Fietas

and

the

enduring

question

of

home

The black and white photographs in Fragments of Fietas stayed with me long after I left the Goodman Gallery. At first, I couldn’t quite explain why. They’re simple in a way, documentary and direct, portraits of ordinary people in a place that no longer exists as it once did. Yet as I reflected on the exhibition, I began to feel something more profound, a yearning that spoke to the meaning of the word home.

What is home, really? Is it a physical location, a plot of land, a set of walls and a roof? Or is it something less tangible, the feeling of being loved and supported, the sense of belonging that grows between people who share a place and a purpose? The more I sat with the photographs, the more I realised that it’s both.

Home is people and place. It is the comfort of knowing where you will lay your head at night, but also the familiarity of streets that hold memories. It is the continuity between past and present that allows you to trace where you come from and who you have become. And it is this, perhaps more than anything, that apartheid tried to erase.

Fragments of Fietas — on at Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg until 29 November — brings that erasure into painful focus.