At the intersections between culture and perceived place within, between relationality and selfhood, agenthood and singular objecthood, existentialism and the spiritualist, physicality and meta-physicality, lay the grand ‘connectodes’ that criss and cross and dissect to form the tangle of experience and sense from which this body of work sourced.
Pillared in my thinking about these works are my Xhosa culture and heritage. I wonder what it means to be Xhosa, what it means to identify and to belong, how belonging is outlined, what is and what isn’t. Along these lines I am reminded of Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger (1966) and her explorations of the idea of outlining and othering as acts of creating and maintaining purity in spaces where interaction is unavoidable. I think about the construction of culture within the home and then the village and greater world, as orchestrated by the self for the self (demarcations by the super-Ego) and by community members for the prospective/fringe member. I think about laws of threes, and the structure of semiotic action. I think about the agent, the action, and the receiver; the seer, the seeing and the seen; the man, the spirit and the divine; the hand, the blade, the blood. I think about God and the fire I have borrowed from it, I think about how much I desire God, how God has morphed and twisted itself to appear to me again. I think about the necessity of God, of a metaphysical that is separate from the physical, that is the reason behind it. I think about the death of God, I think about being as suspended between myth and fact, between material and aether, reason and instinct. I think about killing God. I think about the necessity of God’s death, the necessity of absurdity. I think about impossibility, I think about the limits of action. I think about my brother, I think about my mother. I am reminded of the Enochian story of Azazel and the birth of sin, scapegoat of the world. Azaz-El: Strength-of God. I think about manhood. I feel a twitch in my ear. I think about valleys and I think about mountains, I envision sublimity and again desire God. I think about justification, I think about hatred, I think about surreality and the wholeness of being even at it’s most senseless. I think about light, I think about skin, I think about all the things that I do not know, and all that I only think I don’t.
2023
