Matseliso Motsoane is a writer, researcher and cultural worker, who works between Lesotho and South Africa. Her research interests include African social and cultural histories, and the politics of (photographic) archives and their role in shaping historical narrative. Matseliso’s ongoing PhD research historicizes the work and life of Mosotho photographer Mohlouoa T. Ramakatane. Alongside her PhD project, she also worked on the team that digitized the photographer’s vast collection and contributed an essay to the ebook Portraits of a Nation about Ramakatane. Matseliso’s cultural work fuses historical research, artistic provenance research, community archiving and creative writing—all as a means of both preserving and reimagining contemporary histories. She is the founder of Mabalane Archives, an initiative dedicated to the documentation and preservation of everyday histories from Lesotho. Mabalane preserves private archives, curates mobile archival experiences and engages in other multidisciplinary collaborations. Matseliso is also a lecturer at the National University of Lesotho and has published both fiction and nonfiction in print and online.
Links
Profile / Research Links
Matseliso’s Mabalene Digest Substack
Matseliso’s Instagram
Matseliso’s MuseumNext Page
Matseliso’s Mabalane Archives Instagram
Publication Links
“Book Review Artistic Provenance Research” (Museum International, 2026)
“The SADC* Biennale” (2025)
“Beneath the Riverbed” (Ubwali Literary Magazine, Issue 2, 2024)
“The role of CASSAS in the liberation struggle of the southern African region, 1976 to the early 1980s” (New Contree, 2023)
“Mohlouoa T. Ramakatane: Resilience, Affluence and Collective Empowerment” (Portraits of a Nation: the studio photographs of Mohlouoa T. Ramakatane, 2022, Backline Press)
“Rendering Passages” Exhibition (2022)
“Baby Potion” (Will This Be a Problem? The Anthology, Issue V)
“Violence in Toni Morrison’s Beloved”
“An application of Feminist theories to Sethembile Msezane’s art”
Summary of Research Proposal Supported by 10×10 Photobooks Grant: “Hae ke Hole”: The Transnational Visualities of Southern African Photographic Subjects
This project examines family albums and photographic fragments produced within contexts of African labour migration. Movement between physical and cultural geographies is an old and perhaps innate part of the human social experience, yet at the same time questions of home, identity and belonging are ones we often grapple with. Focusing particularly on photographs exchanged between migrant workers, their family and kin, the project explores how photographic self-documentation operates as an ongoing negotiation of identity, belonging, and home.
Imagined within a broader historical context marked by the monumental South African mineral rush of the 19th and 20th centuries, first with the Diamonds of Kimberly and then the Gold of the Witwatersrand, this project looks to intimate and vernacular forms of self-fashioning, as seen in studio portraiture as sites for the evolution and negotiation of both identity and home. The project highlights photobooks or collections such as albums, personal and community archives, as sites for tracing and understanding the visual identities of photographic subjects whose lives unfolded between and across borders in the wake of the aforementioned moments.
Migration in this context is rarely linear. It is marked by repetition, interruption, and uncertainty, by departures and returns that are not always guaranteed. The imperialist regimes of both the British Empire and the racist South African regime designed work and industry in ways that ensured this precarity. The African experiences of these regimes emerged with new and ever-changing cultural vocabularies. These vocabularies, expressed through photography, orature and performance art, all held within them articulations of identity and belonging.
Within the dominant visual canon, how migrant lives are documented often tends toward coherence. They gather dispersed moments into sequences, and in doing so, suggest forms of continuity and presence, while belonging is ever contested. However, this project is interested in the tension between the non-linearity of lived experience and the ways in which photographic practices, particularly those that take on photobook-like forms, attempt to hold these lives together.
By approaching personal collections, family albums and photographic fragments as publications with historicity, the project contributes to an expanded understanding of photobook history that includes not only published works but also intimate, domestic, and often under-recognised forms of visual sequencing. These image clusters function as more than repositories of memory; they are structured, cumulative, and relational objects that organise how lives are seen, remembered, and narrated across distance. In this sense, they participate in the same visual and narrative work as photobooks, even if they exist outside of conventional publishing frameworks.
A central focus of the project is the practice of inscription: the handwritten messages, dates, places and names often found on the backs of photographs. In the context of southern African migrant labour, it was common for photographs to be sent home from the South African mines and other sites of work, accompanied by brief but meaningful inscriptions. These might include a location—“Johannesburg,” “Welkom”—a date, or a relational marker such as “your child” or “your husband.” While these inscriptions may appear simple, they carry significant weight in how photographs are read, circulated, and understood.
Rather than approaching these inscriptions as merely descriptive or supplementary, this project understands them as self-mapping practices-homing devices, if you will. As “homing” devices, they orient mobile subjects toward a certain location, or social collective, as an enduring centre of belonging. In contexts like 19th- and 20th-century South Africa, where legal, spatial, and social forms of belonging may be unstable or divided across borders, inscription becomes a way of maintaining relational and geographic orientation. To write “your son” or “your husband” is not only to address the recipient, but also to reaffirm one’s position within a network of kinship and obligation that exceeds the immediate site of labour. Similarly, to name a place is to mark presence, to assert “I am here,” while simultaneously acknowledging elsewhere as equally important to one’s identity.
In this way, photographic inscriptions participate in what might be understood as a migrant code, an implicit or explicit understanding that migration is temporary, and that one should “return” home, even if at times that only looks like donning one’s cultural attire or expressing cultural cues in a photographic image. Therefore, the photographic image together with its inscriptions and networks of circulation allows for a continuous rehearsal of return even in contexts where that return to one’s birth home may be difficult to realise. Photographs, accompanied by these inscriptions, become a means through which individuals return symbolically, even when physically absent. They circulate as proxies, as fragments of presence that maintain connection across distance, and as reminders of where home is, or where it is expected to remain.
The project therefore asks: how do photographic practices and photobook-like forms articulate transnational identities shaped by migration? How do subjects present themselves when living between places, and how are these presentations shaped by the expectations of those to whom the images are sent? And how do inscriptions—understood as forms of vernacular metadata—participate in the visual and textual construction of belonging across borders?
Drawing on a combination of family archives, photographic collections, and selected photobook projects from Africa and the diaspora, this research will trace how transnational visuality emerges not only in the image itself, but in the relationships between images, texts, and their circulation. In doing so, it contributes to under-explored histories of African photobooks and expands critical understandings of how identity, belonging, and home are visually produced and sustained in contexts of mobility.