sci-fi landscape for love
The first part of my Research and Development project ‘on speculative narration, Collagraph printmaking and performance’ supported by CBK Rotterdam has resulted in a series of prints titled sci-fi landscape for love. Working with print publishing studio edition~verso in Johannesburg (SA) has been an act of pure love. We made the paper ourselves using offcuts of the studio in combination with waste cotton lint from a local laundry factory; trash cotton bulk consisting of extraneous materials such as hair, dust gained from washing and drying local hospital and hospitality sheets. The plants as drawn on the soft ground etching plate are a mixture of South African native and alien invasive plant species found in the garden of edition verso;

a home grown Avocado tree; a Bottle brush; an Euphorbia tirucalli also known as ‘sticks on fire’; a Senecio serpens also known as ‘blue chalksticks’ and a Crassula ovata also known as ‘Hummel’s Sunset.The collagraph printed hands are my left hand made of shield like scales protecting and holding a vulnerable self amidst all that changes and grows. The colours black and green as read within the South African context represent the ongoing protest movement against apartheid, segregation and social disadvantages against the non-white population. Black and green are strong colours which have been less severely policed - within the South African context - than words or images and it could communicate a message simply, and with feeling.

Traveling to and working in the Global South is a crucial Decolonial act in and of itself. Distributing Dutch funding money to Johannesburg is only one act of resistance and thus supporting the local Johannesburg art community. Decolonial thinking alerts us to a certain direction - from the Global North to the Global South - of how knowledge or theories travel and how geopolitics transform certain people into those who produce knowledge and others who are only affected or produced by this knowledge. As an adoptee of color born in the Global South raised in the Global North i will forever travel back and forth between these two worlds, simply because however the dominant narrative about adoption makes one question oneself, for me my roots will always be the displacement itself.