We are Zama Zama (2021)

A film by Rosalind C. Morris

Presented by the Critical Media Club

Synopsis:

For over a hundred years, South Africa was the largest producer of the world’s gold. More gold has been extracted from its reserves than from all the other mines in the world combined. Ever. But today, many of these mines are closing. New waves of migrants are entering into their abandoned but unsealed shafts, to scavenge for gold in the deep. The most daring of these informal miners are called ‘zama zamas.’ The phrase means to “keep on trying,” but also “to gamble.” Zama zamas stake everything to survive - but not all of them do. The work is dangerous, both for the men who go underground and for the women who grind the rock by hand in order to extract the gold. Without helmets or safety equipment, with neither ventilation nor dewatering, lighting the way with only bicycle head-lamps, zama zamas are indeed gamblers, those who stake everything for survival. We are Zama Zama tells their stories.

Bio:

Rosalind Morris is an award-winning anthropologist, cultural critic and media theorist, who has taught at Columbia University, where she is Professor of Anthropology, for 25 years. She has worked for more than two decades to document the transforming life-worlds around the gold mines of the Witwatersrand. She is the author of 7 books and more than 70 essays, and has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Berlin Prize and the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon fellowship of the American Academy in Berlin, the Lenfest Prize, the Lichstein Lectures of the University of Chicago, and residential fellowships at the Institute for Cultural Technology and Media Philosophy in Weimar, the Institutes for Advanced Study in Princeton and Stellenbosch, and the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio. In addition to her scholarly writings, Morris has collaborated extensively with South African artists, including William Kentridge, with whom she has written three books, Clive van den Berg (whose work is the subject of her monograph, Unlearning the Grounds of Art), Ebrahim Hajee and Songezile Madikida. As a filmmaker, Rosalind Morris has directed and produced works in documentary, narrative and expanded cinematic forms. The Gamblers premiered in Berlin at the ICI in January 2019. With Yvette Christiansë, she is the co-librettist on two operas with the composer Zaid Jabri.

The evening's event will serve as an introduction to the filmic work of anthropologist Rosalind Morris, who will visit the lab November 26/27