The nora chipaumire | nhereraHUB is a female-run cultural space in Zimbabwe that offers all creative people a safe place to come together to explore aesthetic processes of thinking accessed with and through the body. Finding intellectual space within our individual and collective movements, the HUB provides a platform for generative thought to develop as both creative practice and communal ritual.
Founded in 2022, nhereraHUB seeks to provide access to residency space, library archives, and a state-of-the-art sound studio for creators and thinkers coming from near and far to advance projects that take their form from within the global south. The compound also features productive gardens and a wood-fire kitchen, offering the opportunity to participate in a return to culinary arts that is informed by local and traditional practices.
Follow nhereraHUB on Instagram: @nhererahub
Introduction
“Walking each other home!” is a phrase that lies at the core of the nora chipaumire | nhereraHUB, a newly established research space centering around movement, audio, and visual cultures founded by nora chipaumire.
Following the idea that we are stronger when traveling together, nhereraHUB stands as an extension of the life work of nora’s late mother, offering a space that is open to all. Providing materials and programming in Shona, Ndebele, and English, the primary languages of the region, nhereraHUB prioritizes access for those dedicated to developing new ideas and practices that engage with local or regional histories and community.
Born in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, nora has made work throughout her career that straddles these imaginations: Africa and America, Blackness and Africanness. Constantly defying, refusing, negotiating, deconstructing and constructing narratives born out of lived experiences of liberation wars, exiles, racial and social differences and aesthetic processes, nora sees the earth as the country and refuses the limitations that geography and tradition place on the artist. Since 1998, nora has brought her refusals in forms of dance, text, objects, cinema and sound to the artworld, as an individual and artistic entity.
Building on nora’s body of work, nhereraHUB shares with the continent and with the world a new opportunity to join others in building a language of decolonization that seeks to create space and ideas for artists.
The Program
The primary intention of nhereraHUB is to bring people together in a space that offers access to a state-of-the-art sound studio, fertile land, and artistic mentorship. By providing resources, support, and vitality to the diverse creative community in Harare, the nhereraHUB offers a strong basis from which to reboot and rebuild networks that have dissipated over time across national borders within the region, rekindling relations among divergent communities within the African South.
The compound comprises two buildings oriented around an extensive series of outdoor gardens, with the intention to include a robust library archive, accommodations for two visiting artists-in-residence, and a fully equipped sound studio accessible for both local and visiting artists to use. Central to the project, the property will feature an ecologically developed permaculture program including productive gardens where organic foods are cultivated to be prepared in the outdoor wood-fire kitchen. A fully integrated solar-power system has been designed to limit dependence on non-renewable energy.
The program is conceived around practices of shared sustainability, ranging in scope from energy consumption to resource and library sharing, and from income-generation through professional studio rentals to traditional and ecological food preparation. nhereraHUB prioritizes an emphasis on cohesion and safety for the people and the land involved. Building upon nora’s practice of generative collaboration between individuals and with the land, the program is oriented around seven primary pillars, each balancing tradition with innovation to cultivate opportunities for sharing, learning, exploration, and reflection.
The seven pillars of nhereraHUB:
1. ratendai | organic gardens and orchard
Organic gardens form the basis of a robust permaculture program that will offer food to staff and guests, while fostering opportunities for continued research into water preservation practices within local plant cultivation.
2. pahuni | wood-fire kitchen
Moving away from our developed dependency on electricity as the primary source of power within the kitchen, this traditional outdoor kitchen offers space to explore new practices of food preparation while also preserving and revitalizing knowledge of pre-colonial recipes and techniques that have continued to disappear in favor of fast-food alternatives.
3. tsikapasi | open-air movement studio
Revisiting open ground as the original sprung floor ideally used by dancers, this large, shaded expanse offers an opportunity to explore choreography in connection to the earth, and to remember how modern technologies attempt to mimic natural environments within human-built landscapes. tsikapasi will be the primary creative base for nora chipaumire’s team, offering a permanent home for nora that promotes the company’s research and support of Black African female practices and processes, including nhaka and related movement canons.
