Khotso Lamola Mentorship Awards recipient

Khotso Lamola is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, writer, and architect based in Cape Town, South Africa. Khotso’s work unfolds through a vulnerable process-based research practice where she investigates the emotional landscapes that make up urban space. She attempts to forge new modes in archiving to create personal and softer narratives about cities, to understand how one finds belonging and cultivates agency in spaces. Khotso produces research that releases the need to discover, in favour of the need to recover, heal, listen, and give voice to the silenced. In doing so, she aims to complicate what seems simple and advocate for vulnerability above all else. 

Khotso’s projects are explorations into how one can find new languages to speak about belonging to their contexts so that a spatial dialogue of equality is supported, especially in post-colonial situations. Currently, she is focused on revealing the precarities of silenced figures in the archive, and she spends time tracing their trajectories through history, distant lands, re-memories, peculiar coincidences, oceans, and emotional landscapes.