Interview: Thato Toeba
Makella Ama talks with Thato Toeba about their practice, their use of the archives and the process of finding a language around politics and art.
What does it mean to travel through history, minds and the hands of time whilst rooted in the same spot? What does it mean to resolve/grapple/ruminate through art? How can we show a duty of care and extend humanity towards stories we encounter within archives of the past and of now. With profound sensitivity, Thato Toeba explores these questions in conversation on a late evening whilst completing their current residency with Rijksakademie.
Born in 1990, Toeba is an artist, lawyer and researcher (sometimes) using the medium of collage, multimedia images and the archives to resolve.
Before the interview begins, Toeba discloses that they may be working with their hands and collages whilst we speak. I share that this is perfectly okay. By the end, we both realise that little progress with the collage has been made due to the intentionality behind every answer. It seems, sometimes hands also need space to think and respond.
Thato Toeba - E-motionz
MA: Makella Ama
TT: Thato Toeba
MA: How would you describe your own work to a close friend?
TT: Such an interesting way to frame that question.
MA: I’d been thinking a lot about how artists self-describe and how this can change depending on who they’re talking to and the setting they're in i.e. speaking to a gallerist in a white cube gallery vs speaking to someone you already have a kinship with.
TT: Interesting. I wouldn’t describe my work at all- but if I was speaking to a close friend, I’d say I’m trying to resolve. And I'm trying to resolve something both inside of me, but also outside, physically in the actual making process and with narratives this process generates. There's lots of things being resolved.
I’ve been doing my PhD for a while now, - I have maybe one chapter to go, and often I would sit in front of my computer and say “Thato, you have one chapter to go. Just one chapter”. And I would sit there and just be paralyzed. I just couldn’t do it. And then I was like, I don't know if I'm just being lazy? I kept trying to force myself and then I realised I couldn’t do it anymore. And I wanted to do something else that would act as a tester for whether I was just being lazy. So, then I would start making and I realised that I really enjoyed my work, and I did it really well, and I was like… maybe I’m not lazy. Maybe there's something here that needs to be resolved. So that's what I've been doing. I've been trying to resolve things.
MA: Resolving, in a way, is very similar to research and I’m aware you’re both a researcher and an artist. What came first for you and how does one practice inform the other?
TT: I’m not sure that I’d call myself a researcher because I’ve been around researchers quite a lot and I know what their work involves. I studied law, and during this time my mother was a demographer working at the university I was studying at. (I went to the National University of Lesotho). My mum also worked with the consultancy firm of the university, and she did a lot of empirical research that I eventually helped with so that was running concurrently with my studies. These things intersected at the same time, though very unintentionally.
Even with that, I’m still quite careful about calling myself a researcher and I think very loosely about research. I think we are all researchers in a way. I grew up in a very rural setting, in a very rural country (Lesotho) And then I moved to the city, to the ‘big town’. And then I also moved to Cape Town and realised that with all that moving comes expansion. Moving from the rural to the urban is an interesting expansion of its own; both physical and mental. Moving to Amsterdam (where I am now, doing a residency with Rijksakademie) has been an expansion of its own too. Expansions are always happening in the mind and within those expansions, there's lots of things to be curious about; the pursuit of which is research. And I feel like those experiences inform you. There’s always so many thoughts in my head. And these thoughts don’t always have a distinction, but they’re there.
Thato Toeba - town plan
MA: On this, the process of moving around and time- there’s a real sense of history present, so I was wondering whether there’s a period you tend to go back to but I’m also getting the understanding that your focus tends to be quite broad?
TT: Yeah, it's broad but I tend to like going back to the period between the 70s. And… Maybe the 90s because it was a period of such intense modernization in Lesotho. I don't know how much you know about the Lesotho, but it's a super homogeneous country. And it's very conservative. It's a small population of maybe less than 2 million people, so it’s a super small and separate country that wants to be separate from everyone else. People want to keep to themselves and there's this resistance with, like, things from the outside.
When I was writing my thesis, I was thinking a lot about development politics and international law and I knew I wanted to have a better understanding of the people I was writing about. I was like okay… I know I come from this place, but I’ve not looked into our archives to get even an aesthetic idea of us in history. I was interested in finding out about the people of which we speak about, particularly in terms of our essence. I wanted to find out more about our poetry, art, literature; things that might inform what a people might want to be, even as development politics tried to intervene. And so, during that time I was like, oh, let me actually just look into the archives and find out more.
MA: Sounds like… research?
TT: [laughs] kind of.
