Individual Beings Relocated (on-going series: 2017- present)

Cyanotype prints on Fabriano artistico paper 290gsm

The body of work, Individual Beings Relocated (IBR), is an on-going process of revealing the truth and reconciling with a narrative that was passed on to the artist by her late grandmother: the story of a legacy and an inheritance of land. If this body of work's story seems unique, Relocation is actually a shared narrative amongst the Black South Africans. In IBR, the artist references her maternal grandparents’ loss of the family home and the consequential break in generational inheritance of (and connection to) land. The only remaining evidence of this family narrative is through the artist’s late grandmother’s embodied knowledge, passed down through oral transmission. IBR is the development of artist's family’s legacy. A history with no physical evidence, nor photographs.
The story relates to her late-grandfather's inheritance of land in the Free State from a local white man. The artist’s late-grandfather had a wealth of knowledge in farming and served as a traditional healer for the community of Viljoenskroon. He held a position of influence in the community and had many “normal” relationships with the white people of the area despite the segregation and violent times of the apartheid. When Apartheid ended, like many white people, the white man flew back to the Netherlands, his home country and gave his land to the artist's late grandfather whom he was fond of.
The practice started with this story, followed by round trips to Viljoenskroon, long Interviews with the artist's family, researches about the house and studies and experimentations with historical forms of printmaking, including cyanotype printing. By using this technique, she confounds the colonial use of photography and explores the inherent violence of the gaze it imposed on black subjects. In that imaginary yet existing space of IBR, the artist subjects herself and impersonates her late grandmother and the inherited land.
The choice of this technique aims to carry that dimension of truth. The visual artist also incorporates certain memories of her grandmother by including them in the composition of her chemical process. For example, her grandmother used certain household products to clean the house and her grandfather enjoyed drinking a certain brand of tea. The artist uses this tea and household products to tone her prussian blue prints into sepia tones with green, black and maroon tints that give IBR that patina that family heirlooms often have.