ILIZWE LIFILE
Master Thesis
2020
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ILIZWE LIFILE is a tactile exploration of the aspects of cultural history kwaXhosa within South African political history that intersect with my own lived experience. Through drawings, tableau, sculptures and video, I explore how cultural, social and political narratives within the South African post-apartheid landscape are negotiated. In this explicatory document, divided in three parts, I focus on interrelated personal and collective histories. Part I establishes a broad overview of the personal experiences driving my studio practice and research enquiries. Drawing from Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness (2000) to explore readings of history, displacement, education and landscape, I elaborate on a negotiation of my cultural identity within the contentions about collective history and national identity. Part II looks at the negation of black cultural identity through covert impositions of Eurocentric culture and epistemology within education systems in my experience and within history. I employ concepts from Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2017) to develop socio-political readings of the television series Yizo Yizo, linking its thematic universe to heterogeneous black identities in post-apartheid South Africa. Part III presents how aspects of an oppressive history are manifest in the present, while offering more explicit interpretations of my body of work as a means for exploring the residue of history in the present.
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Somdyala, I. 2020. ILIZWE LIFILE. . ,Faculty of Humanities ,Michaelis School of Fine Art. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/32387