I started a project on Instagram (@lesothoarchives) based on this and also because I just wanted to see what was available. It was interesting because there's one museum in Lesotho called the Morija Museum and Archives and it's a missionary museum. I always find it interesting because Lesotho is a very Christian country. And the museum belongs to the Church. And their representation of the archives is what the church wants it to be.
MA: There was an agenda?
TT: Exactly. And it was evident even in the language used in captions of images, so that’s always something to bear in mind. This being the only museum also means that our historical representation is only within this lens. And I found that Lesotho Archives then felt like a response to that; exploring the archives without the same historical lens. Aesthetically, it’s also so beautiful, working with those sorts of film images and working with the colouring and the grain of the 70s.
MA: You've got a very beautiful way of considering humanity in the stories of people within your work. That process [considering humanity] within the archives is something I've been thinking about a lot recently in terms of archiving. When it’s not done ‘well’, it can feel very extractive, especially when people have agendas of their own. What you’ve just said reminded me of the possibilities of delving through archives in an ethical way.
TT: [Earlier] You’d mentioned the idea of critical fabulation by Saidiya Hartman and I’d not read her works before, but I was thinking some more about it and when I was doing the reading I was like… exactly! For me, sometimes there is a discomfort when working with people cutting them out (from a magazine for example). I always have questions like, do they even want to be here? Do I have the right to liberate you? Is this liberating? There’s a lot of politicking that happens in my mind. But then there's also the question of do you just let the archive be? Without commentary? Without any type of intervention? I don’t know whether all archives are better left alone.
MK: Yeah. That's such an interesting question. Is the archive better left alone? I suppose even when we find them, archives are very often not in their organic or native source. They’ve been moved around from one place to another. They’ve been touched by one person or another. They’re not always ‘complete’. Some archives have gaps. Sometimes, as we were discussing earlier, there's an intentionality behind the archives that have been left behind. This can be for political or personal reasons. Some archives have been edited. I often think about photographs of people, for example, like Martin Luther King. For such a long time, we only really saw black and white images of him and the intentions behind that was only noted more recently. Black and white photographs make it seem like certain milestones or movements happened an incredibly long time ago but that’s not always the case. A lot of historical socio-political movements are really not that far removed from our current realities. Archives have always had a charge.
TT: Exactly. And I think for me, when I work, the thing I believe in is my power to affect this. The archive is not alone. When we think of questions like “should we leave the archives alone”, it already isn’t alone. Sometimes, they are very deliberately placed pieces of information. And it's put in a particular way on purpose. When I was doing my research, for my PhD, it was moments like these that made me really want to be an artist. When I was growing up, I was so naive. I really thought that the world was just and fair.
MA: Once upon a time, we all did [both laugh]
TT: Yeah, and then when I moved to Cape Town, there was a student movement FeesMustFall that began in 2015. This was during the first year of my masters and there was a very particular way of framing the world that I accepted at the time. The university was literally burning because people wanted a decolonial approach to education. And we were studying the colonial rhetoric about the world. I always found that contradiction very interesting and it made it very difficult in the coming year to try and do research within that convention.
By then, I was researching anti corruption law and when looking at the histories of certain laws I found that it was very shallow. It was almost like you and I having a chat. And then I go, “yeah, that's really a great idea”. And then you suggest, “well, let's call this other friend of ours who just happens to have this really great institutional job”. And then there's this conference and then there's this law. I had always thought building things like this - like the law - was a long, serious, carefully considered process that involves people and not just the whims of people with power. But that’s not always the case. And that’s not always the case for archives either.
I’m curious about what archives, but also law might look like in a lot of years from now. How mangled they will be in actual fact and in actual truth.
MA: How do you see the people in your collages? Are they characters? Are they people?
TT: I’m not too sure- I think it changes. Yes they are people, but they become more than that. A consistent thing is that there’s almost a feeling of casting. And sometimes I see them on a board, waiting. Once they’re cut out from the origin of a photograph, they feel very separate. But then they begin to play different roles, so maybe you’re right. In a way, maybe they are characters. My main goal is to tell a story and prompt that story through collage. The idea is that I meet people at different points of relatability. I want to feel like I’m telling a complete story and that there’s a sense of coherence. Sometimes that looks like seeing certain characters again. I’m not a traditional artist so I like looking at different ways of showing art.
Thato Toeba - Thato scan20240126_0031
MA: I realised that some of these ‘characters’ are included more than once in your work. Are they still a part of the same story when that happens? Or are they embodying different experiences in different universes/time periods?
TT: I’m always trying to tell several stories because people have several stories. Sometimes I meet people at different points in their life and find different levels of relation. Very often, when I’m looking at images, one thing reminds me of the other and I don’t always know what to make of it. I often buy magazines only to get home and realise I have like, 3 or 4 of the same copy. If I find an image to look very beautiful, it tends to be repeated (but not always explicitly). It has its own metaphoric implications. I’m always interested in how we see things and what we see.
