JILL AND LINDSEY DE ROOS
Publication
Everything That Moves, Moves Through Another
5ever books
2024
What are you? is a question that has been at the centre of an experimental and process-based journey in which we have explored our Cape Coloured identity. Coloured is a fabricated racial group legally introduced at the onset of Apartheid in South Africa, grouping a wide variety of ethnicities that did not fit neatly into other categories of race. Today, “coloured” represents a legitimate cultural group, built on a complex history of colonisers and the colonised, slavers and the enslaved. Due to these legacies, there are not many ways in which we can connect to our ancestry; however food is one of the few exceptions. In What are you?, we fabricated a world in which we could express ourselves with empowerment, gaining a deeper understanding of who we are and where we come from, via our connection to food.
The outcome of this journey is a patchworked tablecloth - made using spices and herbs from meals that we ate growing up. This artwork is an ode to the women in our family who are the storytellers, who kept our bellies full, and who weaved our history into our everyday lives.