chebec crescent

"We left Namibia when I was only 7 years old and we have subsequently lived in two other cities in South Africa, namely, Kimberly in the Northern Cape, and Fish Hoek, in Cape Town, which is situated in the Western Cape. In South Africa my siblings and I were categorised as coloured even though we did not racially or culturally identify with this categorisation. As we did not live in Namibia for long enough, we also do not identify with being Rehoboth Basters and neither do we identify with being Afrikaner, although our home language is Afrikaans. We do however, carry with us some of the different cultural aspects of both of my parents.

Despite these heterogeneous conceptions of self in post-apartheid South Africa, the one thing that has grounded me or has been a constant, are the objects in my parents’ home. Many of these objects have travelled with us from Namibia and are heirlooms, others have been collected along the way. The print explores the tangible, through the different objects present in the print, intersections of a recent material history that is present in the places I have occupied as well as how this links to the identities I have assumed at various points in my life. Because I have observed similarities in the material culture present in both Rehoboth Basters, in Namibia, and coloured people’s homes in South Africa (but particularly in the Western Cape), I am interested in exploring the parallels present in these domestic environments."

- Stephané

2019

Screenprint on arches paper

75 cm x 55 cm

Unframed