The Centre for the Less Good Idea is an interdisciplinary incubator space for the arts based in Maboneng, Johannesburg

DESERT | THE MAKERS

Meet the artist collaborators turning Lindiwe Matshikiza 's DESERT in to reality

Mwenya Kabwe - a maker of theatre and performance, student of revolutionary mothering and lover of collaborative live art practices. She is a performer, writer and educator with migrant tendencies.

Mmakhotso Lamola - is an architect and explorative artist who is concerned with the “in between” spaces of creative disciplines where she feels her work should exist. Her current work focuses on performance art, interactive architecture and model building. As an architect who navigates the city and reads complex layerings of urban fabric, she is interested in how those layers of socio-politics, identity and everyday mundanity collide into an urban landscape.

Meghan Judge - is a multimedia artist and co-founder of the Africa|Nosy Art Exchange (ANAE) Meghan Judge has been working both as an artist and an arts organiser in the Indian Ocean, Southern and Eastern Africa and China. Her artwork includes personal as well as collaborative explorations such as film, sonic arts and light as well as tactile, site-specific interactions with the social.

As an organiser, Judge works collectivy with ANAE members (Madagascar/South Africa). Together, they find connections between artists and support the emergence of artist-lead networks through the Festival d'Art Urbain in Antananarivo, Madagascar. Here, ANAE operates between islands and countries within close proximity to the festival (so far Comores, Reunion, Seychelles, Zambia, Kenya, DR Congo, Benin, Zimbabwe and South Africa) locating artists to partake in artistic exchange with Malagasy artists. ANAE works against the patterns and the divides set up by colonial networks that are still in place and opens up links into current networks that are strengthening across Africa and within the Indian Ocean.

João Renato Orecchia Zúñiga is a Peruvian Italian Brooklyn-born Johannesburg based artist, composer and maker of physical and virtual “things” that play with reality by deconstructing it, shifting expectations of standard uses or purposes of objects and processes. Through experimentation and improvisation Orecchia explores sound’s connective capacities through both its physical properties and material preconscious properties, seeking a balance between computer technology, hand-made electronics and real world sounds like the human voice, field recordings and traditional musical instruments. Orecchia’s background as a self-taught musician is in improvised performance and composition for video art, film and theatre. His practice extends to public performance and intervention and his recently completed master’s degree in Digital Arts brought a shift towards a more spatial and physical approach to composition, where sound, vibration, space, music and audience become connected in experience.

Boitumelo Moroka - is a Cinematographer, Director of Photography, Photographer and Fictional Writer. Born in Lusaka Zambia, Boitumelo currently lives and works in South Africa. She is a film maker who Graduated from AFTDA with a degree in Film and an Honours Degree in Cinematography.

Thando Lobese Moropa - armed with a fashion design background and mentored into maturity by set designer Nadya Cohen, Noluthando Lobese Moropa has been nominated for several awards and has travelled the world with her designs for theatre under a range of directors, including Lesedi Job, James Ngcobo, Vanessa Cooke and others. She’s had the opportunity of studying under Sweden’s theatre maestro Charlie Koroly and she’s enabled her theatre design background to digress into the visual arts. She was one of the artists on JHB Massive a project showcased at the street festival in Accra, Ghana 2015.

Alexia Webster - is a Johannesburg born documentary photographer and visual artist currently based in Cape Town. From creating family portrait studios in spaces of displacement to documenting youth culture movements, her work explores dislocation, identity and intimacy, primarily across the African continent. She has received a number of awards including the Artraker Award for Art in Conflict, the POPCAP award for Contemporary African Photography and the Frank Arisman Scholarship at the International Centre of Photography in New York City. Her photographs and video work have been featured in The New York Times, Washington Post, WIRED, and Time magazine amongst others.