Written by Renaé Mangena
There is an intentional provocation that sits at the centre of Siyababa’s practice, its and in between masculinity and tenderness, queerness and tradition, what we have been taught to look away from and what happens when we are made to look again. Moving between fashion, performance, sculpture, sound and film, Siyababa has built a practice that refuses to sit boxed within a single discipline. Instead, each medium becomes another language through which to interrogate the self and the structures that have shaped it. Siyababa’s work does not necessarily begin with an answer, sometimes it begins with a feeling, a thought, an idea that needs somewhere to go. What follows is an ongoing process of making the intangible physical, using art as both a form of self-discovery and an invitation for the audience to confront their own interpretations and understanding of the world in front of them.
I always say the journey started as soon as I could walk, if I’m being very honest. I had a dad who was super academic, and I think having me was his exposure to creativity. He loved jazz and knew incredible artists, so there was still an appreciation for artistry. You can imagine an academic who gets straight As and is studying towards his PhD. He wants that same excellence reflected in his child, even if it’s through a medium that is foreign to him. Siyababa started in theatre, then evolved into dance, poetry and music. When I was 15, I started a fashion business called The Movement. We created editorials for other brands while also selling our own merchandise. It was really successful, and I think that’s what pulled me into fashion.
When the group started to dissolve, I created my own brand called Valga, which became the blueprint for what Siyababa Atelier is today. It has always been for the daring. It has always pushed boundaries and told stories. As I began discovering my sexuality and understanding who Siyababa was as a bisexual, pansexual Zulu man, all of those stories started coming together and expressing themselves through fashion. My formal training also gave me the ability to bring these grand ideas together to mix the academic with the chaotic mind and that birthed Siyababa Atelier. Over the years, though, I found fashion quite restrictive. Fashion isn’t only about expressing yourself; there’s functionality, trends, seasons and the business of it all. Sometimes I want to wake up and make a dress that fills an entire room so nobody can move, and then someone asks, “But how is that functional? How do you make money from it?”
That’s when I started mixing different art forms. I had to use Siyababa Atelier as a tool to introduce Siyababa as an artist. Moving from being recognised solely as a fashion designer to being recognised as an artist isn’t as easy as people make it seem. Now we’re here: performance art, sculpture, design, the full spectrum of the multidisciplinary artist I grew up becoming.
Siyababa: Because fashion is the medium I formally studied, I think about it like this: fashion takes a two-dimensional surface, a flat piece of fabric and turns it into something three-dimensional. That has carried into the way I approach art. With the mind of Siyababa, I want someone to be able to walk around the work. Even with performances, I want you to experience them in 360 degrees. I love making things tangible and visual, no matter what discipline I’m working within. With the sonic experience Ukululmse, for example, it was about sound and how music is supposed to make someone feel. The challenge wasn’t necessarily making music because I have a musical background. The challenge was: how do I turn sound into something tangible? How do I make it three-dimensional? How do I create something that somebody can walk around and experience from different angles? So, besides the themes, that’s the common thread: everything needs to become three-dimensional.
Siyababa: I still ask myself that question.
I always joke that a sad artist is the best artist, but I don’t usually work from a place of sadness or happiness. I work from a place of energy, this feeling of, “I need to get this out of my head.” I use my work as a form of therapy. Black men and masculinity are so prevalent within my work because I use this ancestry as a way of breaking things down so that I can heal and become a better man within society. A lot of the emotions are only discovered afterwards. I’ll look at a sculpture, a garment or a film and realise, “Something needs to change.”
It comes from a very raw place of self-discovery. The emotion sometimes arrives afterwards, especially through the audience and the conversations that happen around the work. That dialogue becomes part of the therapy too.
My work isn’t meant to be pretty, and it isn’t meant to be liked by everyone. I want it to create discussion around subjects that people, particularly men tend to run away from.
There are so many themes within Siyababa: masculinity, queer politics, socioeconomics and all these smaller conversations. But if I had to put everything under one umbrella, I’d say I want the audience to be overstimulated. As queer people, our existence can be treated as an overstimulation for other people. I’m interested in reversing that gaze. My work is about making the male gaze uncomfortable. In previous performances, I wanted to show men in their rawest form. There was a stick-fighting sequence between myself and another performer that eventually shifted into intimacy. It asks: are these men fighting because of dominance, or is there another tension underneath it? Brotherhood and intimacy can exist alongside each other.
