ESCAPING THE DOMINATION OF CULTURE
Tymon Smith talks to Aryan Kaganof about his online project herri
‘Iwant to say something counterintuitive, but I believe it with my whole being,” says cultural provocateur Aryan Kaganof, via Skype from his home in Greyton in the Western Cape. He barely pauses before continuing: “Heritage is in the future. The biggest mistake we make is in the linear time notion that heritage is only about the past. We’re creating our heritage constantly. Everything we do is part of the heritage we leave behind but nothing we do is in the past, everything we do is in the future because we’re writing ourselves into the future and we’re creating the future all the time.”
Kaganof is discussing the online arts journal and webzine herri, which nominally highlights the work of the African Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation. The institute is an independent interdisciplinary unit that operates within the arts and social sciences faculty at Stellenbosch University. It was established as a reaction to the verkrampte mindset of the university’s stuffy, classical, Euro-centric traditional music department by musicologist and long-time Kaganof collaborator Stephanus Muller.
Kaganof was keen to produce a version of an academic journal that begins to imagine what a decolonised academic landscape may look like, in that most democratic of spaces, the online world.
The journal takes its name from Autshumao, the Khoi interpreter for Jan van Riebeeck and the first Robben Island prisoner, better known to most South
Africans by his Dutch moniker, “Herrie die Strandloper”.
The journal is about fighting back, rejecting imposed rules and ideas — there’s no peer review process and the design elements allow for a curated rabbit-hole experience in which text is broken up by videos, films, music and other media that riff off the texts and allow you to get lost in long digressions that are more intellectually rewarding than the click-bait excursions that characterise so much scrolling.
Each of the journal’s four issues so far has had a strong focus on writing about music but the connections between the pieces are not stringently determined by Kaganof. Instead, they’re suggested for users who can make up their own minds about how they navigate the content.
One of the features of the site is the red button in the top right corner that appears with selected articles and allows the user to switch between alternative language versions of pieces. This isn’t done in a manner of “either/or” but simultaneously on the same page so users can see how the languages work together. This is the result of Kaganof’s experience of hearing languages in the everyday environment.
“If I get in a taxi, I hear four or five languages. In the region where I live people speak a dialect of Afrikaans, splattered like clusterfuck with English and the English is completely littered with Afrikaans words.
They’re not separate languages here, they’re a combined South African language.”
For Kaganof the translation button on the site allows users the power to click, even though in the real world you’re expected to speak English.
In four issues, herri has established itself as a space for a new, multi-disciplinary, multilingual and multi-media investigation of culture as a constantly evolving, shifting, mutating and hybrid entity.
Traditionalists might decry the digital age as marking the death of the book, but for Kaganof this moment provides an opportunity to “actually look at and say ‘These media are transforming our physiognomies, they’re changing our brains and quickly.’ Let’s stop being worried about that, and ask where will this bring us? What will it do to us?”
Herri is an attempt to try to answer the question. “It’s connected to the idea that colonialism is a repressive, regressive way of looking at the world. Coming from SA we must have a perspective on technohybridity that is anti-colonial. When we marry those two ostensibly different directions in the world, something extraordinary can happen,” he says.
“Herri is up to the task of understanding where we really are — outside the box of what culture has been allowed to be by the apartheid mentality. Now you can be free from the domination of culture because of … herri.”