ARTIST STATEMENT
For the past year I have been facilitating a mobile workshop called The Belonging Collective. This involves 9 artists and other practitioners contributing anonymously to a narrative-based archive. The archive investigates senses of belonging in an urban context through various themes of perception and existence. Through the ICA fellowship the archive has been developed and curated into narrative maps, 3D worlds and publications. Instead of attempting to create alternative narratives of existence in Cape Town, The Belonging Collective archive offers narratives that complicate the hegemonic ones being cemented in the city.
THIS WORK IS BASED ON...
An ongoing investigation into our senses of belonging in urban contexts. The Belonging project attempts to circle in on answers and practical ways forward for artistic, spatial and social arenas by using various mediums to translate and mutate the meanings of belonging. The iterations of the Belonging project include writing, video installations, performance and mapping investigations.
Mmakhotso Lamola
Mmakhotso Lamola is a South African artist and spatial practitioner based in Cape Town. Her work focuses on investigations in the immersive in-between spaces of disciplines. She is a graduate of the University of Cape Town and the University of Witwatersrand, where she completed her Honours in Architecture.
She has been an artist in residence at The Centre for the Less Good Idea [Johannesburg, 2018]; Grigri Pixel Residency hosted by MediaLab Prado [Madrid, 2018]; and Residency 11:11 [Online, 2020]. She has been a participant in the Live Art Workshops, hosted by the Institute of Creative Arts, where she presented the performance lecture ​Belonging ​[Cape Town, 2019]. Her video installation, ​Simple Gestures, ​has been included in the group exhibition, ​A Conversation [Cape Town, 2018], Curated by Luvuyo Nyawose. Her poetry has been published in​ New Landscapes Anthology, published by Lungs Project [2019]; and her writing has been featured in the ​Summer Flowers Pumflet​, published by Wolff Architects [2019]. Along with Kopano Maroga, she is a collaborative partner in the research project ​Limbic Resonance​, which attempts to unearth the city’s untold story through personal narrative. She is currently the creator and facilitator of the mobile workshop, ​The Belonging Collective.
Her practice can be described as existing at the node of various intersections and is constantly unfolding. When navigating the city, she finds herself interested in how the layers of socio-politics, identity and the everyday collide in an urban landscape. She is concerned with interrogating the emotional landscape of the city and how this can be interpreted in various mediums. She focuses on this notion of emotional landscapes, and integrates this with her current practice and knowledge as a way to work and move in those liminal spaces.