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

Andrei Van Wyk and Abri de Swardt

Andrei Van Wyk and Abri de Swardt are two of the artists invited by curators Anne Historical and Bhavisha Panchia to produce new work for Joining Room | Nothing to Commit Records.

Andrei van Wyk is a musician and sound artist with a focus on experimental composition, muzak and the relations between sound, noise and music within the context of human experience. Through sound-collage, plunderphonics and free improvisation, van Wyk seeks to recreate and amplify significant aspects within basic human interaction and experience such as humour, boredom and loss among others. He performs in various other projects including in the Experimental Jazz band The Wretched alongside drummer Tumi Mogorosi and vocalist Gabisile Motuba and as a solo artist with his industrial-noise project Healer Oran.

Abri de Swardt is an artist and writer who works across video, photography, costume, sound, sculpture, and performance through what he calls “an aesthetics of drowning” and “the sunstroke of voice”, terms pointing to the seething, theatrical and exhaustive limits of images as interpellations. He is concerned with the difficult visibility and audibility of queer and Southern subjects as proxies of what Michael Taussig terms “effervescent”, “no sooner emerged than” disappearing, the “exact opposite…of monuments”. De Swardt holds a MFA in Fine Art with distinction from Goldsmiths, University of London, and has taught at Stellenbosch University and the Wits School of the Arts, University of the Witwatersrand. He has held solo exhibitions at White Cubicle, London (2015); MOTInternational Projects, London (2013); and blank projects, Cape Town (2011), and has a forthcoming solo exhibition with POOL, Johannesburg (2018).

Recently his work has been focused on local microcosms of tertiary education and viniculture as persistent markers of annexation of land in order to address injustices of recognition more broadly, and the agency of queer youth more specifically, through methods of disorientation and disidentification. This focus has informed him working during 2017 for South African History Online as a researcher, and for 'Piekniek by Mpande née Dingaan'', (dir. Wolf Britz), an Afrikaans, English and isiXhosa follow-up of the Voëlvry Movement protest cabaret 'Piekniek by Dingaan' (1988), as a projection scenographer, as well as his writings published in Adjective magazine.

Named one of the inaugural Young African Artists by Wanted Magazine in 2011, De Swardt was also selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2015, and shortlisted for The Rome Fellowship in Contemporary Art (2016).