Sekai Machache: Svikiro

2 Sep-29 Oct 2023

Overview

This Autumn at Mount Stuart will see Zimbabwean-Scottish artist Sekai Machache showcase a series of short gestural films curated across the Mount Stuart house and gardens, that come together to form the immersive Svikiro. 

Utilising academic, visual, and embodied research at Mount Stuart and in its collections and archives: Machache counters the ongoing erasure of a complex oracular culture that is profoundly connected to envisioning the future. This series of short films will support experimental and innovative storytelling, suggesting alternative readings of past and present, and proffering a model for a decolonised future archive built on collaboration.

These films will comprise performances in dance and song by invited artists such as Alberta Whittle, Mele Broomes,and Eyve Madyise who are all adorned in beautiful bespoke costumes created in collaboration with Fiona Catherine Powell. 

'Svikiro' in Shona culture means one who mediates between the spiritual and human world, receiving visions in dream, performs healing rituals and serves as messenger to the ancestors. 

With themes of hyper visibility and invisibility, erasure and existence, apparitions and traces; Machache has succeeded in curating an emotive display that offers us glimpses of the diasporic experience of familial severing and habitual longing. Machache does this, while utilising literary and symbolic references, in a stunning showcase of multidisciplinary skill and collective visioning. At Mount Stuart these themes resonate with the spiritual enquiry of the Third Marquess of Bute and his embedding of religious, astrological, and mythological iconography in the architecture, decoration and fabric of the house.