I am fascinated by the way in which people categorise and arrange objects in their homes. My mother’s side of the family is primarily based in Namibia, with my grandmother having roots in Rehoboth, while my grandfather moved from South Africa to Rehoboth. My father’s side of the family comes from Stellenbosch in South Africa. During apartheid, my parents were married in Namibia. Just before Namibia’s liberation from apartheid South Africa’s colonial rule, the immorality act and mixed marriages act were abolished, making it possible for my parents’ union. In South Africa, during apartheid, they were categorised into different racial groups. It is not uncommon nowadays to be the offspring of a ‘racially’ and culturally ‘mixed’ marriage, but currently coming from a mixed cultural heritage, I always feel like we are creating our own rituals, myths and stories about our ancestry as I don’t see myself as being culturally grounded to any particular group. Perhaps this is a post-apartheid reality for many more people.

So, despite the various formations and debates around identity in post-apartheid South Africa, I have always felt grounded by the objects in my parents’ home and the homes of my family and friends across Namibia and South Africa. I am specifically captivated by the display cabinets that I remember seeing in friends and family homes in Namibia, where I grew up during the most formative years of my childhood, and later in South Africa. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment I became aware of display cabinets as a visual pattern, but once I noticed them, they couldn’t be un-seen and their dominance in the interiors of my family and friends. Since becoming aware of the trinkets, photographs, brass ornaments and porcelain figurines and teacups, to name a few of the items you can normally find on and in these cabinets, the ornaments arranged and displayed in these display cabinets have had a profound impact on how I try to recreate some kind of cultural significance in my own understanding of identity formation. It was only once I started writing about the prominence of these display cabinets in my PhD, however, that I became aware of how different generations and cultural groups incorporate display cabinets into their homes in diverse yet similar ways. Since writing about their visual prominence in lower-class to lower-middle-class ‘coloured’ homes, I have realised how important the objects arranged in display cabinets are as the cabinets become visual storytelling mechanisms where we are able to portray the abstract parts of our identities that cannot be fully articulated in words.

Many of our objects, that I have a nostalgic attachment to, have travelled with us from Namibia and are heirlooms, others have been collected along the way as we have moved to different places in South Africa from Namibia. Because of these objects’ biographical, material, and aesthetic qualities, I became interested in studying and portraying the tangible intersections of recent material history that is localised and ties into historical events in the places I have occupied as well as how this links to the identities I have assumed at various points in my life. As I have learnt more about where my ancestors might have come from, I have started to speculate, imagine and mythologise about all the different cultural groups I could possibly have come from, as well as negate some. Not knowing exactly who these groups were, adds an element of mystery and possibility to how I choose to historically position and construct my identity in the present. From this place of possibility, I have imagined all of the cultural intersections that might have taken place. Although a part of me wants to know each detail, another part of me wants there to remain an element of vagueness. The objects I use in my work allows me to imagine these intersections in a physical form that encapsulates a moment in time that might be lost to changing taste, aspirations, and cultural flux.

This veil of partial historical ignorance has allowed me to have a certain amount of agency in how I reimagine my own narrative as well as how I might link it to different people and groups historically and presently. This particularly relates to how I have been racially categorised as coloured in South Africa despite not necessarily accepting this label as a signifier. Michele Ruiters says that some coloured people consider their ‘mixed’ heritage as something that happened so long ago that it is no longer important in their current consciousness. ‘Mixture’ has taken on a new association in South Africa after apartheid where it points to children who have been born of culturally ‘mixed’ couples. Although race is still prevalent in a South African consciousness, there are no longer any statutory laws preventing the moral policing of ‘mixture’, giving children born in a post-apartheid South Africa more agency to imagine themselves in any way of their own choosing. Reflecting on the material culture around me has provided a new dimension to my identity where I was able to imagine and fashion how I translate the various layers of my identity into material forms.

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