Faculty of Art

Sculpture/Installation

Tatjana Reithofer

Mother Diaspora

'Mother Diaspora’ is the patron saint dedicated to ‘the other among others.’ It is a culmination of cultural exposure and how it contribute to the exploration of the metaphysical and spiritual meaning of ‘home’ and ‘belonging’. To claim a culture, country or land is to make a proclamation of immense magnitude within one's own experience and yet one that favours one over the other. By casting myself as the stand in as Mother Diaspora, I am revering my existence as the other among others and in turn validating my role within the cultural continuum as well as my cross-cultural experience. Cultures blend and inform each other across time and trace patterns that more often than not recall an even grander more primordial pattern that goes back to time immemorial. In the face of this multitudinous existence, the idea of borders and fine lines between each other become not only futile but superfluous. Mother Diaspora then calls to the reverence of the existence free of the crude distinctions we draw and instead speaks to the desire to return to the primordial existence of divergence. To the world ‘without shape, without form’ where it is ‘this, that AND the other.’