Elegy in Venice

Elegy is a life -work of mourning… It is a cry, a lament, a tender refrain of remembrance, repair, and black feminist love. For more than ten years, Gabrielle Goliath has staged performances of Elegy across South Africa and the world – in Johannesburg, Cape Town, São Paulo, Paris, Amsterdam, Munich, Basel and elsewhere. As a call to mourn, the work tends to an entanglement of hurts, from the crisis of rape culture and femicide in South Africa, to the erasure of Ovaherero and Nama life-worlds in Namibia, and the ongoing displacement and killing of Palestinian women, children, and civilians in Gaza. In confronting loss, Elegy offers a space of tenuous kinship, manifesting in voice and feeling the possibility of a world otherwise. Sounding within Chiesa di Sant’Antonin in Venice are three new suites of Elegy performances, spanning these intertwined contexts of violence and loss. Those commemorated include South African student Ipeleng Christine Moholane, two murdered Nama women ancestors, and Palestinian poet Heba Abunada, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Khan Yunis, Gaza, in October 2023. Arranged across eight funereal video screen monoliths, the collective voices and visuals of these performances bathe participants in light and sound, drawing them into a shared labour of imagination, connection and care.