Shana de Villiers

My work shifts between the performative, visual and literary, engaging with queer post-coloniality and the monstrous, asking: “How can one find belonging as a monster?” Magical, colourful characters and fragmented stories that mirror societal fears and postcolonial complications are characteristic of my work. With a collage-like working method, I patch together craft, theory and internet-age mythologies into wearable works, texts, and theatrical installations. Driven by the impact of ever-polarising political narratives of the monster and monster-ed on what we consider ‘creepy’ or ‘other’, I am drawn to using myths, popular culture and humour to reflect on these issues, finding them accessible visual languages. In translating these ideas into material form, I primarily work with textiles. With a background as a cobbler (shoe mender) and as a lifelong seamstress, the stitch is integral to my work. I resonate with its symbolism of bringing things and beings together. I approach this craft playfully, sometimes deliberately messy, other times exceptionally detailed. Symbolism plays a crucial role in my visual language, as I borrow from cultural iconography both past and present to embed into my works - whether that be in the form of a character, animal, folktale or meme. I often draw on my “monster archive”, an ongoing collection of clippings, images and memes. These images are digitally collaged into speculative monsters or monster parts and printed on textiles using sublimation printing. This is a method I have been using since the academy to bring my monsters (I call them patchlings) to life, through which I unravel and question normative structures. As a queer Afrikaans South African, my relationship to monstrosity, belonging and post-coloniality is lived and far older than me. My cultural heritage is an intricate inheritance shaped by histories of power imbalance, violence, resilience and reinvention - and thus my focus on queer post-coloniality aligns with the post-apartheid impulse to interrogate the self/other within knotted histories of language and cultural hybridity. Working with ideas of monstrosity allows me to explore this tension. The act of stitching, collaging and assembling becomes a way of piecing together my grief, shame and duty to re-member. Through humour, myth and the intimacy of soft works, I feel it is my ancestral duty to create work and spaces of belonging that do not erase the contradictions we carry.