Kelly Gillespie

Speculative Practice and the Politics of the Wayward was an itinerant workshop that took place from the 25 June to the 7 of July 2022 across Namibia and Angola, crossing two borders and driving approximately 2900 km. The workshop was prompted by an invitation from an Angolan artist Victor Gama, working on the shadows and traces of the life of Angolan anthropologist Augusto Zita N’Gonguenho’to meet, exchange, and develop methods and insights in the desert of Southern Angola where N’Gonguenho had allegedly disappeared in the early 80s. The workshop brought together an international group of anthropologists, artists, educators and historians and, together, we explored the seams of art, history and anthropology, archive and ethnography, political realism and speculation by opening a set of multimodal propositions to think collectively the aftermaths of colonial and apartheid violence, and the possibilities of moments and practices of waywardness in methodology and politics.