Known for his large origami-style works, Sipho Mabona turns his attention to a deeply personal object in a new series: the calabash. The hollowed, dried gourd is native to tropical Africa and utilized across the continent as a bottle-like vessel for food and beverage. In The Calabashes We Never Drank Amasi From, Mabona translates his familial connection to the functional fruit into vibrant patterns made from recycled milk cartons.
“The starting point for my audiovisual series of works is my childhood memories of my late father’s stories about his own childhood in the rural Eastern Cape of South Africa,” he says. “One memory that was especially close to his heart, and which he often told my siblings and me, was of drinking his favourite drink, Amasi (Xhosa for fermented milk), from calabashes.”
To create the works, Mabona first cut triangular and rectangular pieces from the gourd, which he replaced with colorful, text-laden snippets of Tetra Pak containers secured with equally vibrant threads. Near the center of each piece is a small mirror that reflects the surroundings through a slightly distorted, curved perspective. When up close, viewers can also hear quiet recordings of Mabona’s father, the late scholar and activist Mongameli Mabona, reading his original poems and excerpts of his doctoral thesis on Xhosa cultural history.
Materially and conceptually, the works highlight how the personal and cultural intersect alongside the distinctly South African sense of resilience, one that emerges in the Black population’s upcycling traditions. The artist shares that the series reflects “how growing up and living in different cultural contexts shapes our worldview, and what interactions arise between generations through the transmission of these worldviews and the exchange that comes with it,” adding:
The works thus represent, on one hand, a juxtaposition of the different ways of life my father and I grew up in, and on the other, a dialogue between my own artistic work to date and his academic work as an anthropologist, in which he studied, among other things, the significance of symbols within his Xhosa culture… (The sculptures) also refer to the fact that calabashes serve not only to store food and drink, but in Xhosa culture are also the resonating bodies of musical instruments (Uhandi), and are used in rituals to communicate with the ancestors, to whom significant spiritual relevance is attributed.
To display the auditory works, the artist constructed cylindrical plinths made from soil, cow dung, glue, and water, an earthen concoction shaped into round stands reminiscent of the rondavel huts in which the elder Mabona spent his childhood in apartheid South Africa. “This is meant to lend the calabashes, with their anthropomorphic forms, a sense of home in an unfamiliar place, within a kind of animist worldview,” Mabona writes.
Find more from the artist, including additional works collaging found materials into rich, symbolic patterns, on his website and Instagram.
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