4. shumba residency | creative fellowship
One room on the compound is dedicated to visiting artists, prioritizing those who have a specific interest in developing bodies of work generated from within the global south. The residency will offer space for reflection and serious study to established thinkers and ambitious creators.
5. nherera | sound studio
A newly-built state-of-the-art sound studio will feature technologies for recording and producing, accompanied by master classes teaching local students both acoustically-oriented artistic practices and technical production skills. The studio will be made available-for-hire to local professionals in acoustic production and will double as a local hub for Harare-based alternative radio programming.
6. mhayiyo | research archives and library
Libraries offer the opportunity for scholarship while archives preserve and share cultural memory. The mhayiyo research archives and library will be home to these two separate and parallel practices. Physical access to books, records, and a study corner will come together with a digitally-hosted sound archive composed largely of oral histories, creating the framework for new access to a non-urban knowledge base focused on locally sourced and generated materials. The library and archives will include the full compilation of nora’s research and past works.
7. pamukoma | outdoor benches
A series of wooden benches will be distributed throughout the property to allow for moments of stillness and reflection in the yard.
Upcoming Residents
Performer, singer, pedagogue and dramaturg, Angélique Willkie completed a Master’s degree in Economics at McGill University before starting her dance training at the School of Toronto Dance Theater. Her career evolved in Europe over the following 25 years where she worked, amongst others, with Alain Platel, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Jan Lauwers / Needcompany, and as a singer with the Belgian world-music group, Zap Mama. Working as a dramaturg for dance and circus, and still on stage as a performer, Angélique is Assistant Professor in the Department of Contemporary Dance at Montreal’s Concordia University and is currently pursuing a PhD in dramaturgy at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM).
Marisa Lull, (Dénia, Spain) has a background in sociology, theater and dance.Her practice crosses stage creation, pedagogy and curating. Since 2002, through the project Yo Me Experimento, she focuses on collective work exploring and reflecting on themes in the field of intimacy and affections.n 2007 co-founded Cultural Mandjani in Madrid with Kassoum Sanogo, aplatform with multidisciplinary programming dedicated to artistic projects rooted n African Mandenge culture. With the aim of occupying an artistic space and establishing a dialogue with the citizenship. From 2019 to 2024, she curated the ÍDEM International Performing Arts Festival at La Casa Encendida, programming national and international artists who coincid e in their marked activism in a commitment to contemporary problems. In his context nora chipaumire was invited to present #PUNK. This collaboration generated a series of projects, including Nehanda Opera Radio, Nehanda Art. Book and Arias Nehanda, presented at ÍDEM 2023. In 2021, she curated the launch of Bajo el Sol, an online platform from Galería Travesía Cuatro, dedicated to the dissemination of voices that analyze and transform today's world from the context of the Global South. which featured notable artists such as Germaine Acogny and nora chipaumire in its second program. Since 2019, co-directs in Madrid Escena311, a space for and exchange where research, creation and teaching dialogue with the contemporary context in the field of performing and audiovisual arts.
Past Residents
Luis Rincon Alba is an artist and scholar focused on the political and social potential of festive practices in the Caribbean and Latin America. His research explores the history of rebellion during the colonial period and how this history influences contemporary artistic practices. Currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art & Public Policy at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, he is working on a book titled “Dance to the Hurt! Carnival Performance, Riots, and Festive Mutuality,” which connects Caribbean carnival history with riots pivotal to ending slavery and colonial rule. Rincón Alba’s work reveals a genealogy between these intertwined histories, emphasizing carnival aesthetics as a source of collective political claims. He argues that carnival practice is a technology of unity that transforms modern understandings of communal practice through various mediums, including music, dance, literature, and performance art. His performance pieces and installations have been exhibited at notable venues like the Hannah Traore Gallery and the Clemente Center in NYC, with recent works such as Maraca (2022) and Chant Down (2023) examining percussive patterns and the transcendent qualities of voice.
