The Archive That Breathes: Spiritual Memory as Fluid, Living Form

There has been a scholarly focus on the archive in the contemporary art space, whether it is physical historical objects or in the form of digital objects. However, artists like Manyaku Mashilo bring a different interpretation of the term 'archive,' one that is spiritual, through their thematic focus and artistic practice. 

Artist, Manyaku Mashilo, 2025. Courtesy of her instagram

With motifs in her artworks like the arch acting as a visual metaphor for liminal movement, a conduit for entering and exiting between the material and the spiritual world, as seen in her works Two Sisters (2021) and Prayer to Passage (2023). Manyaku Mashilo is a South African mixed-media artist whose works focus on spiritual identity, memory, and ancestry, with intuition directly guiding her artistic process, as she stated by Kim M Reynolds (Reynolds, 2024). 

Manyaku Mashilo, Two Sisters. 2021. Acrylic paint and ink on canvas. 158 x 133 cm. SMO Contemporary Art.

Mashilo Manyaku, Passage to Prayer. 2023. Acrylic, ink, red ochre, photo transfer on canvas. 250 x 430 cm. Hayden Phipps & Southern Guild Archives.

Described as “interdimensional mapping,” Mashilo draws from personal and historical photographic archives, together with a line, rhythm, and ritual-filled celestial cartography is used to create a visual archive that champions the rich traditions of African spirituality and identities. Moving from Mashilo’s body to her canvas is a space that stores and transmits knowledge and identity that the colonialists strived to destroy. Her portraits are a cartography of a people where their bodies are a map of lineage, time, space, and spirit, effectively immortalising these elements. Providing the energy and asserting that blackness is rooted in the “highest cosmological order”, as the figures are placed onto a celestial world, imagining an alternative understanding of how a person “comes into being”. By doing this, she frees her figures from the colonial gaze; they are “free of projection or historical projection,” as Uzomah Ugwu states (Ugwu, 2024). This reclaims, reconstructs, and invents a space where the knowledge and identity of black South Africans are unburdened by colonial and apartheid legacies. The figures in her works are often seen migrating. This is an attempt to establish an accurate archive of their time or times imagined, which makes her works as an archive an active medium and not a passive storage. 

She incorporates earthly elements such as red ochre, as seen in We came unafraid and willing to stay (2024), which is often mixed with other substances such as clay as in her work for the Stellenbosch Triennale, “Towards our ancestors who lean towards us, with bent spines, trying to tell us where we are from, where we are going.” (2025),  to create a ritual paste in her works to ground the spiritual in the physical reality of the land, which has cultural significance as it represents traditional ointments during rituals, blood, and clay, grounding her cosmic figures to their origins and in the land. 

Manyaku Mashilo, We came unafraid and willing to stay. 2024. Acrylic, ink, red ochre on canvas. Courtesy of Lea Crafford & Southern Guild.

Manyaku Mashilo, “Towards our ancestors who lean towards us, with bent spines, trying to tell us where we are from, where we are going.”. 2025. Paint, found sticks, mud, cement, red clay, charcoal. Jumpin’ the Gun & Stellenbosch Triennale Archives.

Through the movement in her works is a ritualistic act of transversing between the physical world and the spiritual archive, resultant map of this journey, affirming a multiplicity of black identity and possibility. Her works rely on the spirit and material culture of an imagined, uncompromised pre-colonial world to construct a liberating future, a future that possibly holds healing. 

Mashilo performs a counter-archival act against the forces of colonialism and institutional and institutional historical that sought to erase or distort black identities by inscribing her chosen narrative directly onto her skin. By creating and living, her existing tattoos and those that she has inscribed onto her loved ones become layers in a constantly evolving body archive. Encapsulating the spiritual archive as a fluid, living form, always in motion, and always welcoming of the new narratives that define her ongoing process of selfhood and liberation. 

SOURCES CONSULTED:

• Reynolds, K. 2024. Manyaku Mashilo: Intuition is the Place. [O] Available: https://contemporaryand.com/en/c-and-magazine/texts/manyaku-mashilo-intuition-is-the-place 

• Southern Guild. 2025. Manyaku Mashilo. [O] Available: https://southernguild.com/artists/manyaku-mashilo 

• Ugwu, U. 2024. Manyaku Mashilo: An Order of Being. [O] Available: https://www.arterealizzata.com/exhibition-showcase/manyaku-mashilo-an-order-of-being

  
  

Mabena, L. 2025. In The Archive That Breathes: Spiritual Memory as Fluid, Living Form