The next event in the Mondays at Six programme at St Clements will feature Poetry by Marí Peté on September 5, 2022, at 18h00.
Organiser, Pieter Scholtz and friends invite you to a thought-provoking evening of entertainment and enlightenment where the focus will be on an unlikely academic triad: technology, poetry, PhD.
Lecturers’ encounters with technology:
From flint to abacus, phone to implanted chip — in this presentation, lecturers' encounters with technology will be animated through the music of language.
For nearly 30 years, Marí Peté has provided e-Learning support to lecturers at DUT.
“I have witnessed and experienced how my colleagues perform feats to make teaching work, while technology plays havoc,” says Marí Peté.
Peté, a fourth-generation teacher, was busy working on her PhD thesis when Covid struck. “I was about to conduct interviews with 12 lecturers when Covid-19 lockdown took us all by surprise. Campus closed and the university community were scattered across KZN and beyond. We were thrusted into remote learning, reaching virtually to connect — reliant on whatever connectivity we all had. Villages without electricity and Eskom load-shedding became co-performing actors in these encounters.”
Dr Peté, who graduated both virtually and on stage in Autumn 2022 at the ICC Durban, together with the class of 2021, will share how the ramifications of Covid and lockdown creatively impacted her research, her work and her direction. She will present poems chosen from among 46 (poems) woven through a theoretical essay, a collection created for a PhD thesis in Visual and Performing Arts at the Durban University of Technology. For St Clements, she will focus on the artistic process and the poetry, not on theory. “I hope anyone who has wrestled with tech will find this interesting,” she says.
“Apart from writing poetry from personal experiences and from stories told to me, I wrote poetry by using the performative interview technique. This method is based on the premise that the interview is a world in its own right: truth is not objective, but rather, performed together by interviewer and interviewee. I re-watched the recorded Zoom conversations which I had with lecturers — and then I wrote poetry, by way of analysing this data. Essentially, I was after social and emotional truth. To illuminate lecturers' encounters with technological teaching tools, I trusted the subconscious, the imagination, and poetic devices. Then I asked interviewees to comment and/or edit the poems, and approve them or not, for inclusion in my thesis.”
When the donations box is passed around St Clements suggest a minimum of R50 per person. Wear a mask if you want to. The event will take place indoors.
Bookings limited to diners in support of St Clements restaurant and staff. (They stay open specially for these programmes.)
Please be there in time to open your tab and to place your order before the (18h00) performance.
The programme takes place at 18h00 on September 5, 2022. Table bookings essential: RSVP ST Clements 031 202 2511
St Clements is situated at 191 Musgrave Road, Durban.
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