Sound from the Thinking Strings (installation detail) · The Medicine Chest

Title

Sound from the Thinking Strings (installation detail)

Is Part Of

SA College of Music See all items with this value

African Studies See all items with this value

Centre for Curating the Archive See all items with this value

History See all items with this value

Fine Art See all items with this value

Anthropology See all items with this value

Special Collections See all items with this value

Archaeology See all items with this value

Description

"Skotnes had a longstanding relationship with the museum, which started when she was still a student at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. Davison remembers that Skotnes would visit the taxidermy section of the South African museum to draw bones. As an anthropologist, Davison admits to finding Skotnes’s way of looking at things stimulating – an individual way of looking at objects that made her look at them differently, even though she was already very familiar with these materials. Davison recalls a visit to the ethnographic stores during which she showed Skotnes the San skin bags, carefully conserved in their drawers and laid out on acid-free paper. Skotnes admired not only their aesthetic qualities but related the stories she had been studying in the Bleek and Lloyd archive to them – stories that shifted their status from anthropological museum objects to powerful animate objects in San spiritual and social life (P. Davison, personal communication, 28 January 2021). Skotnes remembers that she asked staff whether they knew what was inside the bags and was shocked when nobody could remember looking in them. She was allowed to look inside one and found a claw, which they thought must be a leopard’s (P. Skotnes, personal communication, 9 May 2021)" (Liebenberg 2021: 2015).

Access Rights

Centre for Curating the Archive

url

https://issuu.com/cca.uct/docs/sound_from_the_thinking_strings

Creator

Pippa Skotnes See all items with this value

Date Created

1991

Source

Sound from the Thinking Strings Archive (Centre for Curating the Archive)

Resonances

Sound from the Thinking Strings See all items with this value

Pippa Skotnes See all items with this value

Iziko South African Museum See all items with this value

rock art See all items with this value

xam See all items with this value

Patricia Davison See all items with this value

insider See all items with this value

outsider See all items with this value

museum See all items with this value

anthropology See all items with this value

looking See all items with this value

object See all items with this value

Bleek and Lloyd See all items with this value

archive See all items with this value

skin bag See all items with this value

familiar See all items with this value

leopard See all items with this value

claw See all items with this value

stories See all items with this value

poem See all items with this value

archaeology See all items with this value

history See all items with this value

diorama See all items with this value

interpretation See all items with this value

exhibition See all items with this value

book See all items with this value

court case See all items with this value

entoptic spirals See all items with this value

clouds See all items with this value

rain See all items with this value

therianthropic See all items with this value

plants See all items with this value

shaman See all items with this value

instruments See all items with this value

shelter See all items with this value

specimen See all items with this value

biology See all items with this value

landscape See all items with this value

mythology See all items with this value

San See all items with this value

cosmology See all items with this value

interdisciplinary See all items with this value

medicine chest See all items with this value

Axeage Press See all items with this value

Type

Photo

Exhibition

Item sets

99_LBNNIN001