When you’re looking at a magazine, the way you look at things and the way your eyes literally fall into images is very different. The way that you see feels different to the way you’d see things if everything was one dimensional. Similar images also help with the trick of the mind. It’s almost like an animation.
MA: It's almost like a continuation of a saga, almost.
TT: Yes!
MA: Do you ever see yourself in the work that you create and in the people that you find?
TT: Yeah.
MA: You do?
TT: Yeah. For sure. For sure. I mean tend to say that the thing that triggered my interest in images was how far I relate to images. A lot of the time, I’ll see someone in a magazine and think “oh, this person looks like so and so”. So that happens, but also, to be able to really see something doesn’t mean I have to appear as the thing. For example, there was a time where I put my face on a collage, and it absolutely haunted me. That made me realise that I don’t want to be in a piece. I want to enter metaphorically without leaving my own imprint. The connection and relation is always there without me being physically there.
MA: Do you find that people that are closer to you have a more accurate and intimate reading of your own work?
TT: Yeah, for sure. I have a twin, and my twin is someone that’s been with me my whole life. Her reading of the work is on point. She understands the titles and where they come from. She understands the work and its stories. She doesn’t necessarily understand the technical processes, but she recognizes what lays between.
MA: That must be so magical. Knowing that someone else is able to find and understand your version of the self through other people’s selves. In different periods of time, too.
TT: Yeah, exactly. And maybe that's what helps me reconcile using ‘people as characters’. They might not be appearing in the work in their initial form, but people are still finding the humanities within them.
Thato Toeba - Ka ha ka ka mona ha se ka mantloaneng
MA: There are quite a few examples of your work you can do that with. One of them being ‘Ka ha ka ka mona ha se ka mantloaneng’. The one of the mother doing her daughter's hair. The whole setting is one of those universal experiences I often find myself time travelling back to in my mind. Could you talk a bit about the title of the piece?
TT: So the title ‘ha ka ka mona ha se ka mantloaneng’ just means ‘don’t play in my house’.
I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up, children largely played outside. You’d wake up in the morning, eat breakfast and then play outside until someone calls you in for lunch or maybe to have a wash. And then after you do that, you get the hell out. And then eventually in the evening, you come into the house for dinner and that's your day. If you came back into the house and people were still inside, you’d be in trouble. So that was just the statement that they would say. I particularly like that piece. I think that was the beginning of my political mind.
MA: I can tell
[Both laugh]
TT: Due to school and my love for debating a lot, politics were an interest for a long time. And when I was in Cape Town, I made a really strong artistic community that basically influenced me to flunk out of my PhD. I had friends who were studying literature and I had friends who were artists and I liked the tenderness of these humanities. I was always curious about the application of that tenderness in something as rigid as law. I used to read a lot of constitutions for my research and constitutions are regarded as ‘the spirit of the nation’. It's the soul and it's what tells you about the inner mechanics of societies. So sometimes, when you read these constitutions – these inner mechanics of the society- it's really concerning (the lack of tenderness). The law is meant to exist for the people. People don’t exist for law. And so I was always interested in touches of tenderness in the law, or the lack of it.
I understand that sometimes, we just want to see beautiful things. But the world is not always beautiful in that way. I’ve heard a lot of people describe work that explores this lack of beauty as ‘poverty porn’ and it’s a shame because I know that some work feels like poverty porn, but the reality is that the world is poor. At the same time, I know that life is not super ugly. And so I'm always trying to contrast this very brutal situation of things like war with tender situations like someone doing your hair. The title, when translated, might seem a bit harsh but it has its own tenderness. I remember when I first shared that work on Instagram, someone had commented on how their grandmother had always used to say “ka ha ka ka mona ha se ka mantloaneng” to them, and it’s those levels of relatability that I'm talking about, you know. People saying, “I remember”, and their process of remembering is not always tragic. There’s a tenderness. Even in moments where it feels like the world is falling apart, there are always things that are just ‘things’ still happening. Someone is making food, someone is doing someone’s hair, people are taking care. Life still continues to happen in its small ways, in spite of bigger political moments.
MA: I had a similar reading in another one of your works titled ‘Man on fire’. There’s a line of men in a row, and they've got their hands up in the air. In front of them, there seems to be a silhouette of a little boy and he's got his arms wrapped around someone I assumed to be a parental figure? In a very similar vein to what you just described, in this piece there’s an element of something bad happening and this is reinforced by the title ‘Man on fire’. But at the same time, there's such softness, sensitivity and tenderness in the way this boys’ hands are clasped.
