An account of forced removals through lived experience of others. Existence is an Occupation (2020)The legacies of colonialism, apartheid and the Group Areas Act live on in the present as many are forcibly removed from their land, and are dehumanised, killed or criminalised for this occupation while the South African Defense Force, South African Police and the Anti-Land Invasion Unit have committed mass crimes against the landless, operating outside of the law. This is a struggle we are not alone in, as similar atrocities are committed by the Israeli Defense Force against Palestinians who have been killed, dispossessed of their lands and whose homes have been demolished. The removals committed towards the landless during the covid lockdown was a case in point to violence, especially during a time of crisis, when these organs of state acted with complete disregard of the most vulnerable who did not have access to protection as a result of their living conditions. People are occupying, not invading land, as they can’t be invaders in something that belongs to them. The act of existing becomes an occupation.Disclaimer: acknowledging that this song by Miriam Makeba used in the beginning does not talk about the struggle of black women and land and centers males as the sole inheritors. 

Existence is an occupation 

The work engages the history of textile and labour through fabric worn by women in my family called a sari. The work engages the history of textile and labour through fabric worn by women in my family called a sari. The Dutch East India company commodified textiles and weighed fabrics like mosouleen down with an 80% duty, selling at 75% profit on the London market (yet it was still cheaper than local British fabric) and severed the fingers of local producers so they could no longer distribute locally. They also erased a lot of the names of fabrics - Kashmiri became ‘cashmere’ , ambi renamed ‘paisley’, and mosouleen ‘muslin’ to quote from Kenyan poet Shailja Patel, ‘How many ways can you clone an empire? dice a people, digit by digit? separate the makers from the fruits of their labour? stab the mangoes out of their hands? How many ways can you splice a history? price a country? entice what has been erased back into history? this is for the hands/ hacked off the Arawaks by Columbus and his men/ lopped off Ohlone children by Spanish priests/ baskets of severed hands presented at day’s end/ to Belgian plantation masters in the Congo/ thumbs chopped off Indian weavers by the British ‘ Hands are instrumental in commodification and exploitation. The hands of the exploited are hard at work, while the hands of the exploiter order them about. I also think about the labour of women in the domestic space who uphold a role through tasks which are passed off as menial- cooking, cleaning, looking after. They too are exploited not only by being denied access but mentally, physically and emotionally. I made this video for my mother and for the women who go to battle every day. In the video my mother is making pleats of the sari by folding the borders of it repetitively. I think about the generational knowledge as well as trauma passed down, a folding of culture and meaning through displacement where one carries a piece of a space in them, but also becomes the space they have been taken to . At the same time there exists a simplification and erasure of complexity that colonialism was responsible for which a lot of culture was removed. Borders are collapsed through the practice of folding and pleating, something done often in the domestic space. Borders are folded as struggles are bound, liberation of one being inextricably linked to others’.

Folding Borders

Indigenous and alien plants’ survival are determined by each other. The video uses a metaphor of plants that are indigenous and alien to South Africa, the survival of each determined by the environment and reaction of the indigenous to the alien. Cohabitation sometimes results in violence and a distorted identity. They distort to become more complicated than their recognised form: foreign and alien plants talk to the complexity of identities that exist as an ‘other’ to each other on familiar or strange lands through displacement, questioning belonging and meaning made of the self through this displacement, how the plant (person) navigates being, but also the survival of the ‘alien plant’ in a foreign land which is threatened by indigenous plants because they are believed to be ‘invaders’ and consume more resources. The battle to survive in being an ‘other’ or ‘outsider’, a threat, influences the personal power people have that inform not just survival, but flourishing and growth of the metaphysical self. It often involves power and violence which in turn shape, contort and distort the self to transform it into something unrecognisable and complex, invoking a longing for roots and belonging, a feeling of nostalgia of that which is not clearly defined, how we re-member, a quest for the unknown and unreachable and constant (re)discovery.

Alien   l    Invasive   l Indigenous  

4.Installation views