Home Truths

Home Truths is an installation that stages an intimate and uneasy dialogue between a father and child to reflect on how South Africa’s colonial and apartheid legacies continue to reverberate within the microcosm of the family. The work begins with a moment of exchange when my father handed me a small piece of paper inscribed with isithakazelo, a record of clan praises that anchors one’s belonging to lineage and ancestry. This gesture, at once affectionate and disciplinary, sought to restore a sense of continuity that apartheid south Africa’s policies of forced removals has fractured. Yet for me, it also exposed the tensions between inherited identity and lived experience, between what should be preserved and what must be allowed to transform. Raised primarily within my mother’s family and in a township shaped by diverse and sometimes contradictory cultural practices, my father’s invocation of ancestry offered both connection and estrangement. Home Truths takes this tension as its generative core. Through fragments of family heirlooms and belonging gathered along the processes of forced removals, the installation transforms this personal negotiation into a collective space of reflection where memory, love, aspiration and dissonance coexist. In relation to the conference theme, Home Truths rethinks decay not as loss or ruin but as an active process of unmaking and remaking. The installation proposes that decay may be a method for confronting what is unresolved in heritage, during apartheid and within the democratic dispensation. Here, objects that form part of our family history are revisited with scrutiny, with care and with the objective of reimagining kinship. Rather than seeking to preserve family history in its original form, the work embraces fragmentation, silence, and the material traces of erosion as aesthetic and ethical gestures. Home Truths thus positions decay as both condition and critique: a means of engaging with the instability of memory and the incomplete project of postcolonial repair. It invites viewers to inhabit a space where the personal becomes historical, and where the ruins of belonging are neither mourned nor restored, but reconfigured through dialogue, vulnerability, and attention.