Omnia mea mecum porto! (I carry with me all my things) – Cicero

In a setting far from all that is familiar, Olivia Botha landed in a place that reminded her of what she had temporarily left behind, particularly the complexities of entanglement in familial histories.

In Seeing Blue, Olivia Botha’s exploration of the Blou Rokke* , which has been at the core of her work these past few years, takes on a more contemplative tone. Seeing Blue is a reflection on exile, faith, and the precarity of life. The installations are the trace of the history of her family story and her search for a home. Blue is the colour of her immersion and yearning for connection, understanding, and making sense of the world. Where she has struggled to understand her grandmother’s ‘blind faith’ with often emotionally charged brushwork or marks, she starts contemplating her subjectivity and how perhaps history can be repeated in different ways. Even when all material possessions are lost, the knowledge, experience and memories remain. Blue has been recurrent in her work, reflecting on life, memory, history and how the colour has been an agent in her making and unmaking to consider where she fits in the spectrum between having a particular identity and belonging.

It is here, though, that one notices that the Blou Rokke is perhaps no longer a subject for rumination, for Botha coalesces the family history that the colour blue has come to mean for her search of where her place is with the realization that our history follows us everywhere, and we always find that which we know is familiar in even the strangest places.

The culmination of the two-month residency at SCAC Marestaing, the work, whilst still tinged with the sense of alienation, frustration, and nostalgia, is now imbued with new energy and realization that our choices change how we see the world. Olivia transcends her social and historical worlds to speak to us all. That everything in this world can be conquered and changed for the better. That whilst we might not know or see it, transformation is inevitable.

Text by Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa

* The Blou Rokke (The Latter Rain Mission) is a church founded by Maria Martha Fraser in 1927 in South Africa. The church is a breakaway from the Apostolic Faith Mission. It is often described as a cult. Women members wear blue dresses ‘the colour of the sky’ everyday of their lives. Members are often described as devoted and immersed in the church doctrine. Olivia’s grandmother and great grandmother belonged to this church.