In this instalment of the podcast, multidisciplinary artist Athi-Patra Ruga joins Refiloe Mpakanyane, remotely from his farm and studio in the beautiful Hogsback area, in the Eastern Cape. The conversation happens under the aegis of revealing the realities and hidden truths of his studio practice; as well as unpacking the lessons he has learnt along the way and the events that triggered growth and change in himself and his creative practice.

Athi is forthright and forthright and forthcoming in this conversation that is an exercise of looking forward, interrogating the moment in which we are talking as well as projecting his hopes of leaving behind something tangible for other artists to hold onto.

Highlights Include:

• Moving to Hogsback at the beginning of the COVID lockdown influenced
• Creating in a rural space- how his studio practice has changed and how Iinyanga Zonyaka subsequently came about
• Creating a studio that serves your changing needs
• Unlearning people-pleasing as an artist
• Irma Stern as unintellectual ancestor and Athi in his Georgia ‘O Keefe era
• Mentorship, community and taking on the mantle of an artist philanthropist

Referenced exhibitions & institutions:

• Inyanga Zodyaka, Narval, Cape Town, 2021
• Gladys Mgudlandlu (1925-1975), self taught South African artist who began her career painting in the rural areas of the Eastern Cape. And the featured exhibition is the Irma Stern: An artist of modernity between Berlin and Cape Town” at the Bruecke Museum in Berlin
• Victory of The Word- project to preserve the historic Lovedale Press in Alice, Eastern Cape.
• Elana Brundyn (cultural entrepreneur) newsletter on Medium.

Chapter 1, spanning episodes 1-3 of Season 2 of the Latitudes Podcast, offers a foundational guide to entering and engaging with the art world. A resource-driven series providing practical tools for emerging artists and enthusiasts to navigate the art world’s complexities. Featuring first-hand insights from artists, arts educators, and professionals who demystify the industry and share actionable guidance on residencies, networking, and career building.

Powered by iTOO Artinsure

Supported by Business and Arts South Africa (BASA)

Co-curated by Art School Africa

Hosted by Refiloe Mpakanyane

In this moving conversation, Cape Town-based sculptural ceramicist Zizipho Poswa joins Refiloe Mpakanyane to share the personal, cultural and spiritual underpinnings of her extraordinary art practice.

Known for her monumental ceramic and bronze sculptures celebrating African womanhood, Poswa opens up about her rural Eastern Cape upbringing, the powerful women who shaped her, and the ancestral callings that fuel her creative vision. From co-founding Imiso Ceramics with almost no capital, to exhibiting at global institutions like LACMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Poswa reflects on her path with humility, purpose and fire.

She and Refiloe unpack her creative rituals, her career-defining partnership with Southern Guild, and the tension between craft and fine art - as well as the urgent need to preserve work on the continent so future generations don’t have to fly to foreign museums to see themselves reflected in art.

This not-to-be-missed conversation incorporates personal history, creative entrepreneurship, cultural pride and legacy-building.

Highlights include:

• How Zizipho Poswa's mother's belief laid the foundation for her artistic journey
• Founding Imiso Ceramics on a shoestring and a vision
• Spiritual rituals and ancestral messages as creative guidance
• Her dream of keeping important works accessible to African audiences
• The leap into bronze and what it means for legacy

Referenced exhibitions & institutions:

• iLobola | uBuhle boKhokho | Indyebo yakwaNtu
• Southern Guild (Cape Town & LA)
• LACMA, The Met, Princeton University Art Museum
• Louis Vuitton x LOEWE collaborations
• Frieze Sculpture, Regents Park, London

Chapter 1, spanning episodes 1-3 of Season 2 of the Latitudes Podcast, offers a foundational guide to entering and engaging with the art world. A resource-driven series providing practical tools for emerging artists and enthusiasts to navigate the art world’s complexities. Featuring first-hand insights from artists, arts educators, and professionals who demystify the industry and share actionable guidance on residencies, networking, and career building.

Powered by iTOO Artinsure

Supported by Business and Arts South Africa (BASA)

Co-curated by Art School Africa

Hosted by Refiloe Mpakanyane

Chapter 1 of Season 2's podcast is all about flicking through the manual - a guide to the art industry: The door opener, the first step, the how-to enter and engage with the art industry. A resource-driven series providing practical tools for emerging artists and enthusiasts to navigate the art world’s complexities.

In this opening episode of The Latitudes Podcast powered by iTOO Artinsure Season 2, Refiloe Mpakanyane speaks with internationally celebrated photographer Ayana V. Jackson. Known for her arresting visual investigations of race, gender, history and the colonial gaze, Ayana takes us behind the scenes of her practice, from navigating global residencies and managing her studio, to honouring her family's legacy and making space for the next generation through her Johannesburg-based residency, STILL Art.

This episode is a deep dive into the practical and philosophical tools that have shaped Ayana’s trajectory: the power of public programming, the reality of running your studio like a business, and the ongoing process of becoming an artist. Recorded between time zones and continents, this conversation is generous, grounded and deeply human.

