Kopano: Red plurism, 2026
Multimedia drawing on paper
41,5 cm x 41,5 cm
Artist’s Statement
I draw while in transit, through peri urban fringes and rural corridors where the ground beneath Black life is neither fully inherited nor securely held. Using ink and alcohol markers, I render landscapes that begin as recognisable sites and progressively dissolve into abstraction. Drawing here is not illustration but an architectural methodology: a way of questioning how knowledge is produced from a spatial position of suspension. Each image is collaged and superimposed upon others, creating layered palimpsests that resist a single, fixed reading of place or identity.
These works ask: What does home mean for Blackness under conditions of onto‑epistemological displacement? Coloniality has not only occupied land but also fractured the very frameworks through which Black subjects locate themselves, spatially, metaphysically, and in relation to the earth. My practice responds by refusing a stable ground. Instead, I propose a poetics of being in transit: the landscape as perpetual becoming, identity as montage, and drawing as a tool for re‑imagining spatial grounding where none is given.
Conversations with Torkwase Dyson’s infrastructural abstraction, Nolan Oswald Dennis’s para‑colonial geometries, and Chang Yuchen’s fugitive landscapes run against Descartes’s split between subject and space and Malevich’s quest for a zero degree of form. From these tensions, I build a visual language that is both critical and devotional, a way of mapping Blackness not as rooted but as rhythmically, restlessly present.
