Abstract
Imbokodo Unina is a body of work that serves as a love letter to our mothers , through narratives , performances and tools for public insertion ,it takes the seemingly common experience of the our mothers. In Zulu as a child uyathunywa, (you are given instructions and serve as a messenger ) I as Isithunywa the messenger , I seek to use my mother tongue which I suckled from my mothers breast to tell short stories that speak to the prevalent experience of the objects , people and environment that has played the role of mother and nurturer. I deploy fiction as a tool to uncover lived experiences of our mothers in the township , rural areas and urban settings battling a similar issue of having to provide for their families and as a result having taken on an invisible existence both in their communities and the foreign communities they serve. Research Outline: This MDP focuses on fugitive practices of black mothering as a practice that remains invisible largely within colonial and post-colonial settings, and follows historical traces of the black female body as a primary maternal care giver in such spaces, where such bodies are often rendered as ‘other’ or marginalised. I aim to unpack the spatial implications and remnants in the present-day of a history of servitude conducted by black domestic workers in an Apartheid and post-Apartheid South African context, with the aim to explore ideas of substitution and what forms of mothering can be made visible. I look specifically at the ways in which the black female domestic worker’s body is tasked with mothering the children of white women at the expense of her own child sometimes. The spaces I aim to frame in this project may be articulated as environments that seek to exploit and not validate the black femme body’s labours of care. This project proposes to explore the surface of black mothering in terms of fugitive mothering practices, the black femme body as labour and capital, and femme reproductive substitution....
M.Tech. (Architecture)