RICH IS BLACKandviceversa

RICHISBLACK&viceversa/RIBVV provides a nostalgic mood in rich colour, solid backgrounds with tiny detailed photographic motifs. which as a collective of prints  might remind one of the Bandana template/designs  at a distance, because of their energetic  and abstract nature,With pop cultural influence Thandazani Nofingxana transforms personal experience along with those of others on the subject of Insecurities and feelings into textile his print designs or at least as the starting point.

RIBVV is an exploration of personal experience with regards to my dark skin, for quite some time I have been insecure about my dark complexion, obviously being pressured by societal perception on what beauty is and perfection is, which is usually not in the favor of the darker tones(we can have a history lesson on this one) . Pretty understandable neh? cool,see  we live in a world where  'white' is glorified more than anything else in the world especially in the South Africa,well i am a South African i'll speak for South Africans,yeah sho.

shit wait, have you noticed how being black(no not just race but complection) is a thing now? No like seriously,people are actually starting to fuck with themselves now and that's awesome,look at how trendy having dreadlocks is at the moment.I just really hope it stays like this for the longest time hey,we need this kind of self discovery because this is us,sithi aba! people are starting to tell black stories,people are starting to embrace their cultures and everything they stand for,by people i mean people my age.

Anyway feel like i was caught in cultural dynamics here, one thing is appreciated over other and 2 years later its vice versa.Have you looked how for the longest of time being light skinned has been the ish and now how all of a sudden black is beautiful typa vibes(which has always been the case by the way). Its all a cultural thing but tough luck for the light skinned guy and the very dark skinned fellow,they will always be caught up in the conversation. Which i feel like shouldn't even exist because we are all Human,for now never mind the fact that we are all black/African.

 So what I’m trying to say is my insecurity with my dark skin has been created by the community that I grew up in, there was a time (still happening) I would be confused with a Nigerian/Ghanaian and obviously there would jokes around that I’d be called iKwerekwere(which is perfectly fine,because me i i'm not xenophobic or anything) but the connotations that surround that are not of progress,we are in a world where you're forced to hate yourself because of preconceived ideas of what you are suppose to look like and if you don't look like that that you're an outlier,we might just call you names as well.

What I’m trying to say is, I kind of felt othered by my own people growing up simply because I have a darker complexion,mind you i'm not  talking about white people here telling me i'm black,its the black community!!.Even though these were just jokes(i mean at 10 years you pretty much take things lightly) when people calling you these kind of names,even though it does some damage to your well being without you even realising that,next thing your are bleaching yourself and mind you by 20 you most probably see nothing wrong with wearing a lot of make to make you lighter because its been built in you since you were 10 years,that black is ugly. 

An example this other girl told me her biggest insecurity are her butt and breast,mind you she has the finest butt every girl right now could ask for but she  told me   she feels like people do not necessarily they just like her butt and that's it and the fact that she's 'yellow bone'. She also had an an interesting point on how people would tell her she's pretty and sometimes overhear someone saying if  maybe if she wasn't light skinned she would have been ugly. See? whats happening? people constantly trying to make you what they perceive as beauty and as she was talking i totally related to each and every thing she was saying and i was like connecting dots and made so much sense why she's insecure. Because,one day your are appreciated and the following day they don't like the same thing they told you yesterday you are fleeking about. Confusing.

Understanding that not everyone is  facing the same type of insecurities i was facing, I went around my residence and also on  social media and randomly asked people about their insecurities, but I had to be open to them and tell them about mine first so they could ease up a little bit and open up,insecurities are not easy things one would discuss with a stranger even though some people didn't mind telling me. People sent me photos,some i took with my digital camera and the process was interesting because i started to know people even much better,i'm still in touch with people that i met during the process,some of them  being people around my res that i never talked to so it was quite a very edgy way of starting a friendship with those types,but everything went well and yeah.

All the tittles of these prints are in IsiXhosa which is my home language, chose to write in IsiXhosa because when said in IsiXhosa they contain a bit of a truthful wittiness into them regarding a particular insecurity, which is one the aspects I found interesting people being able to laugh at their own insecurity no matter how uncomfortable it is and I just generally love isiXhosa as  a  language. there's just a lot to decypher in a lot of simple phrases in IsiXhosa which is pretty dope.

The idea behind these  textile prints design was to take these body parts people felt insecure about and create something beautiful of of them,when looking at a distance they would appear as flowers and when looking closely one will eventually see that they aren't flowers,its the very same reaction when your are insecure about something people who aren't close enough to you might probably not know about it but the ones that are/close to you know about insecurity.

