iHubo – Whispers

On the occasion of the 10^th anniversary of the photographic program Of Soul and Joy conducted by Rubis Mécénat in the township of Thokoza, south-east of Johannesburg in South Africa, the endowment fund has invited two South African photographers involved in the project, Jabulani Dhlamini and Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, to present in France a new photographic work that has been elaborated in close collaboration on the theme of memory.

As part of the PhotoSaintGermain festival and with curator Valérie Fougeirol, the two photographers, who met as mentor and student, have decided to bring their perspectives together at the point where personal memory and trauma intersect. Jabulani went back to the countryside of his childhood, and to Warden in particular, a landscape which is imbued with the emotional words of generations of transmitters of history. For his part, Thembinkosi returned to the family tavern where memories of violence are transformed into ghosts embedded in the walls and in objects-presences replayed in apparitions which are captured, scratched and burned. The exhibition iHubo – Whispers with its two complementary facets, is built around memories which resurface – past and present, in colour and in black and white – the traces of personal stories which intersect and intermingle, so that it can exist in the Present.