How to (Re)Pair my Grandmother's Basket
Anawana Haloba​​​​
February 10th - May 5th 2024

How to (re)pair my grandmother’s basket is an experimental opera by the contemporary visual artist Anawana Haloba (born in 1978), drawing from African philosophy and operatic traditions.

The opera is grounded in the Ubuntu philosophy of encounter to create a non-hierarchical comparative method, by which to interrogate rootedness and empathy.

Haloba’a opera is created and composed borrowing from operatic conventions, knowledges and sensibilities outside the European tradition, mainly from Southern Africa, such as Chiyabilo/Kuyabila and Budima from Zambia.

The libretto of this experimental opera, scripted by Haloba, is a dialogue among non-gendered characters who transverse geographies, cultures, and societies, composed for these times. It engages with questions of environmental racism, the rise of nationalism in the western world, and the plight of immigrants.

Halobas incandescent experimental libretto and composition is an extension of her doctoral exhibition in 2021entitled Negotiating the Subtle Encounter, at Bergen University and teaching practice, in particular a course she taught at KHiO University in Oslo, based on a comparative approach. How to (re)pair my grandmother’s basket opens many possible readings: repairing the basket as a new pairing of histories side-by-side, as much as the idea of recovery, or reparation (though the basket, or history, may not be ever retrievable).