Puleng Segalo

My work centers around historical trauma as a theme, I also look at issues of gender and I look at this using visual methodologies. I'm interested in the everydayness of gender trauma, I look at trauma, not as an individual experience only are limited to an individual experience. But I look at trauma as also a social experience as something that does not only affect the individual in isolation, but always at the same time. It's always in relation to other people as well. I challenge psychology in how we've always looked at the idea of trauma. Then I zoom in and specifically look at the gendered nature of trauma. I do this drawing on the South African experience, on the ways in which apartheid affected people in South Africa, but in particular, the ways in which it affected women in South Africa. Often when we look at the master narratives, it's all always the story or the narrative of how people were generally affected by apartheid, but also zooming in on the gruesome violations of apartheid in people's lives. But what we often don't pay attention to, isthe everydayness nature of how the brutal system affected people on the everyday and in particular women, how they were affected in their homes, how they were, their private spaces, were also affected by the brutal system, and how then the trauma manifested through these experiences that women encountered. Oftentimes in our theorizing, when in the ways in which we speak about trauma, we don't pay specific attention to the gender trauma of it, but also to look at the ways in which it shows itself in the everyday experiences of women, and the everyday experiences of people of color. I then go further to engage the ways in which often it's difficult to speech from, it's difficult to express some of the traumatic experiences that people go through.

In my work in my research, I draw from visual methodologies and in particular, I use embroidery as a method wherein women can come together in solidarity, and collectively engage and speak about their experiences of growing up during apartheid, but also to look at how one can recollect how we can draw from our memories to then make artworks that speaks to and that reflects on traumatic experiences of people. Embroidery then has assisted me to critique and engage the idea of trauma that but also to offer space and platform for women to express that which they otherwise would not be able to express. I go back to apartheid, I go back to the past, because the past influences the present, because it's the past experiences, that also determines or affects how people experience the present. I then draw also from decolonial framework and argue that visual methods such as embroidery actually serve as a decolonial lens that assist us to look at what we think of when we engage issues of epistemology and issues of ontology. So how do we come to know how do we make sense of the world? And how can we do this without limiting ourselves to the mainstream ways of knowledge production. I look at embroidery not only as a research method, but I also look at embroidery as an epistemological framework that women can use to make meaning of the world to reflect on the world, and to also critique and challenge some of the injustices that they experience in their everyday lives. I have shifted from looking at apartheid, to looking at the current issues and current challenges that women are experiencing in their everyday, but always, at the same time, acknowledging the role of history, acknowledging the role of the past, in how the present manifests itself in how people experience the world in the now. My work has also then also moved on, to look at the ways in which COVID has affected women.