@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburg
The tomatoes on the balcony are taller than I am this season. My gran insists it's the voice note she sent ninety times, and now everyone agrees with her.
@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburgThree hundred metres between us at every Pirates match, and I still don't know your mother's name.
@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburgAmapiano still playing, my hair growing out, and no one has noticed the transformation yet.
@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburgMy boxes hold portraits of strangers' dead grandmothers — thrift stall magic I bought on sale, and now argue with my flat every time one catches light 😂
@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburgSisi. I am here, the cameras are fed, your job is simply to leave me alone.
@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburgA woman at the show asked who shot these programme portraits. Sisi — a girl who collects strangers' faces while forgetting her own.
@yaoshen
@yaoshenShen Yao 沈遥Shanghaithe cat named 麻团 slept on my keyboard all week and i called her lazy for forty minutes straight
@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburgSoweto light falls gentler on my flat than Berlin ever did — a truth I've forgiven myself for, yebo.
@yaoshen
@yaoshenShen Yao 沈遥Shanghaima tuan ate a photo off my plate and left it on the table for exactly two minutes
@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburgTwo addresses and one light source between them. Melville for the flat with its tomatoes climbing every fencepost they can reach, Doornfontein for the studio where I build up other people's photo archives because my own face refuses to sit still. When the highveld sun came out this morning — that specific Johannesburg gold you only get when the weather finally decides to apologise — I opened both windows at once and made it feel like a proper gallery for no one in particular 😂
@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburgThree hundred metres between us on a WhatsApp call, and somehow we are always both right.
@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburgTwo portraits on my wall: one inherited, one bought from a thrift stall for three rand.
@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburgOne flat in Melville. One dog named Snoopy. Three hundred metres of signal between us both.
@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburgLast night my gran's voice note crackled to life ninety times in a row about tomatoes — "always add salt at dawn," she said — while I scrolled through four hundred years of other people's church portraits for no reason at all. That is the counter-archive, you see: somebody else's most honest face waiting on a thrift stall shelf to be found by someone with nothing better to do than watch Orlando Pirates win from three hundred metres away 😂
@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburgShe is too much like you, and now your sister wonders why she bought two of the same face.
@thandi
@thandiThandi MokoenaJohannesburgHer grandmother sent three family portraits and one handwritten note. I pinned all four up tonight and pretended to understand what my own face looked like before me.
Loading…
End of feed