‘A Map Home’ is a long-term, multidisciplinary research and artistic project by Mmakhotso Lamola. It is dedicated to recovering overlooked histories and restoring legacies of those lost to violent archives. The project interrogates how erasure and misrepresentation—particularly of Black femme and child figures—might be re-encountered through art in ways that enable dignity, celebration, healing, and rest. It asks: What does it mean to restitute that which cannot be physically returned—the silenced voices, emotional landscapes, and intangible narratives of belonging?
The project is anchored in the story of Sara Baartman*, an indigenous South African woman taken to Europe in the early 1800s and subjected to dehumanizing exhibitions. Baartman’s* life epitomizes the entanglement of hyper-visibility and erasure: her body was displayed as spectacle while her subjectivity was denied. Though her remains were repatriated in 2002, the intangible dimensions of her being — her emotions, memory, and imagined futures — remain displaced. ‘A Map Home’ charts pathways of return that extend beyond the material; offering intangible “maps home” for Baartman* and others lost to colonial and patriarchal archives. These maps are created through poetry, collage, performance, spatial storytelling, and immersive film. The project is heavily inspired by the poem ‘ I have come to take you home’ , written by Diana Ferrus in 1988- which became the catalyst for the repatriation of Baartman’s* physical remains back to South Africa.
By working across disciplines, the project builds a polyphonic archive that fosters knowledge practices of care. Each work forms a fragment of a cartography of recovery, enacting practices of storytelling and reimagining. The project unfolds through interconnected offerings:
1. ‘The Maps’ (2025) : A series of riso-printed artist books translating archival critique into intimate storytelling through poetry and collage.
2. ‘The Ceremony’(2022–ongoing): An iterative multimedia performance lecture staging research through letter writing, journaling, and narration, creating an intimate ceremonial space for restitution.
3. ‘The Return’(forthcoming): A poetic immersive 360° short film in collaboration with Lo-Def Film Factory, tracing Baartman’s* symbolic return.
*Sara, Sarah, Saartjie, Baartman, Bartmann, Wilting Flower, Whispered Wind, A Body of Water, Mother, Venus, The Unknown Name: these are all names that are interchangeable for this figure who has remained elusive. The methodology of care that has been crafted honours this by referring to her in multiple ways in the publication, public performance and film . Be aware that “Sara Baartman” is a tool for contextualization and a surrogate word for a universe.
poem by Diana Ferrus
The Tricontinental Secret Garden is a collaborative project between Luiza Proença, Mmakhotso Lamola and Zahra Malkani, formed during their stay in Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2022. This partnership grew from the tender conversations between collaborators about their contexts in respect to land, ecology, hospitality, enchantment, colonialism and intimacy. Through these conversations, the Tricontinental Secret Garden cultivates a tender practice of archiving land-based knowledge. The collaboration explores the idea of hospitality rituals that are so ingrained in different contexts; as well as unearthing alternative means of knowledge generation that are actively anti-academic and domestic; elevating and revealing these vulnerable and soft modes of archiving.
The Kitchen Table is A Garden, which was exhibited at the Akademie Schloss Solitude’s annual SommerFest in June 2022, is a time-based installation exhibiting the traces of an intimate encounter. The encounter unfolds around a kitchen table of coded ecological forms, that activate and mediate conversation. The installation showcases the traces of the exchanges, unfolding around an experimental, multimedia menu that poetically puts into practice situated knowledge around land, herbs, plants, animals and their global circulation.
The lab of the home is a site of experimentation for investigating how one cultivates senses of belonging and home feeling. A prominent inquiry in Mmakhotso’s work questions what it means to belong to a city, a home, a community or even to oneself. During her stay in Zagreb in Croatia with the Pogon residency, Mmakhotso contemplated home spaces and invited co-conspirators to dream of home with her. Through a workshop participants explored their sense of belonging using the mediums of movement, writing, imagination, and mapping.
The space in the small hall of Pogon Jedinstvo was envisioned as a living room to gather, process and document in an intimate and comfortable setting – a temporary home. The lab transformed from an artist studio; to a cozy living room to gather; and finally, into a space to present the findings as an exhibition.
The exhibition explored how one can locate themself in unfamiliar spaces and cultivate home through memory mapping, collage, writing, and audio-visual portals. In this work, Mmakhotso seeks to understand how she would define home and weaves a story of belonging to her temporary home in Zagreb, her current home in Cape Town, and her childhood home in Pretoria.
Using flowers as memory markers she pays homage to the softer practice of archiving in the act of pressing flowers in books; as well as honouring the purple flowers of the jacaranda trees found by her childhood home. She adds these memory markers to found objects and images of sites in Zagreb to weave her personal narrative into the cityscape.
a set of poems and performance punctuations in response to Chapter 5 of the book, Let the Sea Eat me: To Perform A Ferry , a collection of performance scripts written by Mohamed Abdelkarim [2021]. This performance is an exploration of these prompts within the given text and accentuate what the engaged body is drawn to.
poems | Mmakhotso Lamola
video conceptualisation | Grace Matetoa & Mmakhotso Lamola
performers | Neo Mbabama , Grace Matetoa & Mmakhotso Lamola
cinematography & editing | Ayanda Duma
2020
Institute of Creative Arts Fellowship
The development of The Belonging Collective Workshop 2019-2020 where the archive has been reimagined into virtual worlds and publications. Instead of attempting to create alternative narratives of existence in Cape Town, The Belonging Collective archive offers narratives that complicate the hegemonic ones being cemented in the city
sep 2019- sep 2020
A mobile workshop where 9 anonymous artists contributed their findings to 5 roving boxes. Each box asks the artists to investigate their belonging to themes of body, home, self, community and city. These boxes then become an archive for the collective to use for various projects- one being the development of virtual worlds through the ICA fellowship.