TT: Yes. Wow. This piece actually has a really important historical context. I showed an iteration of it at the Johannesburg Art Fair. The collaged face in the middle was a Mozambican man named Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave. Back in 2008, there were a series of xenophobic attacks in South Africa, in a township called Ramaphosa township, which is ironic because that's the name of the current president of South Africa.
Nhamuave was set alight on fire, alive. I think it was interesting that this work was showing at the entrance of the Joburg art fair because people didn’t really recognize him. In the collage, the other men to the side are from a choir.
Thato Toeba - man on fire
MA: When I first saw the piece, I’d initially thought that these men were either holding their hands up in praise and worship or holding their hands up in surrender.
TT: Almost. I can see that. They’re actually members of a band and in the image, they are singing. The collaged image of the boy with the figure was taken in Zimbabwe and the boy was clinging onto his Dad, who was also a teacher. I would often think of this man – of Nhamuave and how he had fled from the war and left his family; his wife and four children, to work in South Africa in order to send money back home. And that’s where he got attacked. Later, Nhamuave’s brother in law had shared that they were actually not in the area when the xenophobic attacks had started, but Nhamuave had wanted to go back in order to get things from the house they were renting, and they set him alive. They stripped him of his clothes and set him alive with a blanket on fire. And these were his neighbours.
The images I’d seen of this were in a South African magazine. The images of the men in the choir, and of the boy and his father were also from a magazine. I liked the way that this child was clinging onto his father’s leg. It reminded me of those moments when you're young and someone comes up to you and your parents; they start to give you a little bit too much attention, and you get very shy, and you hold onto the safest thing around you. I thought about this man's children that he left at home. Once upon a time, they must have held and clinged onto him like that. I thought about how he was the one to leave in order to try and create a better life for them. I thought about who remembered him in his moment of pain.
I saw this image when I was 18 and when I reflect back, these are the kind of things that would change my mind from one of naivety. I was seeing violence on TV like this for the first time, and then continuously.
MA: Whilst you were speaking, I was thinking about how this is a testament to the power of archives. I’m not proud to admit that I hadn’t heard of this tragic unfolding of events before. All I knew was that this piece really struck a chord with me, and I knew that I really wanted to talk to you about it. Now, hearing about it and the legacy behind this collage, I’m leaving with the ability to remember the heartbreaking realities of life, we must never forget. I can now acknowledge Nhamuave's existence. His life and legacy. And pass this knowledge on, too.
TT: It's important work.
MA: It's important work.
MA: I'm curious about your process of making. Where are you sat? What can you hear? What surrounds you? How do you feel?
TT: When I was in Lesotho I would live in my studio, and I really enjoyed that. This is my first time (whilst in Amsterdam) having a separate studio. It’s a studio in such a big community as well so there’s a lot I’m trying to get used to. I tend to be very absorbed in my work. I live very close to my studio – it’s around 10 mins away. And even with that, sometimes I feel like the time it takes me to get to my studio can affect my ideas. When possible, I prefer to work from home. I buy magazines, go around book banks, look at a lot of images. Sometimes, I will go to sleep, wake up and just carry on with my work. In terms of what I can hear, sometimes I’m watching something passively, or listening to something passively, but the work is always continuing with my hands.
MA: I realised that some of the people in your work seem almost camouflaged, as though they are waiting to be witnessed. With some characters, for example in Sara, we are only privy to half of people’s faces. Is there an intentionality behind this?
TT: Yeah, with the work you’re talking about – Sara – that’s maybe the first time doing something like that (with a silhouette). I think it’s been beautiful for me to realise I’m not done looking at art and finding new ways to look at art. The work of William Kentridge also evokes the same feeling for me. He’s phenomenal. His work is kind of like a mental trick because there are so many shadows. He will have people on a stage with big shadows that stand behind. And then you, as a viewer, begin to think about predictability and human beings having shadows. But then you look closer, and you realise that some shadows don’t have bodies. And then you kind of look around and wonder where the shadows are coming from.
There’s a lot of complexity in otherwise very simple arrangements. When I think about camouflaging – I always get so happy when people notice that in my work – I think it’s a part of pushing the limits of looking. But it's also a very metaphoric preposition about the presence and absence of people in the world. Even in terms of the archives. For example, I am not in the archives in Lesotho. People like me with my background/sexuality are not in the archives. We’re not there, but we are there- in history. The people that are excluded from the archive are nonetheless there, in the history of the place.
