Title: Body Drift
Year: 2021
Size: Length. 55.5 cm Width. 16.3 cm Hight. 14.6 cm
Technique: Ceramic

Description:
“Between the period of 1903 and 1928, Zimbabwe (a former British colony) went through a radical cultural change by which the language, people and spirituality was convoluted, redefined and remixed. “Body Drift” is an illustration of body drift resulting from a forced amputation of ones spirituality and language. Herbert Chimhundu, a Professor and Director of the African Languages Research Institute (ALRI) at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) writes in “Early Missionaries and the Ethnolinguistic Factor during the 'Invention of Tribalism' in Zimbabwe”(1992), that “colonialists simplistically equated the groups they identified as tribes with language or dialect areas. In any case, for both the settlers and the missionaries, it was more convenient in the early years to deal with fewer chiefs with territorial claims over relatively wider areas.” This artwork peels back the curtain of reality and exposes a haunting existing within me, answering a question posited by Braidotti and Bignall: “How do some Indigenous and non-European models of time and temporisation resist the ‘homogenous empty time’ of universal History to affirm the ways in which experiences of time and history are shaped by places, and what happens to such experiences of temporal existence when ancestral places are destroyed by colonial histories of devastation?”. “Body Drift” exists as glitches of the past towards a certain future where the body is an amalgam of mutated ideologies and spiritualities”.