NOGOLIDE - Have I taken this name for myself?
2024, Pretoria Art Museum
2022 Oil on Canvas, 300 x 170c
2022 Oil on Canvas, 300 x 170c
DEAR NOGOLIDE -- LETTERS
Dear Nogolide is a collaboration between Philiswa Lila and Thabo Jijana. The project is a creative exploration of Philiswa Lila's painting, "Dear Nogolide" (2021), using letter-writing, drawing, painting, poetry, performance, video and sound. The body of work is a layering of narratives across mediums, bringing together different memories as fragments that speak to each other and are part of a continuum across time, tense and space. Thus, memory work is at the centre of the creative engagement, in how the artists recover something of the vulnerability, absence and presence of the past; of forgetting and remembering in what is considered a re-sentimentalising of memories in the present.
2021, Investec Cape Town Art Fair, Tomorrow's Today Section
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NOGOLIDE
by THABO JIJANA
We invite ourselves into the images of others or wait to be let in, ready for a handshake or to quarrel, toyitoying in feet first, widening the frame, scratching at the canvas, more sun please, a rosy question, fading laughter, affinity. I am the model and the audience, looked at and the one doing the looking. I inherit the many afterlives of my own skin. I am this gaze that returns prestige to a woman whose true medium is her muscular name.
The eye is a mute camera, the heart’s advocate and confidant; the hands that dig the gold also tremble to fix the camera in my direction, the paint brush combing my eyebrows:
It’s a landscape yelling at you.
It’s the orange yellow of fire. It’s a man of the cloth with gold teeth. It’s a beloved inquiry.
It’s a talking fly. It’s a shark asking me to lend it my smile. It’s a precious stone.
It’s to offer the present the familiar garments of history.
It’s my doppelganger willing my pictorial past into the now.
It’s a summer for the sculpted self. It’s to prospect the many faces of my archive. It’s to reinhabit myself. It’s strangers I know sometimes without having ever met.
It’s Ntombikhona. It’s Mama Eve. It’s a few epiphanies about what makes village people people. It’s a portrait of the sitter as a multigenerational figure. It’s to substantiate and flavour the pose. It’s the memory of a painting that celebrates a memory. It’s thickening the water with blood, glittering sweat on black foreheads. It’s an heirloom heavy with hearsay and silences. It’s the stories people tell in order to remember themselves in the stories of other people. It’s the theatre of childhood. It’s the magic and intimacy of oil on canvas. It’s an affair between God and metal. It’s the ebb of time itself. It’s the ink of your feelings. It’s a song of female friendship.
It’s Negre’s muse. It’s Mister Apples. It’s Jesus in black trousers. It’s to befriend Dumakude. It’s to rid ourselves of spiritual views. It’s a younger, bewitching me.
It's a birthday salad to tame.
It’s funeral salads to reference.
It’s the zama zama spear. It’s V Mash’s wig. It’s Mr Goldfingers.
It’s the find of Mapungubwe.
It is the holy city and the altar.
It is Precious, it is the land; it is Nogolide.
© Thabo Jijana, 2022
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