“With images delicate as pinpricks on skin, Kai Lossgott translates the dreaming human body into a universal anatomy of nerve and leaf and root – fragile but resilient. This luminous work is a love poem, an invocation, and a declaration of communion with a complex living world.”
(Henrietta Rose-Innes, winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing 2008)
Cecile Ludolff | De Kat Magazine: Kai Lossgott studied journalism at Rhodes University, specialising in film, dance and physical theatre. He then did
a post-grad diploma in visual arts, and a Masters in creative writing. It seems quite logical then, that the diverse strands of his many interests would be woven into the creation of his artworks. …
“It’s all in the body. My studies in dance and physical theatre at Rhodes University returned my own body to me in my twenties, after ritualised learning and team sports had killed it. When I started to write poetry again, to find out what I really thought, instead of the theories I had been trained in, I again had to start with the body. It remembers everything. Everything I do comes from the expanded intelligence and rich sensory cognition of my own body. I simply cannot limit myself to being a pair of eyes or a brain. I still dance once a week with an improvisational community group. Echoes of dance find their way into the rhythms and thematic pre-occupations of my drawings, films and poems.”
Kai Lossgott, quoted in:
Ludolff, Cecile. 2012. The Body Remembers Everything. De Kat Magazine, July / August 2012. (English and Afrikaans edition.) p 32. Johannesburg: African Sky Publishing.