Urussa interviewed artist Mandla to get more insight into Mandla’s artistry, processes, upcoming work and thoughts on Manchester. Mandla’s work is exhibited currently in Traces of Displacement which is running until May 2024.

Urussa: I have this relationship with artists in Manchester where we say ‘hi’ and ‘bye’ and nothing more happens. I remember seeing you last time in Bhaji on the Beach.

Mandla: Oh yeahhhhhhh, you came to that! Bless you, that was so much fun.

Yeah, and I just remember. And we had loads of onion bhajis as well.

Urussa: So, what’s your relationship with Manchester- like, did you grow up here?

Mandla: So, I moved to Manchester 7 years ago, I came here after I graduated. I’d grown up in London and I’d studied in London and I was like…this is boring, this is too big, and expensive I can’t do this. And I’d come to visit friends in Manchester, and I really liked the vibe and how your friends can live near you. So, I was just kind of like let me just try something new for a little bit.

U: It’s a really nice place to choose to move to! So, what is your art practise like? I’ve seen your work performed, it’s in cinema, it’s in Fringe.

M: Yeah, so like I started as a poet, in terms of performance. I studied English literature and creative writing and I wrote a play for my creative dissertation, so theatre’s always been like something that I’ve loved being around. I feel like I kinda wrote a long poem which kept going and with the support of people in the arts in a Manchester who were like ‘ you can make this into a full show’ and I was like ‘are you sure, I didn’t go to drama school and how do people do this?’, so kind of winging this performance which is quite nice and it became a film because Covid happened.

It was always meant to be a live show and then things were still closed so Contact were like, ‘can you make this a digital offering of this?’. I had seen quite a few National Theatre Live shows and I was like ‘I don’t know if I want something quite obviously alone, on stage, so sort like filming like a live performance and putting it online as something that would sit on its own. So, we filmed it at a big stage at Contact so it’s literally, me alone on a stage but yeah kind of wanted something that wasn’t like a film but it opened up so many avenues- so I never really thought my work would be in art gallery for example, but it is somehow!

U: There’s something about the film mould that is highly versatile and it felt very artsy, like a play. How did the Whitworth contact you, what’s the story considering you filmed it only down the road to the gallery?

M: Yeah, so Leanne (the curator for Traces of Displacement) got in contact with me and my producer and said ‘hey we’re doing this exhibition on displacement and we’d like your work to be a part of it’, and I guess already when they got in touch, I was talking to someone from the Sharjah Biennial, they wanted me to bring the live-show in but because I have a refugee travel document, I’m not allowed to travel to the UAE. So, I said I can’t come but I have this thing! And so, they made a screening space and people could decide to go watch it in a gallery, so that had already happened so I thought if it could work there, it can also work here. It will also be in another exhibition in Berlin, starting next month (Mandla was interviewed in late August 2023). When I first made it, it screened in theatres, it’s had a few cinema outings as well so visual arts can also became a part of that, which has expanded my practise.

U: Nice! How does that feel? Brings in money?

M: It’s good, it brings in money and it’s quite nice to not have to do a live performance all the time as I got injured last year and so performing was causing me a lot of pain. Being able to say, you can have this for 10 months, but I don’t have to perform for 10 months…

U: Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that, it manages your capacity as such…Do you have a favourite piece in the Whitworth?

M: Do you mean currently or ever?

U: Let’s go both

M: Ever – there was a film in there maybe 5,6 years ago I can’t remember what the exhibition was but it was 10,000 waves by Isaac Julien and it was this huge, 3-screen installation and it was 45 minutes long and different things were happening on each screen and some were connected, it was like really poetic and beautiful and it was about the Morecambe Bay, Chinese migrants who picked cockleshells and a huge wave that essentially killed the migrant workers, working in unsafe conditions, footage of that. This woman monologuing going through her life…I went back to watch it 5 times, that was gorgeous.

At the moment, I really love the Traces of Displacement exhibition, there’s family artefacts from a woman whose grandad I believe was alive during the Nazi regime and there’s these photos that have scuff marks and damage from actual Nazis and its haunting…Like, I’ve been to Germany twice this year and there’s something about the way the country acknowledges like history and little bronze in the squares in the street where they’ll have someone’s name and date of birth, their date of death, and it’ll be in front of somewhere there was a raid and been taken away. The fact that they still have the remnants of the Berlin wall, history is right there in front of you and it’s really haunting, and now Germany takes in the highest number of refugees in Europe and UK’s nowhere near that…

U: To throw something out to you as I did English at uni and a module at uni which explored identity and nation states and there was an idea that refugees, the way they operate without visa and passports, is the way we should move- but the way they are so demonised you don’t want to be a refugee. Refugees offer the idea that if you could move as you needed without borders and passports. How do you feel about this idea of refugee movements as utopian almost?

