KHAHLISO MATELA

Who Am I?

I am a writer and filmmaker, who uses his creative expertise and art to interrogate and hold memory to account. Being of the conviction that art also judges history and how history is recalled, I find my craft becoming a social barometer, where remembering is  an act of activism in an era of forgetting.

Why Film-Art?

To plagiarize the Holy Book: “I art on earth as I art in the heavens”, similarly as – “to art is to be”. The act of “Being” is therefore an active engagement with time in space – a concerted affirmation that to be is a lucidly artful spectacle. And cinema, being my choice of expressing creativity, holds a pivotal stature as it represents an act of “freezing “ time quite unlike any other re-collective like photographs and paintings. Cinema for me is a “moving” record and documentary artwork that can depict past events for a present setting. Cinema is memory-work, frozen yet alterable by “ eyes of beholders”, interspersed into multiplicities of definitions and often edited by the beholder through filtered tools of recollection.

Labourers Of Death And Birth

This video poem is an experiment at understanding the juxtaposition between death and birth, events that can occur simultaneously, while also exploring man’s own relationship with the animals which he helps bring to the world and would later have to kill.

Evidence Of Departure

How does it feel walking in a space that invokes extreme nostalgia, because you had once lived in that place? Does one’s mind superimpose memories, in whatever filtered and corrupted manner, on such a place? Where is one’s presence when the past can look back through cracks and echoes in time?

In The Wake And In Sleep

An audio-visual experiment into what I have dubbed ‘the dreaming triad”. The sleeping muse is an entity immersed in half-death, watching herself meandering through a space long vacated and somewhat perceiving herself as ‘the spirit of the place’. The act of watching oneself sleep becomes a metaphor emphasizing a triad of the sleeper, the watcher and actor of dreams – a poem washed in rusty sounds of nails and tin rattled by winds only heard.

The Silence And Sounds Of Dusk

Do The Two Eyes Have To See The Same Thing?

This video poem is an exercise stretching the limits of sight as a perceptive faculty employed to capture memory data for our cranial vaults. Through the two sets of frames, the artist is invoking what he calls THE DUALISM OF SIGHT – an analogy that draws from the notion of ‘persistence of vision’.

Premised on an inquiry of the possibility of each eye being able to perceive its own chosen ‘field of vision’, the first sequences are depictions of the same sunset viewed at different times of its occurrence, while the second merely composes the same sunset to create dually variant fields of vision.

Home Of A Million Ghosts

Johannesburg, a city of defaced silhouettes, trudging mysteries over tarmac, lisping discordant sales-talk verbatim and random vulgarities. This poem merely observes from juxtaposed vantage points how a city full of throngs can seem a place of the unknowable. Familiar inhabitants of a solitary dream-place crisscross each other’s shadows, is a cemetery where Lesego Rampolokeng said: “Dreams come to die.”

If These Walls Could Speak

The premise of the video-artwork is an investigation into incarceration through architecture, questioning how stoical cement slabs, bars and electric gates affect the human psychology? The actor in the film though exploring a suburban building assisted in embodying the geometry of captivity as a concept derived from the illusion of safety created by incarceration of safe spaces.

Last Room Of The Forgotten

This video portrait tells the story of a mother and son, living together in the squalor of a single room in the heart of Johannesburg’s southern region. The son, a former apartheid soldier reminisces about adventurous days fighting ‘Terrs’, while his mother merely recalls the solemn beauty of a son she lost to a war of white supremacy, which she also supported.