Prints Are available for viewing on Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/crucialcartel/ 

Ay ngomabele ngumqamelo

Amagwinya

Ay zozandla zinyawo

bra tiger

umnyamana

mpumlwana

amagwinya 2

Lunch Bar

Unohili

umkhaba

SHOWCASING AT COLOURS OF YOU SOUTH AFRICA EXHIBITION

Stick To Yours Chap

Crucial Cartel - Good Girl Gone Bad

One Man Can Change The World Cover By Crucial Cartel

DOWNLOAD LINK

CHAP MONOGRAM DESIGN (Jewelry Box)

                                                        HAND EMBROIDERY

For a week i felt like a granny embroidering,but anyway...Concept being this box is unity,in Varsity we were given  an assignment to design a jewelry box that best describes your personality as an individual and one  can include anything they like. Well being the CHAP that i am :) and believing in everyone that considers themselves as CHAPS. I made box for yall (sweeeeeeet :) ) okay...seriously uhm,yeah i just felt like i should include one of the most important things in my life right now which is CHAP(if you don't know,chap is my unborn baby,she is till kicking in her mother's stomach,now you know?..she's not not a boy or a girl,just  a CHAP)... and i'm the mother lol. anyway if you have been following you will most probably be familiar with the chap pose,Yes that one,see  the blue monogram that you see with a lot of 'C' s  it represents all the people who has done the chap pose and sent me their pictures and people whom I've actually forced to do the chap pose lol. all in all when i did this print design i was thinking about yall and everything we will be and everything we are not.

       I don't have pictures of the final product,but as soon as i get to varsity will definitely show yall.

THE CHAP POSE :

I thought You Were My Friend Part I

As a kid I’ve always had questions about things like death, dreams, happiness, anger, sadness and a lot of other things that make us human beings, but I was more interested in death. I remember when my Aunt passed away in 2004 (RIP Desrey Mitchley) I was only 8 years old when she passed away. My mother called me from hospital I was still living in Ngangelizwe at that time,

she called the helper who stayed with me and my older brother, anyway, the first thing she sad was ‘Mtnam ndiyakwazi uqinile,le nto ndizokuxelelela yona ingakophuli’ in English “My child I know you are strong do not let what I am about to tell you break you” … and I’m just on the line like …”mama I need to go play outside what’s up”… because my brother actually fetched me from the streets to talk to mom on the phone. So after she told me the Des passed away, I cried so hard and honestly I don’t know why I cried but just after she told me my body felt so uneasy, felt dizzy, I couldn’t eat for days, vomiting and  just feeling tired. She was my favorite human being on earth, she is still my kick ass aunt J. . My mother new exactly how I would feel about this situation hence she started to encourage me before she actually told me about Des. What really confused/surprised her though was my reaction to the situation, I am sure she asked herself do I even know what death is because I was still young. Even now I won’t lie and say it really hurt me(at that time)  because I didn’t know any better ,but I knew something was wrong going and she is obviously not coming back

Anyway I was told she had migraine and yeah it was a hectic one.

Fast-forward few, years later I started isolating myself from a lot of my friends and stayed at home, started hating soccer, watched a lot of movies(like every kid did) but the change, I used to hate sitting home all day now all of sudden i  never go out and play with other kids. I developed a hobby, started drawing I would stay late just drawing weird skeletons from the grave and my mother noticed this behavior/change. My drawings were no longer clean and all happy anymore. She would take all the red crayons and red pens and hide them because I always drew skulls with blood and all these crazy things which I obviously saw on television, but the crazy part is every female character I drew was Aunt Des. This other time she banned me from drawing because everything I drew was either graves or a whole bunch of scary things. So I drew at school most of the time, even my brother started to intervene, telling me I should stop drawing because I was dropping at school and I was not as active anymore in sports, dropping  in Math basically and he was the one tutoring me and helping me with my homework’s. Anyway the point is I took my frustrations (even though I may not have understood them as frustration) but now I do. They probably thought I was possessed at home lol. Honestly I was just normal, drawing scary stuff like other kids.

Don’t get me wrong (even if you do, I don’t care) I am not saying the death of my aunt came with some magical spirit or whatever and boom I learnt how to draw. No, my drawings/content changed/became dark and I am Christian so this behavior scared the shit out of my mother who is used on seeing her son’s beautiful trees and happy green landscapes, psychedelic drawings and all.  I won’t proof read this I made a lot of grammar mistakes and frankly I don’t care.  

On this series i'm just really trying to wrap my head around the question of what is death,how does it feel like. Loneliness,is there something wrong when you feel lonely?,Heaven,is it real? is it far?,is it up there?Is heaven blue? these are things i kind  i took into consideration when i roam around the street of Port Elizabeth,just trying to find the most loneliest human being i could find and obviously take a picture of them and yes,with out their consent.