Assembling Fragments of Home: Finding a Sense of Belonging in Other People's Domestic Objects and Family Photographs

Stodel, Sitaara

Assembling Fragments of Home: Finding a Sense of Belonging in Other People's Domestic Objects and Family Photographs

Thesis / Dissertation

2026

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Michaelis School of Fine Art

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

My project, an exhibition of assemblage artworks and explicatory document, explores aspects of displacement, belonging, and notions of home with reference to personal, familial, and ancestral experience in the context of South Africa and its history of racial discrimination. I investigate how found materials, specifically photographic fragments and household objects, can be reassembled into affective and meaningful artworks through their alteration, combination, and physical and conceptual layering to construct new narratives that engage memory, loss, and identity. Using found material with mixed media that include printing, sewing, stuffing, and embedding elements, I allude to details of domestic space that relate to personal experience. In my explication, I consider various theoretical frameworks to examine the ideal and transient home, material culture, liminality, domestic photography, and memory, and discuss how particular features of South African history have shaped both my research and the conceptual and material choices I have made in my exhibition, with particular reference to photographs. I refer to the writings of Sara Ahmed, Arup Ratan Chakraborty, Siona O'Connell, and Rebecca Bryant, as well as to selected artworks by Lebohang Kganye, Penny Siopis, Lungiswa Gqunta, Do Ho Suh, and Massa Lemu, to analyse and position this body of work. Through this project, drawing on my personal experience, I aim to evoke and construct new narratives in search of a sense of belonging and to contribute to a more complex and layered understanding of the varied transgenerational impact of displacement on individual lives.