Atiyyah Khan is a journalist, researcher, selector, crate-digger, event organizer, and archivist from Johannesburg, based in Cape Town. She currently freelances as an arts journalist, documenting visual arts, theatre, music, film, and other forms of culture in South Africa. Atiyyah is also the co-founder of music collective Future Nostalgia, which hosts listening sessions around Cape Town celebrating the culture of records. As DJ El Corazon, her sets explore music beyond boundaries forming connections that link the global south to the rest of the world in order to evoke curiosity in the possibility of sound. She has also experimented with making zines; her latest one titled Bismillah, which references Islam and music in Africa. Since 2017, Atiyyah has taken on the role of sound artist in a performance called 100%POP with afro-futurist Zimbabwean dancer and choreographer nora chipaumire. Most recently, she has toured with this performance through various cities across the US, UK and Europe.
Haman Mpadire is an artist, performance maker and dance teacher born in Eastern Uganda, originally from Busoga tribe. He graduated with a diploma in contemporary dance from École des Sables and Master’s degree in Choreography from CCN – Paul Valery University, Montpellier (France). He holds a danceWEB scholarship and is a laureate of the Visa for Creation program at the French Institute in Paris. His artistic practices involve the body as a medium that embodies entities that are not seen but their presence is felt in space. Furthermore, Haman explores animistic notions of ancient Busoga kingdom and beyond + complex relationships between identity, visibility and colonialism towards black African bodies. We are unapologetically stepping into the black future with ancestral joy’.
As a Fellow of the Pina Bausch Foundation Haman follows the work of nora chipaumire at the nherera hub. Haman is interested in learning about chipaumire’s thinking method, her understanding of the animist body practices, as well as her process of creating a large-scale production. During his stay at the nherera hub, Haman will be shadowing her work nhaka, a cartography of the animist body practices, and will as well take part in the creation process of her new work Dambudzo.
With a background in classical, contemporary and traditional dance, classical music, theatre and literature, Caroline Roche is pursuing her artistic research in Brussels as part of the Masters in Dance and Choreographic Practices at Charleroi Danse/INSAS/La Cambre. Interested in traditional dances and Occitan vocal polyphony, she explores the multiple relationships between body and voice in contact with silence, ancient music or contemporary musical and vocal works.
In July 2023, I completed a one-month work placement with choreographer Nora Chipaumire on the opening and inauguration of the Nherera HUB. Concerned by the project and the artistic, social and political issues at stake on the scale of a territory, a country and a continent, the placement also gave me a better understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of the choreographer’s work, which, however punk it may be, is rooted in ancestral practices and culture. I referenced and catalogued the books that had been sent to the Nherera HUB and which constituted the first books in the future archive.
Lara Barzon will use her time at the hub to research for her PhD Project “Aesthetics and Politics of Decolonial Practices in Contemporary Dance” a joint project between the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick (UK) and the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana (SLO). Awarded by EUTOPIA PhD cotutelle programme.
Joseph Cochran II (b. 1990, New York City, USA) is a lens-based artist whose work spans photography, video, and archival research. He explores the complex interplay between advanced industrial societies, their systems, and their impact on society. Through his photography, Cochran creates images that blur the lines between documentary and diary, anthropology, and philosophy; urging the viewer to analyse the complex relationships that exist in today’s globalised economic structures. His works are in the permanent collections of the The Schomburg Center For Research In Black Culture, The Langston Hughes Library (Queens, New York), The Evergreen State College library and the Swivel Gallery in New York.
At the nherera hub Joseph will research and contribute to a multimedia installation titled Dambudzo, collaboratively developed by artists nora chipaumire and Svenja Wichmann which is supported by the Goethe Institut Visual Arts Fund.
Franz Schuette is a german musician and artist who is running a music studio called NADEL EINS STUDIO BERLIN. He offers various services such as recording, mixing, mastering, sound-design and consulting. Working in different positions related to audio for more then 25 years he can draw on extensive experience.
Franz has been working with Nora for nehanda, afternow, wiFziFM, nherera, NOTwaiting and shebeenDUB. As collaborator and foremost conspirator he is a true supporter of the hub in deed and mind. His main emphasis is the conception of the hubs music studio as a place that will have its very unique acoustic and equipment. The goal is to create the “nhereraHUB signature sound”.