MA: Were you thinking about these kinds of things when you first started collaging? I know you’d mentioned that you only really started making after university, but I’m curious about what made you choose collage as a form to express yourself and the different things you wanted to say. Sorry, there’s a lot of questions in here but I’m just really interested in what kind of thoughts were running through your mind at the time.
TT: When I was growing up, me and my twin had these playbooks, and they were basically collage books. We would get catalogues from furniture shops, and we would cut all the furniture and paste them in the book in an animated way. So, for example, we’d cut out fridges and make slits in them so that once it’s done, you could open the fridge. And underneath it, there would be images of food in the fridge.
MA: Wow, you were building a world!
TT: Yeah, so these ideas around making using the form of collage have always existed as a tool to build worlds, as you said. I think maybe in 2017, collaging became a ‘fashionable thing’ in Cape Town and there was a popular artist, Lunga Ntila who has now passed, and I remember her really showcasing how it can be a form of expression. I used to use an app called Bazaart, but it was a very casual engagement with the medium. It didn’t really feel artistic.
The first ‘proper’ collage that I made was one of Winnie Mandela around the time she passed away. I gifted it to a friend. There was a tribute in a South African newspaper and I remember really liking the images and so I just started building. And it was a one-dimensional collage, maybe the only one-dimensional collage I’ve made. At the time, it felt very effective as a tool to speak fluently without words.
The thing I’ve always loved about Winnie is her personality. With both her, and a lot of other Black women from South Africa like Brenda Fassie, there was a unified anti-apartheid and anti-establishment attitude alongside a critique on societal ideas on what a ‘good woman’ is supposed to behave like. I liked that Winnie was full of rage. In many ways, she would remind me a little bit of my Mum and what she would teach me without always knowing.
MA: On the topic of things learnt during childhood, I’ve been thinking a lot about a previous exhibition you had, titled ‘Phate lia Lekana’ taking from a common fable/saying and translating to ‘when you lie down to sleep, the earth below you is equal to the heaven above you’. When I first read that, I read it again and again and again and I was like, wow, that's poetry you know? It’s just so, so beautiful. And it got me thinking about the stories we hear from elders at home or at school, or from friends who are passing on things they've also heard from their own elders, and how all these stories and fables and riddles stick with us and shape us. And then I was wondering whether there are any other South African / Lesotho parables or stories that have stayed with you from your own childhood.
TT: Maybe not South African, necessarily, but I’ve always been interested in the linguistics of words. I went through a period where I would question why we needed to follow the rules of writing and I think that sort of questioning came from my experiences in high school and university. There was a very much a set way of doing things, accompanied by all these rules. And then you get to university and there are even more rules you have to follow. And if you didn’t speak in a certain way or follow all these rules then people wouldn’t listen.
I'm very fortunate that I can speak through art in a way that doesn’t involve words. Sometimes I think about how the internet is not a safe space to speak and how it wasn’t really created as a safe space to speak. In 2008, when Mark Zuckerberg asked us, “what's on your mind?”, he wasn't trying to be a friend to you, he was trying to mine something. The internet is always trying to sell you something. So, I like considering the tricks of language and how it can be something that you use and engage with. The internet is not a space of honesty, but it is a space that has gathered people that owe each other honesty.
When I was making the show, ‘Phate lia Lekana’, I had been talking to my sister because we use a lot of parables when we chat, just for the fun of it. I had meant to call my show ‘Two Worlds’ because at the time I was thinking about the dual experience of the world that colonised people. You have to navigate the natural fact of being and existing in the world; whilst also navigating living in a capitalist/political world. DuBois talks about the double consciousness, and this was on my mind a lot; that theme of being beyond and within the veil. Going back to this idea of relatability, the world we can access or that we have the means to, isn’t always one that we can relate to.
When we were talking about parables, we spoke of how when we’re sleeping, in our subconscious state, you and I are equal. No one is rich, no one is poor. You are just a human creature in a space of surrender. And I liked that as a meeting point between these two worlds and within this double consciousness. So, I wouldn't say I have a favourite parable but I do love the idea of things having several meanings.
Nowadays, when people say something, they mean it and take it at face values. But with parables, just as with collage, everything is still open to your own interpretation of what's in front of you. It’s part of expanding the emptiness of the collage. It’s empty and full at the same time. Empty because people fill it with their own experiences, but also full for the same reasons. So yeah, I like language and I like idioms and I like hip hop and double entendres and knowledge and play and being able to say many things with one word and making things up from things that already exist.
Interview by Makella Ama (@ma.kevelli / @freshwater_archives)
With special thanks to Thato Toeba
All images courtesy of the artist: Thato Toeba (@flattendacurve)Thato Toeba