Fire my Spirit operates through a material and spatial logic in which making is not illustrative but epistemic. Built through layering and repetition, the installation treats textile, gesture, and colour as forms of thought. It produces a perceptual field that shifts with movement.
The work draws from an elemental incantation that appears at the opening of Dr. Uhuru Portia Phalafala’s doctoral research on Prof. Keorapetse William Kgositsile:
“Earth my Body, Water my Blood, Air my Breath, Fire my Spirit.”
As Phalafala demonstrates, this formulation does not operate metaphorically but ontologically, articulating a non-dual relation between human and world in which the body remains continuous with ecological, spiritual, and ancestral systems. Within this framework, the elemental is not symbolic representation but a condition of being.
=‘Fire’ in this context exceeds notions of destruction or transformation as discrete events. It operates as a generative force that simultaneously undoes and re-forms, reconfiguring temporal experience through what Phalafala identifies as Kgositsile’s non-linear conception of time – a co-presence of past, present, and future in active relation. ‘Fire’ becomes a medium through which memory is not recalled but reconstituted, and through which historical time is unsettled and rearticulated.
Installed within the Keorapetse William Kgositsile Theatre at University of Johannesburg, a site structured by performance and collective encounter, the work situates the viewer not as observer but as participant within a dynamic perceptual field. As bodies move through the suspended layers, vision is disrupted and recomposed, producing a spatial-temporal experience that resists fixed orientation.
In this way, Fire my Spirit proposes knowledge as emergent, relational, and contingent: it is produced through movement, encounter, and material intra-action rather than abstracted representation or stable form.