blk banaana
cape town, south africa
blk banaana [Duduetsang Lamola, b. 1991 in London, UK] is an interdisciplinary artist based in Cape Town, South Africa.
Through the use of collage, digital art, moving image and installation, she explores the relationship between fragmentation and speculative reconstruction in order to challenge a hegemonic Western perception of reality that has been mediated through anthropological violence.
As an emerging artist, she has collaborated with many artists and organisations internationally and on the African continent, working as both a designer and artistic collaborator. She was commissioned by Mushroom Hour Half Hour as a visual artist, designer and creative director to create the cover for dumama + kechou’s debut album buffering juju, released in 2020. She designed print and online promotional material for a n c e s t r a l b o d y n o i s e (curated by artist Gugulethu Duma for Oyoun Berlin in 2020), as well as presented her video installation Fragmented Trajectories (2020) as part of the final exhibition and performance.
She was selected to participate in Sira Virtual Residency 2020: RUST, hosted by La Teinturerie based in Antananarivo, Madagascar.
blk banaana will be exploring the ways in which we engage with our imagination, our memories and our being, with a particular focus on the historical and ancestral connection between St Helena Island and South Africa. This exploration would involve reconstituting fragments from personal family archives, oral history and memory in order to create imaginary maps of past, present and future trajectories of my ancestors. My hope is to explore a more mythic, speculative and anecdotal story of the relationship between St Helena Island, South Africa and beyond.
My great grandmother was born on the remote Atlantic Ocean island of St Helena and, like many others, relocated to Cape Town in the early 1900s. This exploration would involve reconstituting fragments from personal family archives and memory in order to create a series of imagined mapping strategies that interrogate the broader connections between these two geographies and beyond.
The project would resist presenting an accurate account of this historical connection. Rather, it would involve an imaginative, anecdotal, mythic and sensory mapping of these trajectories. Employing methods of layering, texturing, juxtaposing (though collage/montage); collage animation; speculative mapping and storytelling (writing/journaling); imaginative mapping and audio recordings, my time during the RBFP residency will be used to construct an audio-visual sensory experience consisting of a series of short video portals aimed at speculating and complicating this history, as well as our collective relationship with self and spirit, remembering and dreaming, past and future, etc.