360 worlds created for #DearUs, Matric 2020, curated by Faye Kabali-Kagwa, which speaks to the lives of 6 South African teenagers living through a global pandemic at what should be the pinnacle of their schooling career. It centralises a moment shared by many, matriculation, while allowing the audience to identify and empathise with individual stories from the matric 2020 class using a platform that is familiar to many.
2020
900mm x 900mm x 300mm
black steel powder coated frame and panels with a round mirror. Designed for Kevin Fellingham Architects
My month long stay with Residency 11: 11 explored the process of moving through various disciplines to understand the nature of change of meaning when content shifts perspectives. I have found that my practice has unfolded through the lenses of the various disciplines that I am drawn to, and I was interested in seeing how layered the content becomes as it was complicated it in different contexts.
as a starting point in this process, I selected a particular text from Beloved by Toni Morrison; specifically a portion describing a scene from the Clearing. This text has been, for me, a radical call for self love beyond what one is capable of producing and the value that is subscribed to that.
The residency culminated into collage, poetry, podcast episodes, 3D visualisation and little notes to the beloveds.
It is through those encounters and time spent dreaming that the notion of the Clearing became this amorphous place for me; somewhere within us/ somewhere within what we have inherited/ somewhere online/ somewhere in the water/ somewhere in our dream life. And since we make the Clearing what it is; it is ours to claim- This, I feel, was Morrison’s gift.
VIEW WEBSITE HERE
2019-ONGOING
A multidisciplinary exploration into the self-body-space relationship through the imaginaries of mapping, collage, and poetry. The project explores the perceptions of what it means to support and be supported in isolation. It is an opportunity to make poetry out of journaling, and beauty out of devastation.
Tiny Deaths.
Ask yourself:
what parts of your whole did you have to cull, so that the space of others could wax within your wane?
How much of the clear stuff did you pour into your concentrate, to be palatable for some else’s taste.
How many funerals of The Tiny Death of Self
have you had to attend today?
In this place;
In this time;
In this body;
Have you mourned yourself today?
2019
The performance presentation of the project Belonging was a meditation on the body and the city; and how there is a scale and language associated with these two things-but could also possibly be one in the same.
There were parts about the intimacy of public spaces; reconstructing home life; and a consideration for what my friend, Sara Ismail, once wrote: “the city is more than a group of buildings, roads, bridges, bus stations, shops. it is more than my home and the objects it holds, more than everyone I know who lives here. it holds all of us, all of our dreams, our memories, our fears, our hopes. how can I re-create this city from a substance that is mine, my memory, imagination and fiction? can I create it as much as it has created me? perhaps I always have.”
Performed for the Live Art Workshop Showing 2019, hosted by the Institute of Creative Art.
[photography by Carla Eagles]
in collaboration with Kopano Maroga
Limbic Resonance is a multidisciplinary, research project that seeks to unearth the past, present and future narratives of people who exist on the periphery of Cape Town’s society, particularily black, femme and/or queer bodies. The project seeks to render these narratives material through a series of installations, activations, interactive publications and web based media.Limbic resonance describes how our brain chemistry and nervous system is influenced by those around and closest to us through resonant energies and emotions (auras).These states include the resonance of feelings of empathic harmony or the emotional states of fear, anxiety and anger.
In cityscapes, limbic resonance forms one of the complex networks that make up its fabric. The city is made up of many tangible, concrete phenomena- buildings, sidewalks, trees, cars and people- these phenomena make up how one can perceive spaces and recognise them as “places” that are familiar and are stitched into our memory. One phenomena that is acknowledged but is never unpacked is the phenomena of “things that take place” or events in these places. The phenomena of events leave a sort of residue in a place and is perceived in multiple ways by people that come across it in the city. This is the atmosphere, more specifically the psychosphere - the energetic emotional landscape of the city- that is often felt yet cannot be explained. People read this psychosphere in relation to their own identity, socio-political situation and lived experiences. Sometimes these readings are shared and amplified through recognising oneself in another and empathizing with that reading-hence forth the common language of love: Limbic Resonance.
[photography contribution by Jesse Navarre Vos and Lara Simon]
2018
A video installation of gestures that examine the relationship between our conscious communication and our unconscious body language when recalling belonging to our trauma, love and the mundanity of existence.
The objective of this work is not to tell the audience of our existence-as proof of our existence- but to rather reflect on the effect of these narratives in our body language, our breath, our laughter, our silent moments.
These gestures form a basis for a larger project in which I seek to understand the silent language that we use in the city.
Exhibited for A Conversation, curated by Luvuyo Nyawose, at Michaelis Gallery.
