Sihle Sogaula

Project Descxription Solicited Advice (Amabhaso kaLindro) Amabhaso is a women-led ceremony held in the lead-up to marriage, where knowledge is passed through speech, song, and the careful arrangement of domestic objects. In this instance, married women gather to offer what is framed as solicited advice: instructions on how to inhabit marriage, how to tend to a home, how to dress the body of a new life. The exchange is structured, communal, and intimate, moving between humour, seriousness, and song. At the end of the ceremony, the advice takes a material form. A wall clock is presented as a gift for the bride’s new home. It is both ordinary and exacting: an object that measures hours while also anchoring the domestic life to come. In this gesture, time is hung on the wall, placed inside the architecture of marriage, made visible. This material is drawn from my late mother’s archive, a body of documentation that continues to shape and inform my practice. The archive holds fragments of her work as a designer, women’s gatherings, rituals, and domestic knowledge systems that are at once intimate and collective, personal and inherited. Working with it is also a way of working through what is remembered, what is repeated, and what is carried forward through form. Bio Sihle Sogaula is an archivist, curator, and researcher based in Cape Town. Her practice operates across image, text, sound, and cloth, engaging archival inquiry as both method and epistemological framework. Central to her work is an investigation into how memory is materially and affectively produced within domestic, familial, and personal archives. Her research extends into collaborative and practice-based methodologies that engage oral history, sonic storytelling, and embodied listening as archival practices. These engagements are grounded in an understanding of “living archives” as relational, contingent, and produced through situated acts of narration and recollection.