Purple Mountain Arts Residency welcomes their inaugural artist in residence, Matlali Matabane from Lesotho. 18 May – 2 June, 2024.

Matlali Matabane is a sound scholar and visual artist living between Lesotho and South Africa. Her locality explores sonic culture in the context of the Global South as both an act of experimentation, and identity forming through the mediums of photography and sonic storytelling. Playing on the theories of performance and performativity, her visual and sonorous practice engages with the binaries of power and beauty, the feminine and masculine through site specific artworks. Focusing on vibration as a theoretical tenet, Matlali’s sound installations serve as introspective portals to rest with the self within a given space, thus history. She investigates the hierarchy of specific sounds over tonal music and negotiates spaces of silence, erasure and museumification. Matlali participated in the We are Africa; the power of women and youth (2022) in Washington DC and participated in the Tankwa Artscape Residency in the Tankwa Karoo Desert in 2023. Matlali is currently studying at Rhodes University for a Master’s in Music as a Composer. By combining electronic music with indigenous instruments a third-cultural-realm is made manifest and invites collaboration, vulnerability and humanness as modes of engagement.