Known for his large origami-style works, Sipho Mabona turns to the calabash in a new audiovisual series, translating a family story into material, pattern, and sound. In The Calabashes We Never Drank Amasi From, the artist looks back to “childhood memories of my late father’s stories about his own childhood in the rural Eastern Cape of South Africa,” he says. A favorite vignette centered on drinking Amasi (Xhosa for fermented milk) from calabashes—an everyday vessel across tropical Africa transformed here into a resonant tribute.
Material interventions and embedded voices
Mabona cuts triangular and rectangular sections from hollowed, dried gourds and replaces them with colorful, text-bearing fragments of recycled Tetra Pak milk cartons, laced in with vibrant threads. Near the center of each piece, a small mirror catches and bends the surroundings in a gentle, curved reflection. Move close, and the works speak: quiet recordings of his father, the late scholar and activist Mongameli Mabona, reading original poems and passages from his doctoral thesis on Xhosa cultural history, play within the sculptures. Materially and conceptually, the series meshes personal narrative with cultural practice and points to a distinctly South African strain of resilience expressed through Black upcycling traditions.
The artist describes the project as reflecting “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,” and as a dialogue between his own art and his father’s academic work as an anthropologist. He notes that calabashes hold layered significance in Xhosa culture: beyond storing food and drink, they act as resonating bodies for musical instruments (Uhandi) and figure in rituals for communicating with ancestors.
Setting the stage
For display, Mabona builds cylindrical plinths of soil, cow dung, glue, and water—rounded forms that echo the rondavel huts of his father’s 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.
The Calabashes We Never Drank Amasi From (2024) brings together calabashes, tetra pack, embossed sheet aluminum, nylon thread, cotton, honeycomb cardboard, soil, cow dung, rabbit-skin glue, and an MP3 player in an installation measuring 105 × 218 × 209 centimeters, with an installation view at Kunstmuseum Luzern. Individual works in the series include “Man,” “Dove,” “Female,” “Unicorn,” and “Bull.”
Mabona shares additional works that collage found materials into symbolic patterns on his website and Instagram.
