A stormcloud balanced on the chin, glistening like a raspberry mid-licking

A storm-cloud does their make-up using freshly spun cotton candy. Once ready, this cloud that does not know how to skateboard regardless begins to shakily try to skateboard around the space of the old scout hall of POPArt Performing Arts Centre. They carry two golden cymbals that they desperately try to maintain in constant tension, never meeting, never making a sound. Much like the ice particles within a storm-cloud collide to generate the electrical charge of a lightning strike, this flailing skateboarding cumulonimbus collides with the walls, the floor, and the audience over and over again. All the while, the cymbals are attempted to be kept close yet without touching, like the lingering, teasing moments before a kiss – inevitably crashing, failing, trying again. This goes on for four hours. The make-up of globs of coagulated string sugar fall off as they are engorged with sweat. The cloud returns to do their candy floss make-up anew, then goes back to their wobbly-tense ricocheting around the space, over and over. Eventually, exhausted, they turn the cymbals around, fill them with buttons and raspberries, and serve them silently around the festival grounds.

An oblique anti-racist and anti-fascist happening wherein the figure of the storm-cloud, simultaneously tangible and intangible, might reflect the notion of ‘freedom’ itself and the never-meeting of the cymbals might be seen to represent the seeming unattainability of closure and release from intersecting past and present oppressions. Produced on the occasion of Live Art Arcade durational live art festival, March 2025. Informed by work as artist in residence at Wits School of Arts and Johannesburg Lightning Research Laboratory, University of the Witwatersrand.

Arcade2025, photography by Zivanai Matangi with courtesy of the Live Art Arcade.