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on the beach - white sand 2019

brick paving

July 2019

“I am an imposter to this land, I am an imposter to my people and I am an imposter to the memories of a little girl named Lindsey that was left in Cape Town .”

brick paving is a series of ceramic photographs and letters that share symbiotic relationships with text and imagery.

The artworks navigate the ‘routes’ to my postcolonial indigenous ‘roots’1 of my socio-political ethnicity2 of being a “so-called Cape Coloured”3. This navigation is explored through practices of letter writing, ceramics, and a decolonial lens-based practice that speak to memories which have not been documented in any other form.

Through cyclic acts of preservation and preserving4 brick paving returns respect to the imagery and words, thereby allowing the passage of cultural history to continue. As a result, spaces of memory and culture are activated through physically realising distant childhood memories. These spaces work to expose the indoctrinations and propaganda of an overbearing coloniality that still persists in South Africa.

1 Erasmus, Zimitri. Race Otherwise: Forging a New Humanism for South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2017.

Erasmus explores on the other-side of power, and critiques the methods of understanding the concept of roots. She proposes the journey to understanding cultural roots is just as important.

2 Ibid. In Race Otherwise, Erasmus classifies the coloured identity as an ethnicity that is not genetic but political.

3 So-called Cape Coloureds, is the colloquial term that Coloureds call themselves. The Cape Coloured community is an ethnic group that consists of mixed-raced individuals that are a product of mass integration during colonisation. The term Coloureds was introduced so that the government would be able to group these individuals during apartheid

4 My methodological approach to making consists of the preservation of cultural memories and preserving/omitting information to avoid exploiting the individuals involved.