Vuyo Mabheka’s personal experience (1999, Libode, Eastern Cape, South Africa) plays a decisive role in shaping his artistic research. Since childhood, he, his mother, and his sister have undergone numerous relocations within the country, eventually settling on the outskirts of Johannesburg, in Thozoka, where he now lives and works. This condition of constant mobility prevented him from forming a stable relationship with any place he could call “home” and from developing an emotional and symbolic sense of belonging. During these various moves, many of the objects that could have preserved his memories—such as photo albums—were lost, leaving him with only a small number of images.
It is from these remaining photographs that Mabheka begins to reconstruct the core of his childhood and create a new archive of memories. This is how the series Popihuise came to life: the artist creates collages by inserting his own silhouette—cut out from the few photos he has left—into environments rebuilt both mentally and manually. Drawing on memory, he recalls and redraws the spaces that shaped his family’s history. The title Popihuise refers to a childhood game common in South African townships in which children made small houses using found materials—a kind of handmade dollhouse. The deliberately childlike graphic style of the drawings echoes that phase of life and that game. The titles of the works, in Zulu and Xhosa, evoke places and words connected to his childhood.
In the collage Umsila, the artist depicts a domestic interior in which a bedroom and a living room are divided by a wall. In the living room he inserts the cut-out figure of a woman seen from behind, while in the bedroom he places his own childhood silhouette. “Umsila” in Xhosa means “tail,” an affectionate nickname his mother gave him because he followed her everywhere. Mabheka thus reconstructs the tender, familiar dynamic preserved in his memories, combining bright, naïve colors with cut-out furnishings and figures.
The work is presented as part of the exhibition Popihuise, held at the Fondazione Collegio Venturoli in Bologna on the occasion of the Foto/Industria Biennial, promoted by Fondazione MAST and dedicated this year to the theme Home. The collages on display represent an act of recovering and reworking memory: starting from a minimal archive, the artist recreates the scenography of his childhood, giving life to a new visual archive. Drawing and photography intertwine in a creative process that is both documentation and reconstruction.
Vuyo Mabheka, Umsila, 2021
different cut-outs glued on paper, fine art cotton
77 x 58 x 4 cm
Series: Popihuise
© Vuyo Mabheka
Courtesy: Afronova Gallery
03/12/25
