

Miranthe Joan
van Staden
Biography
I am a practising educator, art historian, researcher and writer since 2002, specialising in Art History and Visual Culture with a special interest in Feminist and African Discourse. I have lectured and developed progressive curricula for 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th year levels at various tertiary institutions, including UNISA, TUT, Pearson, and Open Window. As a creative practitioner in the visual arts, I am currently a candidate for the only practice-led Masters programme with an ASRA (African Story Ritual Artefact) focus in the world. I use my creative practice and idiosyncratic voice to revive/revise indigenous knowledge, especially mythology and wisdom traditions with the focus on feminine deities, sibylline mysteries, oracular practices and guardians of indigenous spiritual wisdom in pre-colonial, pre-patriarchal Africa. As an advocate for symbolic literacy I am interested in the power of symbolism and active imagination for personal and collective transformation. I live by the motto, "They who can see the invisible can do the impossible"
Imagining Sibyllisation: re-envisioning human ancestry for future generations through creative practice-led research.
Weaving together the diverse feminist perspectives of hooks, Haraway, Gimbutas, Horn and Muthien, my creative practice employs decolonising methodologies and devises liberatory cartographies that remember, revise and re-imagine an alternative civilisation story rooted in African myth, ritual and artifact. This practice-led research looks back at ancient indigenous African wisdom traditions with the focus on the visual art and symbolism of selected animist and oral traditions and their connections to female spiritual practitioners. In response to the problem of a world deprived of unifying sacred symbols, I develop and document the evolution of my own artistic voice and mytho-poetic visual vocabulary in service of reframing and restoring value to some of the ‘lost’ lore and sacred wisdom at the root of this study. Using Haraway’s sf worlding model, I employ speculative fabulation and speculative feminism to (re-)imagine Sibyllisation – a word coined by the artist/researcher for a fabulated future rooted in a revision of the past. Sibyllisation is a (m)other word for an ancient-future world that may have existed, and has been imagined into existence through the creative research project I will present at this conference. It is no coincidence that “Earth and Africa are both referred to as ‘Mother’ (Matoleni, Boateng & Manyonganise, 2020: xiii). In an animistic worldview, this ‘Mother’ is not only nature in her physical forms, but also in her intangible forces and invisible phenomena. While the origin of the name “Africa” is uncertain and possibly of European origin, earlier names such the Egyptian word “Afru-ika” meaning “Motherland” (National Geographic, 2024) and “Alkebu-lan” meaning “mother of mankind” (Diop, 1974: 10) describe the Afrikan continent in terms of origins, as a mother. In revisiting Indigenous Knowledge and selected African wisdom traditions through a feminist and fabulatory approach, I explore how the artistic process produces liberatory new knowledge capable not only of dismantling the proverbial Master’s house, but laying the foundation and building bridges to re-imagined futures.
