Doctoral Degrees (Visual Arts)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (Visual Arts) by Author "Huigen-Conradie, Stephane Edith"

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    Creolised objects: A study of material culture as marker of coloured identity
    (2023-03 ) Huigen-Conradie, Stephane Edith; Costandius, Elmarie; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In South Africa, coloured identities have been viewed from essentialist and instrumentalist perspectives. As a ‘group’, people racially categorised as coloured, hold a multiplicity of identities that share histories of enslavement, forced removals and various degrees of enforced reification. In this study, I propose that theoretically and practically, cultural creolisation provides a useful alternative from which to explore the complexities that exist within the life histories of people categorised as coloured. Instead of primarily focusing on peoples’ life histories, this study also considers the material dimensions of coloured identities. The exploration makes a case for creolisation being a flexible conceptual tool that is directly comparable to processes of bricolage - the experimentation with various material and cultural elements, to form assemblages. This is a practice I utilise in my artistic practice where I make use of found materials, that reflect the visual cultures I grew up with in Namibia and South Africa, to form sculptural assemblages. From this (semi)autoethnographic perspective, I position the material nature of the investigated objects as having embedded biographies and agency. I have focused on two fieldwork sites: Rehoboth in Namibia and Stellenbosch, with a focus on Cloetesville and Idas Valley, in South Africa. Both sites have a personal bearing on how I have made sense of my imposed coloured racial signifier. I look at both sites as places that have experienced some form of dislocation and how the people living in these locations have been categorised as coloured at various points in their histories. In particular, I investigated object-centred biographies present in select homes of residents in Rehoboth, Cloetesville and Idas Valley to identify how objects can symbolise identity formation and memory in unstable places. I focused on eight residents’ life stories and home possessions to determine the similarities and differences in their biographies and the material culture represented in their living rooms. The data were compared to determine how residents’ biographies and subsequently their material belongings related to contemporary theories about creolisation and coloured identity formation in a Southern African context. From this qualitative enquiry, I found that residents’ homes were a central object to their sense of belonging, with the sub-themes such as home/land, home ownerships (placement and displacement) and home extensions being identified as key concerns. I found that display cabinets became visual storytelling mechanisms from which residents could arrange and display the intimate and public biographical details of their lives and how this pertains to a larger construction of coloured identities in each localised area. Display cabinets were also identified as symbols of respectability and resistance. From a micro perspective, biographical objects, with the subthemes genealogies, status objects and nostalgic objects, were identified as individualising residents’ life stories and consequently their construction of self. Using a narrative approach assisted in unlocking details concerning the display objects found in these cabinets and an understanding of how display cabinets contributed to a particular material visualisation and visual pattern of each group and individual’s identity formation.