Blackness as self-actualisation: Cognition

"The beginning of self-actualisation through Blackness begins with epistemic disobedience which happens through decolonial practices such as rehistorisizing, rejecting and healing from western imperialist ideologies regarding Black people and Blackness. I often think about the intersections between Sylvia Wynter’s “What it means to be human” and my practice of abstraction, Blackness as self-actualisation; “Wynter is not proposing to contribute to and to comfortably participate in a system of knowledge that left her out of humanity, but rather delink herself from this very system of knowledge in order to engage in epistemic disobedience”. I interpret this very practice through in- depth research and gathering material that remains from a time before and during epistemic violence thereafter.

This means engaging with material and writings by and from pan African thinkers, feminist writers, scholars, sociologists and philosophers that deal with matters surrounding decolonisation. This includes books such as ‘African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo’ to concepts like ‘double consciousness’ by Bu Bois, and further relating and/or challenging these findings in our own history and present-day South Africa. This process of extraction, in turn, presents itself in the mark-making and word-making I engage in when painting. I reject the notions of colonial ideologies and instead try merge a time and world that I imagine to have been a purist or ancient way of living without the destruction and disturbance of imperialism and, an alternate present world of what could have been, all into one world — one that is inherently Black."