© Tshepiso Moropa, 'Untitled I', from the series 'Inside Your Home', 2020

In the contemporary world, some photographic projects are bringing to light the strength and symbolic value of archive images as a tool for autobiographical and identity analysis. This article focuses on two authors, Lebohang Kganye and Tshepiso Moropa, who have made their family history and cultural roots a cognitive map of rediscovery and interpretation.

Let's start with some common elements. Lebohang Kganye, like Moropa, lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa. Both use self-portraits and archive research (family photos for the first, shots found in books, or web pages for the second) to reconstruct their own personal and family history that has a narrative and, at times, political value. The themes that emerge from their works are femininity, the relationship with ancestry and with one's ancestors, and the reinterpretation of history.

© Lebohang Kganye, 'Mohlokomedy Wa Tora' (2018) Installation view (Kunsthal KAdE, 2018)

In Ke Lefa Laka: Heir-story, Lebohang Kganye plays the role of her maternal grandfather. Her family's uprooting due to apartheid is recomposed and overturned in a narrative reconstruction in which archival images and self-portraits merge. Lebohang immerses herself among the figures of an installation that recalls fiction and photo novels. She becomes the character of his story, and she plays a grandfather she could not know but whose emotions she relives, transmitting a sense of disorientation and uncertainty in a pop key.

© Lebohang Kganye, 'Pied Piper' (2013) from the series 'Ke Lefa Laka: Heir-story'

 
© Lebohang Kganye, 'The Suit' (2013) from the series 'Ke Lefa Laka: Heir-story'

The theme of the rediscovery of one's ancestors' roots is deeply felt among those who, for example, make up the multifaceted panorama of African hometown associations.[1] Groups of people originating from rural villages, who have emigrated to the metropolises searching for work, associate with each other to help each other. In these contexts, keeping the memory of the ancestors alive is often the keystone of a complex system of identity narrative.

Like Lebohang, Moropa also goes in search of a past made up of faces. Her investigation is aimed at finding and reconstructing women's stories that she wisely inserts into collages. What emerges in The Memory of Her in Me is a narrative structure on the feminine, on archetypal symbols, on black pride. Following some strands of Cheikh Anta Diop's Afrocentrism [2], for example, the black woman is seen as the world's mother, the keeper of a glorious African past. It embodies a history to be protected and preserved. 

© Tshepiso Moropa

However, the logic in place in the images of the two photographers also seems to overturn this thought. Following the footsteps of black feminism, for example, by Bell Hooks, the authors rediscover their identity roots, their blackness, and their femininity as a source of pride, not with the idea of ​​museumizing their history, but to make it current. It is not a question of being a woman while remaining protected within the walls of the house, respecting the patriarchal logic recurring in Afrocentric tradition, but living their past and putting it back together.
In the two authors, therefore, a gathering of memories is taking place. The self-portraits and archive images are made up of collages, photomontages, and installations that want to find an identity narrative based on the experience of the photographers.

© Tshepiso Moropa

© Tshepiso Moropa

Whether they are unknown women, such as for Moropa, or whether they are photos of the mother, as in the Kganye, a process of enhancing black femininity's voice and its own needs is raised, a social category left aside by gender, "race "And class. [4]

As Lebohang Kganye tells us in her 2016 work Reconstruction of a Family, that history, especially the family one, is always a mix of reality and fiction. Archive photos can therefore be reinterpreted, becoming a vehicle for new stories. As in the film "The Sense of an Ending" (2017), by Ritesh Batra: memory and photographic recomposition open up to entire worlds, a game of recompositions that hardly will tire us. 

© Lebohang Kganye from the series 'Reconstruction of a Family'

[1] Dainelli Maria Elisa (2017), Ritornare a casa. Le associazioni di villaggio e l’organizzazione delle veglie funebri nella città di Parigi, in Africa e Mediterraneo, n°86, pp. 64-70.

[2] Diop Cheikh, A. (1982), L'unité culturelle de l’Afrique noire. Domaines du patriarcat et du matriarcat dans l'Antiquité classique, Paris : Présence africaine. 

[3] Hooks Bell, Nadotti Maria (2020), Elogio del margine. Scrivere al buio, Tau edizioni. 

[4] Davis Angela (1981), Women, Race & Class, Random House.

LINK

Lebohang Kganye
Tshepiso Moropa