Education

2012 - 2014 Hochschule für Bildene Kuenste, Braunschweig

2014 - 2018 Kunstakademie Duesseldorf

2017 - 2018 WITS University, Johannesburg, Philosophy, Anthropology

2018 -           LSE, London, MSc Social Anthropology

 

Multimedia artist, working with sound, image, text. Scholar working in the field of critical whiteness studies and race theory, discursive psychology and ethics.

Orania, a white Afrikaner settlement in South Africa, gained global fame for being the ''Neo Apartheid” village, the manifestation of continual racism in South Africa. The work How are you? is based on a visit of the settlement, but utilizes the location only as a reference to racism. The situatedness becomes decontextualized through the fragmentation of the documentary footage, How are you? neither provides a narrative about Orania, nor a definition about racism, but instead uses the context to ask the question: Where does racism end, where does it begin? What are the boundaries of the white body, what is its relation, its connection to racism? What is the meaning of the white body in racialized system? How do I participate in, perpetuate racism through my body, besides my good intentions?

 

Black scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in the 40s:

My life had its significance and its only deep significance because it was part of a problem; but that problem was, as I continue to think, the central problem of the greatest of the world’s democracies and so the problem of the future world.

 

How are you? reverses his insights and problematizes the white body as the central axis of continual racism. How does it feel to be a white problem?

 

Text source: Artist website

Artist website: daphnefietz.com