Mother tongue

The artworks in Mother Tongue were inspired by the journey I took to know more about my family's food tradition and my grandmother in her absence while exploring my identity with my Basotho culture. I explore my maternal history through culturally-specific food rituals and practices to understand my identity as a contemporary woman of Basotho heritage. The research engages my archive of Basotho cuisine, inherited from my grandmother and my mother, to create a body of artwork as "imprints of absence" – an anarchive – as Zaayman (2019:x) suggests. As art-based research has the potential to anarchive by illuminating untold stories and offering traces of knowledge.