Lerato Maduna
“[Lerato] Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless.” (Walker, 1983)
Lerato Moloi aka Maduna was born and raised in Soweto, Johannesburg and is currently based in Cape Town. A mother and sister, Maduna is enrolled in the MFA programme at Michaelis School of Fine Art at UCT. She has a BTech in Photography and Diploma in Television and Film Studies from the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT). She is also an alumni of the Market Photo Workshop. For over a decade Maduna has worked as a photojournalist and documentary photographer for a broad range of print publications and online platforms and has worked as a creative researcher in the film industry.
Cissie Gool House. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
Maduna’s work and being has somehow always been focused on the notion of home or the making of home amongst the displaced, which she has always considered herself to be: displaced. At times, for Maduna this has meant finding home and community in music. Whatever images she has created says a lot about who she is or has been and becoming, even though the images might be of other reflections outside of her subjective position.
Maduna’s MFA research project works with her family’s visual archive, specifically photographs made in the 1940s to 1990s, presenting four generations of matriarchs. Using the tactile (or haptic) object of photographs, the research grapples with questions around memory, rituals, re-membering forgotten histories/herstories and private narratives versus popular public histories, all in the context of apartheid South Africa and the subsequent years. By way of interdisciplinary practices, the research investigates ways of refiguring these “matriarchives” (Phalafala, 2020), by searching in my/“our mother’s gardens” (Walker, 1983) all this in order to reimagine the future by creating new “biomythographies” (Lorde, 1993).
Omakhelwane. Photograph courtesy of the artist.
Maduna will produce new visual work, which centres these inherited archival documents, each packed with lasting personal and cultural significance.
Red 4 live. Photograph courtesy of the artist.