As an artist and researcher, an interest in the human need to collect and catalogue has created a long thread throughout my practice.  A common form through which I investigate this is through the Pepper’s Ghost – a 19th-century theatrical illusion mechanism that makes use of a half-silvered mirror, video compositing, projection and live performance  – through music, dance, drawing, live narration and more – archived videos and photographs that have remained otherwise silent and inactive are agitated from the froze dead states in which they are held into direct relationship with the body – with breath, voice, movement, life.

A key animator of the Pepper’s Ghost works is the Collection Archives de la Planète, Musée départemental Albert-Kahn. By situating myself both literally and figuratively in the archive, I hope to provide audiences with a sense of the Pepper’s Ghost mechanism itself, and invite a collective reading of the archival footage and imagery held within it. In Amazing Grapes, I merge personal memory with archival footage in an experimental performance lecture.

Through a narrative retelling of events from my childhood and my experiences as part of a research group working with the above-mentioned archives, I draw lines between 19th century Dahomey (now Benin), the rural Botswana of my birth, and present-day Johannesburg. Woven throughout these narratives are anecdotal misreadings and incidental connections between the songs “Ave Maria” and “Amazing Grace.”