Published 25 September 2024 in Blog
As South Africa commemorates thirty years of democracy, the exhibition We, The Purple offers a profound space for reflection. In a unique cross-cultural dialogue, Georgia Nasseh, the BRIDGE Fellow at the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria (Javett-UP), encourages us to explore the democratic journeys of SA and Brazil—two young democracies that emerged from oppressive regimes. What lessons can South Africans learn from Brazil’s handling of the post-dictatorship era, and how can Brazilians learn from SA’s approach to post-apartheid reconciliation and nation-building?
On 18 September, the Javett-UP hosted a screening of three Brazilian short films, produced in the wake of Brazil’s twenty-one-year military dictatorship (1964–1985) under the banner Represent/ Re-present Interrogating the Turn to Democracy in Brazil and South Africa. These films—The Day Dorival Faced the Guards (1986), Chico (2017), and República (2020)—provide a cinematic lens into Brazil's complex transition from dictatorship to democracy, paralleling South Africa’s struggles with apartheid and its pursuit of liberation. Through the screening and a subsequent Q&A, participants reflected on the histories of repression and resistance that shaped both nations.
Following the screening, a closed collage-making workshop titled “Living School: Artists As” was held with students from the University of Pretoria’s Visual Culture Studies. Led by Nasseh and Javett-UP’s Education and Mediation Curator, Puleng Plessie, the workshop invited students to engage creatively with representations of democracy by examining archival materials from two pivotal years: Brazil’s return to civilian rule in 1985 and South Africa’s 1994 democratic transition. This workshop offered a space for collective exploration of how art can represent and reinterpret history, deepening our understanding of how societies confront their pasts.
With SA’s marking of thirty years of democracy, the conversations initiated through We, The Purple exhibition will continue to resonate, reminding us of the importance of global solidarity in the ongoing struggle for freedom and democracy.
Georgia Nasseh completed a PhD in Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford in 2023. Her research was concerned with multilingualism and translationality, with an emphasis on the work of Angolan author José Luandino Vieira. She read for a BA in English at Queen Mary, University of London and for an MSt in English at the University of Oxford. More recently, she has acted as Departmental Lectureship in Portuguese at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford and as Coordinator of the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT) Research Centre, based at St Anne's College, Oxford. She is an incoming Junior Research Fellow in the Literature of the Global South at King's College, Cambridge. Georgia is originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
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