Highlights Include:

• Ayana’s reflections on legacy, privilege and purpose
• How residencies and research shaped Ayana's exhibition, From the Deep at the Smithsonian
• The value of public programming as artistic practice
• Why artists should master the business side of their work
• A moving tribute to curator and visionary Koyo Kouoh

Powered by: iTOO Artinsure

Supported by: BASA

Co-curated by: Art School Africa

Hosted by: Refiloe Mpakanyane

Latitudes Online: www.latitudes.online

Valerie Kabov is the Director of First Floor Gallery Harare as well as the co-founder of the African Art Galleries Association.

She is an educator, writer and researcher whose international experience in teaching, training and implementing projects in the field of art; audience engagement and intercultural dialogue, has further burnished her impressive mission into an awe-inspiring one.

Valerie sits down with host Refiloe Mpakanyane to explain her approach toward supporting the artist; thriving in spite of the capitalist head-winds that Creativity faces; the need for unbowed and professional art criticism and the foundational need for art in every single person’s life.

Valerie brings forth some surprising and delightful elements of her upbringing in Belarus and Australia, which continue to inform her work and which along with experience, her studies and temperament, have coalesced into a delightful, invigorating and expansive world view.

In this episode, Refiloe Mpakanyane speaks to award-winning writer Milisuthando Bongela. While her career began in fashion, her creative spirit has carried her into music, art, media and now film. Bongela has written and directed her first film: the self-titled: Milisuthando. The artfully edited and scored documentary is a personal essay spanning 30 years and was eight years in the making. Written as a portrait of the filmmaker and her country, South Africa, both growing up (as it were) in parallel and in the aftermath of apartheid. Told in a non-linear fashion: Milisuthando calls the film an invitation to viewers to excavate forgotten parts of themselves, their history their family. The film takes a feminist lens to questions about power, fear, intimacy and love as it relates to race. The conversation traverses on Bongela's decades-long path to writing and directing her debut film, as well as what finding her voice and perspective means to her and how she imagines it will ground her work going forward.

In episode 10 of the Latitudes Podcast, host Refiloe Mpakanyane speaks with British-Ghanaian, curatorial powerhouse, Osei Bonsu. A sought-after curator of contemporary art, Osei’s work has taken him all over the world, advising museums, art fairs as well as private collections. Also a lecturer and writer, Osei has contributed to various arts publications and exhibition catalogues.

Before joining the Tate Modern as Curator of International Art, he had established the digital platform, Creative Africa Network, where he drew upon his experience to mentor artists and re-imagine more meaningful ways to create value for and among African artists on the continent. Osei shares why this mission to effect change abides in his current work and why a more textured and nuanced art space that grows the western canon, benefits us all. Osei’s expansive view on the purpose and potential of art moves our conversation to the importance of family as well as his take on professional recognition.

In Episode 9 of the Latitudes Podcast, host Refiloe Mpakanyane talks to Ekow Eshun; a British writer, journalist, broadcaster and curator, about his abiding penchant for doing the difficult (and sometimes agonising) in order to spark meaningful conversations in audiences. A thoughtful and considered conversationalist, Ekow reflects on a multifaceted and impactful career that has spanned magazines, books, curating and broadcasting. He credits curiosity and a search for new ways of seeing and representation as the drive behind his work.

We explore Ekow’s career highlights, his most recent offerings – think In The Black Fantastic - and look ahead to what's to come.

Ekow Eshun is Chairman of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, and the former Director of the ICA, London. He is the curator of exhibitions including the critically acclaimed In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery, London, and author of books including Africa State of Mind andBlack Gold of the Sun, shortlisted for the Orwell prize. He has contributed to books on artists including Mark Bradford, Chris Ofili, Kehinde Wiley, John Akomfrah and Wangechi Mutu.

In episode 8 of the Latitudes Podcast, host Refiloe Mpakanyane talks to the dynamic New York born, South African-based, multi-media artist Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, who received the Tollman Award for the Visual Arts in 2019 and the Phillippe Wamba Prize in African Studies in 2004. Nkosi has collaborated, exhibited and studied globally and is popularly known for her pastel-hued paintings of triumphant Black gymnasts as well as her series of portraits of influential Black figures.

In this conversation, Nkosi unpacks the genesis and process behind some of her pieces; she sheds light on her studio practice, as well as her emphatic belief that love can be a force for meaningful change. Nkosi explains how her vibrant heritage (South African father and Greek-American mother) and being born “in exile” have influenced much of the direction of her work. Be it synthesising the “disparate” elements of one’s identity; or looking critically at the seemingly benign conventions of our lives: Nkosi's art is deeply considered and grounded in thorough research that lays bare the workings and consequences of our shared imperial and colonial history, while also imagining an alternative and fascinating present.

*A quick note that the poem alluded to in the conversation is called First Petition by Divya Victor

In episode 7 of the Latitudes Podcast, host Refiloe Mpakanyane talks to San Francisco based Charles 'Chuck' Collins. Whether working in law or sitting on the board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Collins’ career has always bent toward improving the lived experiences of communities. This theme is baked into the conversation which focuses not only on what art and design tell us about ourselves (and our condition) but why art is so pivotal to our shared growth and humanity. Collins zooms in from the macro perspective of historic legacies that encourage the devaluing of African art (and artists) and takes us into an almost step-by-step process of how an intentional, global community of collectors, can elevate African art using their influence, their reach and one of Collins’ favourite things: “a good plan”. Humanity is at the heart of Collins’ championing of the visual arts and it shines through profoundly in this interview.