Visual Arts: Esther Mahlangu

In Visual Arts, our little 1st grade artists created different graphics on unusual supports, from cardboard boxes to wooden benches. The activity, inspired by the work of South African artist Esther Mahlangu, evoked the practice of graphics as marks of a communal memory of the Ndebele, an ethnic group concentrated in the Mpumalanga region of South Africa, which the artist belongs to. In the Ndebele tradition, the symmetry of geometric patterns is applied to the outer walls of their houses, communicating the history of each home and composing a collective memory of each community. Our students, while researching this iconography and repeating the processes of making their own paint and brushes, produced a set of pieces with geometric graphics, marks of their own memory as a group and in our community.