As members of A4’s team work in a distributed mode during the National Lockdown, the foundation becomes an imagined interlocutor in Bubblegum Club’s performance as artist. 
 
Rather than pursue a predetermined outcome or produce discrete art objects, Bubblegum Club instead reflects on the role of the artist within the institutional framework A4 offers. With the foundation as conceptual holding device, the collective turns the particular attentiveness art demands to their own practices as writers, designers and content producers.
 
Initially, Bubblegum Club’s residency, titled City Deep, considered commercial signage in downtown Johannesburg as a way with which to imagine alternate perspectives of the urban environment. The proposed project would read and reuse street imagery to explore the desires and possibilities contained within the cityscape, advancing the notion of daily life as an artistic experience. 

The collective’s inquiry, however, soon expanded into a wider consideration of collaborative production. What transformations needed to occur for Bubblegum Club to perform the identity of ‘artist’? Central to this residency were questions of A4’s role in affirming this performance. 

Opportunity for regular engagement and contact with the foundation’s team was encouraged and enabled through smart online workspaces, a grant, and production support. In addition, A4’s Challenge Network offered Bubblegum Club access to a network of trans-disciplinary practitioners. Among them, the artist Nolan Oswald Dennis proved an invaluable sounding board in guiding the conceptual framework of the Club’s enquiry.

“The work is going to be whatever you determine it to be," Oswald Dennis said at the final ‘challenge’ meeting, the third held during the course of the residency. "It can be the picture, it can be the thing, the performance – and you can change your mind later. I think what would be more important to consider is how you want to frame this project regardless of what you ultimately decide is the centre of it.”

In a series of provocations, propositions and engagements, members of both A4 and Bubblegum Club worried the relation between artist and institution. At the residency’s conclusion, a series of parts remained – photographs, screenshots, transcripts, recordings – which together evidence an unfolding process, notating the conversations between the foundation and Bubblegum Club.

–

Bubblegum Club is a cultural organisation based in Johannesburg. The collective's multi-faceted approach to working pursues experimental forms of communication, without being restricted to exclusive spaces. 

Bubblegum Club pays homage in name to the rich legacy of 80s Bubblegum Music, which combined cutting-edge technology with local and international influences to make electronic music that was both wildly successful and playfully avant-garde. The aim is to update this legacy of popular modernism for a new reality of network culture and hyperstimulation. Populist, but without pandering to dominant celebrity culture, Bubblegum Club champions the treasures that may be lost in the pursuit of the next social media fix.