in collaboration and performance art, but they don’t have to define or think of themselves as performance artists before coming here. Perhaps they have an interest in bringing less of an academic stance to their work, and they want to explore a lightness in performativity. The interventions around Kumasi are rooted in a notion of normalizing this art form here, championing its validity, and bringing in new audiences.

Mawuenya Amudzi, reinKarnator, 2020. Multi-media installation. Courtesy of pIAR.

DAS: These sites for the residents’ performative interventions are diverse—from abandoned railway tracks to markets, processions in the streets, and important historic sites around the city. How has this worked, particularly with the more extreme works that might offend some viewers?

artisT: Conventional venues, like a white cube gallery or museum, these are all within a certain institutional framework that is mostly too inflexible for more radical practices. Also, the symbolism of certain sites around Kumasi is of interest to me; some are challenging for their social and political histories. How do we take the studio out, and, in other instances, how do we bring the city in? These are questions I constantly ask myself.

DAS: Intervening in public space has a lot to do with cultivating visibility, familiarity, and normalization, as you so rightly identify. A site can be potent for activism, and, of course, the performing body within public space is always politicized. There are tensions in entering and moving between gendered spaces. Could you speak to this intentional disruption of public spaces with regards to pIAR?

crazinisT artisT (Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi), x in REd, 2016. Performance. Courtesy of the artist.

artisT: As I mentioned previously, what I do in my studio and by extension with pIAR is responding to urgent local matters that extend to issues we all deal with in terms of visibility, self-determination, and activism that promotes the visibility of those that society wants to exclude and silence.

Secondly, yes, my goal is to normalize things. When I began performing around 2013, I had the intention to hold the gaze of the viewer. It worked, but I quickly noticed that no matter what you do on stage, even if you have people who are homophobic in the audience, they will applaud you. But when this performed action or appearance becomes life, they are unable to relate and deal with it. So, seeing a queer body on stage is fine because it is deemed entertainment, at least to a certain degree.

Peat Szilagyi, Black fish, white wash, 2021. Performance. Courtesy of pIAR.

I tell people that, before all the gender constructs, humans were born naked, unnamed, and without gender. So queerness is the beginning of life. These preexisting realities have been obscured by all of the forms of colonialism and the religious invasion that came with it. When can we actually re-normalize queerness and reclaim public spaces? What I am doing here in Kumasi empowers me and feels very necessary. I want everyone who comes here to reclaim public spaces as free sites for limitless interventions and commentary on contemporary life.

Dr. Jareh Das is a researcher, writer, independent curator, and (occasional) florist who lives and works between West Africa and the United Kingdom. Her interests in global modern and contemporary art are cross-disciplinary, and her understanding is filtered through the lens of performance art, which informs both her academic and curatorial work.

crazinisT artisT (Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi) was born in 1981, in Ho, Ghana. sHit works internationally and lives in Kumasi, Ghana. sHit is a multidisciplinary artivist, curator, mentor, and founder/artistic director of perfocraZe International Artists Residency (pIAR), which is aimed at promoting exchange between international and local artists, activists, researchers, curators, and thinkers. As a performer and installation artist, artisT investigates gender stereotypes, prejudices, queerness, identity politics, conflicts, sexual stigma, and their consequences for marginalized groups and individuals. With rituals and a gender-fluid persona, sHit employs sHit’s own body as a thought-provoking tool in performances, photography, video, and installations, confronting issues such as disenfranchisement, social justice, violence, objectification, internalized oppression, anti-blackness, and systemic indoctrination. artisT has performed and exhibited across the globe, including in Brazil, Cape Verde, France, Germany, Ghana, Netherlands, Nigeria, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Togo, United Kingdom, and the United States.