Not just fabric, but evidence

Why Theodorah remains an evolving figure in artist Senzeni Marasela's practice

- Lesego Chepape

"This is my way of saying that I know about your story. I see your daughters. I am listening." These words, quietly spoken yet dense with power, reverberated through a modest studio nestled inside Ellis House in Doornfontein. It wasn’t a formal gallery space that housed artist Senzeni Marasela’s latest work, but one steeped in red thread, memory, and repetition.

During this intimate performance lecture and studio session, the artist opened the door both literally and metaphorically into her decades-long meditation on land, displacement and the gendered experience of waiting, suffering and surviving.

This gathering is hosted under the banner Dialogues on Soil III: Walking with Theodorah and supported by the Bartlett School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Graham Foundation.

Scholars, poets and cultural practitioners came to engage creatively through After Extraction, a pan-African cultural and intellectual gathering project combining art, research and indigenous environmental knowledge.

In this session with Marasela, at the centre, always, was Theodorah, a figure born of memory, stitching, trauma, silence and love.

"I've been performing Theodorah since 2003," said Marasela. "My work as a multidisciplinary artist often begins in performance. It's about dresses that reference my mother's history, her silences and her pain."

When Marasela speaks of her mother, it’s not with the removed reverence of a biographer but with the intimacy of a daughter who has inherited not only a name but an emotional archive. Theodorah, named after Marasela's mother, is a constructed figure, yes, but she is no invention. She is the bridge between personal and collective memory, an avatar through which the artist traces her own lineage, while also stitching into history those who have been systematically erased.