The Hi-Stories of whitenoisewhitegirl: Unravelling a Colonial Blueprint.

“The Hi-Stories of Whitenoisewhitegirl” is an artistic body of research written as prose, poetry and critical reflections. These texts form the backbone of the recent exhibition, “Things I Found Nelle Viscere” (2024), which included a series of transdisciplinary performances that were the coming together of the texts-as-stories shared through knitting, embroidery, food and sound. Taking as a departure point my life experiences as a white South African-Italian woman who immigrated between South Africa and Italy, this body of work looks to my personal encounters with coloniality and to the colonial histories of my two countries in an attempt to unravel what I call the ‘colonial blueprint’ for ‘knowing’, ‘being’, and ‘doing’, that has been handed to us. I do so, firstly, to unmask the pervasive, systemic, and intersectional nature of racism; and secondly, to consider what it means to embody the ‘decolonial option’ as a white person. This paper reflects on the artworks and performances created, and the ways in which they embody the decolonial and feminist theory put forward. In this paper I consider – both artistically and theoretically – the colonial blueprint of a white self, of a home, of a nation and of continents, and, on the prompting of the Argentine decolonial scholar Walter Mignolo, I link these back in time to the socio-philosophical revolutions of the Renaissance and Enlightenment which came to form the foundation of the ‘colonial matrix of power’ and our world as we know it today. The central artistic intervention of “Things I Found Nelle Viscere” was a textile recreation (and subsequent unravelling) of the first modern atlas, the “Theatrum Orbis Terrarum” (Theatre of the World) by the Dutch cartographer Abraham Ortelius in 1570. Following the work of Mignolo I consider how this collection of modern maps was a part of Renaissance Europe’s colonial redefinition of itself in relation to those beyond its borders. Aided by the fabric replica of this world map, I perform and share stories about my colonial encounters with the world around me, not simply as a personal story that folds onto itself, but as a way of looking at my own formation in order to examine larger historical and social processes. I then consider the way that this work and research was brought to life by following a deeply embodied process of choosing to ‘stay-with’ that which discomforts and disturbs; making of the body and its somatic processing a home for caring, tending, troubling and renegotiating. Finally, I reflect on the capacity for this somatic mode of ‘staying-with’ discomfort to become a decolonial act of renegotiation and a political labour towards unravelling a colonial and systemic blueprint.