The audience immediately wants to categorise intimacy between two men, but I’m interested in challenging that instinct. Why can’t a man tell another man that his hair looks good or that he has beautiful skin without that gesture immediately being categorised? That’s what I’m trying to challenge when I talk about queer conversations. Sometimes I’m simply saying: you need to heal and call each other beautiful. Who is going to call you beautiful if your brother isn’t? Ultimately, I don’t necessarily need the audience to come and explain their interpretation to me. I want men to walk away questioning how they interact with their masculinity and sexuality. If the work made you uncomfortable, you need to ask yourself why.
It came partly from navigating my first heterosexual relationship after being in a five-year queer relationship. There were certain things I began noticing about heterosexual women entering relationships with queer men. I realised that while I often represented queer men in my work, I wanted this project to reflect something broader, the pansexual body. People often ask whether I’ve spoken about my sexuality with my family or my mother, and I’ve always felt like my sexuality isn’t something that necessarily needs to be questioned. I act the way I act, speak the way I speak and love who I love. At the same time, how do I explain pansexuality to somebody from a completely different generation and context? I wanted to break down some of those stereotypes, and that began translating itself into Indugu.
Siyababa: It has evolved so much. I think it’s the longest-running project I’ve ever done, and I’m actually very proud of myself for the consistency. Induku is a performance piece that continues evolving through the different artists who enter it. At one point it was a live-band show, then it moved into something closer to a vocal orchestra. Each iteration becomes something different. There is also a lot of research behind everything. We think about Johannesburg, its sounds, immigrant workers and the histories surrounding these ideas. Because of the weight of that research, it isn’t something that is simply meant to be consumed and left behind. I think institutions have also started absorbing Indugu differently.
It has become this multidisciplinary platform where I can play. Earlier, I spoke about how restrictive fashion sometimes felt, constantly thinking about the most functional way to create something. Indugu broke those chains. Now Induku can be a sculpture. It can be music. It can be performance. Maybe one day it becomes a painting. It can be photography. It has created a space where I feel comfortable with the work, regardless of how the industry chooses to recognise it.
Discomfort is something queer people have had to become comfortable with. Discomfort can be a trans person navigating a taxi rank. It can be a queer kid at an all-boys boarding school. We are exposed to discomfort from such a young age. I discovered my queerness when I was around 18, but the emotions, feelings and psychology surrounding it had always been there. Growing up and navigating the hood, there were always questions: How do I assimilate with the boys? How do I make sure I don’t out myself? That discomfort can begin when you’re nine or ten years old. Then you arrive somewhere like Johannesburg, find your subculture and find your community, but you still have to navigate the rest of the world, the taxi ride, the library, the everyday spaces. So if an adult encounters my work and feels disgusted, repulsed or uncomfortable, I want them to sit with that feeling. Imagine being a ten-year-old who is constantly being told that the way you naturally exist is somehow wrong. That’s why I’m obsessed with discomfort.
Every medium has its own financial constraints, but at the core of Siyababa Atelier and Siyababa as an artist is community. Every move I make, even when it’s independent, is still community-built. Moving into sculpture and understanding new materials was an entirely new learning process. We live in such a fast-paced world where artists rarely get the opportunity to actually learn new skills because it’s constantly: put something out, put something out, put something out. I’ve adapted to that through collaboration.
Every project becomes an opportunity to take something from somebody else, learn something and build from it. There’s always someone helping me, whether it’s a friend, another artist or someone whose opinion I trust. That’s how I navigate all these disciplines. It .isn’t only my brain working on them. I’ll ask somebody, “What do you think about this colour?” If they tell me it’s ugly, I’ll sit back and think about it again. That’s how I make sure no discipline becomes heavier than another, because once one starts feeling heavier, I think that’s when neglect begins.
I realised that I used to be an Instagram artist. A lot of the work was made for the ’gram and existed primarily online. I made a firm decision that I wanted to invite institutions into the practice. I want to become an institutional artist. I want the work archived. I want relationships with galleries, universities, cultural institutions and embassies. Getting closer to institutions is part of how I’m thinking about legacy. How do I find myself in a textbook? How does the work become part of somebody’s PhD? I recently gave a talk at UJ, and I initially wondered who would even come. But the room was full, and so many students came up to me afterwards and said it was refreshing to hear from an artist they could relate to. When I come into a lecture, the first thing we have to dismantle is: who are you, and who am I? Then we can move forward. So yes, institutions feel important to me now. It’s time for these conversations to enter the textbooks.
