Noluthando Mpho Sibisi is a South African human who makes use of writing, performance, and visual art as modes of complicating, documenting, and disseminating South African black woman narratives. She is especially interested in developing the archive of black queer women experiences in the contemporary performance and the literary canon.  Through this project, she explores autoethnography as a methodology, and the ways in which multivocality may be used as a method within autoethnography. 

final cut medium from Institute for Creative Arts on Vimeo.

Artist's Statement:

My name is Noluthando Mpho Sibisi and my research interests lie in ideas around complicating and archiving black South African women narratives; I am especially interested in the archival of black queer women experiences in the contemporary performance and literary canon.

 While I intended to use the Medium Project as a platform to further explore autoethnography as a methodology, and the ways in which I can use multivocality as a method within autoethnography. Covid-19 regulations presented a challenge, to the conventional ways I conceived and delivered performance, last year. Which meant that the Project also became an ongoing conversation with digital and social media as mediums for making and delivering work that is meant to be consumed live.

The return into physical performance spaces this year has demanded yet another reconfiguration of the work and its multiple translations. And this offering is a curation of the multiple lenses and mediums I have been thinking and creating in. Using Instagram filters, photography, visual art, scripted reflections; I have compiled various portraiture detailing my ordinary/mundane lived experiences by way of extending an invitation into my staging of interiority as a “queer black woman”.

Still image:  Noluthando Mpho Sibisi's on-set still for her MA medium project. Photograph courtesy of the artist.