The video-installation intervention titled ‘Don’t make me over’ is part of a series of works within the ambit of The Posterity Project: that act as disruption and public provocation, within selected archival and heritage sites. Besides the installation at The Forge and The Commune situated within the newly gentrified heart of Braamfontein, Johannesburg, the Castle of Good Hope in Cape Town will host a parallel installation. The link between these installations reverberates a continuum between past and present: how historical colonial exploitation has developed into the much more evasive neo-liberalism we know it today.   

In The Posterity Project: #2, entitled Don’t Make me Over … pays homage to the presence of past selves as a manifestation of living and ancestral spectres. Don’t Make me Over performs the generating-making, reproduction-remaking, and deconstruction-undoing, of self, within socio-political and psychosocial domains of the past and the present. 

My work explores, how, hidden societal contexts such as quotidian patriarchy, is violently (re)inscribed and (re)enacted in the home and workplaces alike. More specifically, I seek to highlight the still overlooked intersectional violence experienced by womxn of colour in this country and beyond. For womxn, performing labour(s), are entangled with sex and power. A further violence is the expectation (disguised as culture and religion) that we need to perform and deliver labour, excessively, constantly and to a certain standard (as set by the oppressive structures). From the home (as mothers and partners) and within our chosen occupations, we perform imposed labour at the cost of our health and mental well-being. Above all, when we consider matters of race and class, exploitation, and abuse of power, exasperates the levels of violence experienced. 

Posterity Project #1 launched at the Castle of Good Hope: Pawnography is available at Fariedanazier.com