M: Yeah, I find the idea of borders just really confusing, someone was just like that’s mine and that’s yours. Different bits of land that are the same, the fact that like Victoria Falls is in Zimbabwe and Zambia, what does that mean for that bit of land whereas beforehand people moved around. Like my tribe, I’m Zimbabwe and born there but at a certain point if I want to trace the history of my tribe I’d have to go to South Africa because they moved from South Africa to Zimbabwe and so the idea of people not being allowed to go somewhere in the world and people not being allowed to seek safety and a better life feels really charged because a lot of people with a British passport can live anywhere they like and be called expats so why can’t everyone else have the privilege because they were born somewhere else and didn’t win the passport lottery.

U: That is also the arbitrary bit when I think about my family, my great grandma was born in a different place to my grandma who was born in a different place to my mum who was born in a different place to me and there’s this really organic way of moving, no one really stays in one place. Even I’m not sure that I’ll stay here in UK and there’s 4 generations before me that moved so if I want to move, my mothers before me already did.

M: Yeah, everyone should have that ability. I have a friend who is Italian, she lived in Korea for a bit, a bit of time in China and I found it really interesting that vast majority of her friends in those countries were white people, these expat communities, but yeah anyone else trying to build a life…People can be really weird about areas where migrants gather because I remember when Brixton was first getting gentrified and white people suddenly were like ‘omg yeah it’s so safe here, it’s so nice’ and it’s like no, all the black people have just been kicked out because before the rhetoric around places like Brixton and Tooting was that ‘ah it’s really dangerous because, its Black working-class people there.’ So yeah, gentrification.

U: What’s your favourite colour?

M: Between black and gold

U: What’s been the highlight of your art career so far?

M: Being able to travel because I made something, sounds wild to me. I got to tour the live show across the UK, to Germany and one of my favourite phase of the tour was in Bristol because we got to do it in main house in the Old Vic, which is the oldest working theatre in the UK, and I was literally like ‘Are you sure? Me, on there? That’s quite a big stage!’ It was really exciting to me but there was a time when Black people weren’t allowed on that stage, so yeah being able to be there, is a dream that I never even imagined and yeah when I went to Mannheim earlier this year, was the first time I had left the UK since I arrived, yeah when I was 7, and yeah, the fact that I was able to do that because of my little baby, was really really special. Just seeing how much has grown and how far it has taken me.

U: How did as british as a watermelon (ABAAW) come about? From the first idea, it’s your baby but it feels like it got its own two feet and its fully running and speaking on its own…

M: Yeah, when I first wrote it, it was a poem and then I applied to like things constantly as a freelancer and it was the king of like gateways for doing freelance things full-time. I’m now trying to make a new show and I’m like ‘ah, what if it’s not as good!’ what if it doesn’t fly high but also it is putting the groundwork for me to able to do lots of different things as well.

U: Well hopefully ABAAW, it is giving you the space to experiment again.

M: What’s nice as well is to put something down and I feel like I’ve been saying those words for so many years that now I’m kinda like, I can say something else!

U: What do you think your next work might be?

M: I want to make something that’s looking at the history of my first language and how words like ‘queer’ and ‘trans’ don’t exist, we have to use English words because Zimbabwe was colonised by the British. Trying to look into that culture prior to colonialism and look at how people were, what attitudes were to queerness and gender non conformity because in a lot of Zimbabwe it is still illegal to be any kind of LGBT and that began through colonisation. So I want to find out what went on before and were there any words, and there are people now trying to get a movement started where they’re creating new words in a space so that’s this idea of sexuality is a quote unquote ‘white man’s disease’ that’s an idea that’s played into whereas I think their homophobia is actually the white man’s disease.

U: It’d be interesting if your work can create this new language and to be creative with queerness this way.

M: Yeah, so for example like my first language, doesn’t have any gender pronouns, there’s no ‘he’ and ‘she’- which feels like a queer space there because of something in the language isn’t separating people that specifically, just using people’s names when talking about them and so I was kind of like I’m going to use my name as a pronoun because like the English language is not my language so much that I don’t care if it’s annoying.

U: Your like blending languages this way, what is your first language?

M: Ismdebele. Again, that thing about borders, when I meet Zimbabwean people who speak Shona, we have to speak in English because our languages are so different but when I meet South African people who speak Xulu, we can speak together because our languages are derived similarly- so I’m like what is a border!? Someone from another country I can communicate easier with than someone from the same country as me! There is no one person who is South African, as South Africa has 10 national languages.

U: It’s definitely a thing in South Asia too, where the languages are so so many. Watching Indian dramas were highly intelligible with me speaking Urdu, which surprised me – the script is the major difference and that’s not something I was taught formally. So, to know that I speak a language that a good fifth of the world population can understand me in is mind-blowing. And then the way English people came about, and it became systematised and hierarchical. But at the same time, the reason why it’s so well-known it’s because it was enforced and made lots of people’s main way of consuming culture, business, education and national pride.

M: One of the things I always find funny but in a bad way, but you know the Spanish language centre in Manchester, Cervantes? Has a sign that’s like ‘All these cultures and different and countries, one language’ why are you proudly announcing this, like they didn’t all just go ‘let me just take up Spanish on Duolingo’ like no it was enforced but you know...