“When you’re not a musician yourself, or you’re kind of standing on the outskirts, you start to see things a bit differently,” Carm d’Unienville says to me. She’s busy explaining how the idea for Framed Sessions came about, a concept that d’Unienville is visibly ecstatic about. Framed Sessions is a new multidisciplinary arts event conceived by d’Unienville, taking place at The Pink Room at Gorgeous George next month.
It’s d’Unienville’s first event project. She moved to Cape Town from Durban around four or five years ago, bringing with her a lifelong obsession with music and an emerging interest in photography. After meeting photographer Brigitte Stanford, she began shooting gigs, initially focusing on the psych-rock scene, before working with Verve and becoming increasingly immersed in Cape Town’s music underground.
Photograph by Brig Stanford.
It was from behind the camera that she started noticing the long storied divisions between the city’s various scenes. “Psych kind of sticks with psych and reggae, hip hop, whatever, kind of sticks with itself. Jazz sticks with itself,” she explains, recounting an experience that’s well-bemoaned for any Cape Town stalwart.
Framed Sessions is her attempt to do something about it. The event brings together photography, live visual art and music in what d’Unienville describes as a small “microcosm” where different creative communities overlap. The aim is less about throwing a bunch of artists into the same room to see what happens, and more about creating the conditions for actual connections to happen. Audiences from one scene discovering new genres, musicians from across the spectrum meeting artists they might not otherwise encounter, creating creative relationships across the usual scene boundaries. “How can we also foster community?” d’Unienville asks. “Because in community, you have collaboration and you have connection. And I felt that was something that was missing in Cape Town.”
Photograph by Rishi Prag.
That idea runs through the entire structure of the evening, an arc that d’Unienville has passionately mapped out to help attendees make the most of the night. It begins with an exhibition of work by local music photographers including Hanno van Vuuren, Brig Stanford, Emma Synman, Warren Talmarkes, Vuyo Polson and Rishi Prag, accompanied by a vinyl set from Wax Garden.
From there, musicians and visual artists will come together for an improvised live jam, with live painting and projections responding to the music in real time, before the night moves into live sets from Dierbaar, Operation Khataza and TOUGHGUY. Even the line-up has been deliberately assembled across different genres and audiences. “The very idea of it is like, if you look at the pyramids, the pyramids weren’t built by one person, they were built by a community,” d’Unienville says. “We’re coming together to build something beyond ourselves.”
Photograph by Emma Snyman.
For d’Unienville, there’s also a more personal motivation behind framing the event. As a photographer, she has often felt that the spotlight falls heavily on musicians while the other people who make the scene happen around them remain in the background. Framed Sessions is designed to shift that focus. “It’s giving equal focus to everyone,” she says, describing the project as an attempt to “bring the peripheries to the centre.”
The first edition is deliberately small, with Gorgeous George’s 120–160-person capacity giving d’Unienville room to experiment before scaling up. But she already has ambitions for what comes next, including the possibility of bringing back a collaborative finale that proved too difficult to coordinate for this first edition.
The larger vision is less about building another event brand than creating an ecosystem that can keep connecting Cape Town’s disparate creative communities. “For now, it’s a very small pyramid,” she laughs, “but the idea is that we’re coming together to build something beyond ourselves.” It’s a tough battle that many creatives in this city have tried and failed to fight, but with d’Unienville — we may have found our most valiant soldier.
Tickets for Framed Sessions are available via Quicket from R150.
Banner photograph by Frame The Gig.
