Thandolwethu Tshabalala

This project is a language returning to the tongue after silence.

I trace ancestral memory as a living pulse that moves through land, material, and body. I am not searching for origins, but for what continues to live through gestures that remain inscribed in soil, in breath, in the names we inherit and the ones we forget.

While exploring IsiHlubi I work within  the inseparable weave of ritual and ecology. Using thatching grass from Rhodes Memorial, a site where rainmakers previously gathered, I form circles that recall rainmaking sites, migration routes, and agricultural layouts. Each thread interlaced holds history and defiance, embodying memory through body.

In cultivating different aspects of maize, I engage in a conversation with survival and forgetting. The plant reflects my heritage, a nomadic, altered, sacred voyager who  heals, teaches and restores while evoking memories and inquisitiveness of origins. Within its seeds resides the essence of those who came before me and those who will follow. Its resilience against manipulation uncovers a politics of remembrance: a denial of external control. I won’t transform it into something productive. I yield to its unique rhythm, allowing it to develop as it recalls itself in whatever form it takes. What develops from attention, comes from hearing and instructs a person to connect with land, earth, and place. 

When maize enters the Hlubi vicinity, it alters its position. It transforms into both strange and known, symbolising continuity, fertility and resurgence. It represents the surname that needed to erase itself to survive.

The significance of grass at Rhodes Memorial’s location, reflects the geopolitics of territory and rain. Before monument and empire, that location served as a sacred space for the Hlubi rainmakers, who once summoned clouds and blessing. By returning to that ground and weaving what grows there, I reanimate what was severed. The grass becomes mediator: between sky and soil, between memory and matter, between now and before.

My practice lingers within the instability of knowing. I move through intuition, signs, and the body’s quiet ability to translate spirit into material. The work speaks in fragments,  sound, breath, movement, fabric, maize , each a fragment of a language that cannot be spoken, only felt.

I think about control and release. About how colonial histories were acts of control of land, of seeds, of bodies, and how release can be a form of reclamation. In allowing the plant to grow freely, in weaving what the earth offers, I practice refusal , of mastery, of finality, of linear time.

Rain has its own politics. So does soil. I listen to both.

The process is ritual. Sometimes ritual looks like care. Sometimes it looks like waiting. Sometimes it looks like failure… but failure too holds its own kind of knowledge.

Each element, maize, grass, unstable image , is not symbolic but alive. They collaborate in a language of remembrance that exceeds the archive. This work is not an attempt to preserve, but to let things breathe again: to trace how memory survives through matter, through breath, through all that it refuses to be forgotten.