I am South African. That sentence is the first ground I stand on, even when I am standing somewhere else.
And I am in Italy. I have lived here. I live here. My days have an Italian rhythm now, streets, language, bureaucracy, light, the way the air changes across seasons, the way people greet you, the way coffee becomes a ritual instead of a drink. Europe is not an idea for me; it’s where I wake up and fall asleep.
So when people ask, “Where do you belong?” I feel it like a pressure point. Not because I don’t have an answer, but because any single answer becomes a reduction. It becomes a neat box someone can place me in. And my life is not neat.
My clear belonging is Africa, because Africa made me. Not only by geography, but by memory, by early language, by the shape of family, by the feeling of being “from somewhere” that is not negotiable. But I am European now in the practical ways: my body is here, my routine is here, my relationships are here, my daily survival happens in this place. The facts of my life have changed, even if the roots have not.
So I live inside an uncomfortable truth: I belong, and I don’t belong, at the same time.
And instead of trying to solve that discomfort, I have started to use it.
This is what I mean by (anti)belonging: I don’t reject belonging because I want to be “above” it. I reject belonging when it becomes a demand, when it becomes a border drawn around me by other people. When it becomes a question that is secretly an instruction: pick one, be one, stay one.
Because migration doesn’t just move your body. It changes the way your identity gets handled by the world. It changes the kind of gaze you live under.
In South Africa, I am not a “South African artist” as a label that needs explaining. I am inside the context. Even if I am complex there, even if I am misunderstood there, I am not a surprise. I come with a kind of assumed background, streets, histories, accents, unspoken references. People may not know me, but they know the ground I come from.
In Italy, I am visibly from somewhere else. Even when I am quiet, even when I try to blend in, there is often a moment when the question arrives. Sometimes it arrives politely, like curiosity. Sometimes it arrives as a test. Sometimes it arrives like a joke. Sometimes it arrives like someone needing to place me so they can relax.
“Where are you from?”
“No, where are you really from?”
“How long are you staying?”
“Do you miss home?”
“Do you feel Italian yet?”
And I have learned that these questions are rarely neutral. They can be warm, yes. But they also carry a subtle power: the power to make me explain myself. The power to make me prove my right to be here. The power to position me as temporary, even when my life is not temporary.
And then the reverse happens too.
When I go back, or when I speak to people from home, I can feel how I have changed. There is a new distance. There are phrases I now say differently. There are references I now carry that don’t land the same. There are moments when people treat me like I have “left.” Like I have crossed into a different category. Like my Africanness has been slightly diluted by proximity to Europe.
So I am in this strange middle: in Europe, I am marked as African; in Africa, I can be marked as Europeanized. And you start to realize that belonging is not just about where you feel at home; it is also about how others permit you to be at home.
This is where the “anti” in (anti)belonging becomes important.
I don’t want to be owned by either side’s expectations. I don’t want to become a symbol of Africa for Europe, or a symbol of Europe for Africa. I don’t want to become a convenient story: the “African artist in Europe,” the “immigrant success,” the “voice of the continent,” the “bridge between cultures.” Those stories might sound flattering, but they can also be cages. They can reduce your life into an abstract function.
So I practice anti-belonging as a way of staying human.
Anti-belonging means I let myself be split without turning the split into shame. I let myself be plural. I let myself be contradictory. I let myself feel loyalty without needing purity.
Because the truth is: I want to be both African and European. Not as a brand. Not as a theme. As a lived reality.
I want to keep my African belonging as a pulse that doesn’t disappear just because I pay rent in Europe. I want to keep my European reality without pretending it hasn’t shaped me. I want to hold both without forcing them to become one clean identity.
That’s hard. Emotionally hard.
There are days in Italy when the beauty of the place feels like a gift, and then suddenly I feel lonely in a way I can’t explain. Not because people are unkind, but because there’s a layer of “not quite.” Not quite inside. Not quite understood. Not quite relaxed. You become hyper-aware of what you don’t know: the childhood jokes, the old television references, the tiny cultural shortcuts that make people feel like family.
And there are days when being South African feels like a warm fire in my chest, until it also feels like grief. Because South Africa is not just home; it is history. It is tension. It is trauma. It is beauty. It is contradictions that I carry in my blood. And distance doesn’t erase that; sometimes distance sharpens it.
Distance can make you romanticize. Distance can also make you blame yourself. Distance can make you feel like you abandoned something, even when leaving was necessary. Distance can make you feel guilty for surviving somewhere else.
And then there’s the simplest pain: being asked to summarize your entire life into one answer.
“Where do you belong?”
I want to say: I belong in the places that shaped me and the places that hold me now.
But people often want a single word.
And a single word can feel like betrayal.
If I say “Africa,” it can sound like I am rejecting my present life.
If I say “Italy,” it can sound like I am rejecting my origin.
If I say “both,” it can sound like I am trying to escape responsibility.
So sometimes I answer differently. Sometimes I answer with silence. Sometimes I answer with humor. Sometimes I answer with a story that doesn’t resolve. Sometimes I answer by making art that refuses to settle into a single flag.
Because my practice is not separate from my belonging. My practice is built from this tension.
My art doesn’t always announce, “This is African,” or “This is European.” It doesn’t always dress itself in obvious symbols. But the way I think, the way I use absence, obstruction, minimalism, silence, interruption, that comes from living in a split reality. From living between languages. From living between systems. From living with the constant awareness that identity is negotiated, not fixed.
Anti-belonging in my work is the refusal to provide a clean cultural performance.
There is a kind of pressure placed on African artists in Europe: to represent Africa in a way Europe can recognize. There is a hunger for the “authentic.” And “authentic” often means “familiar to European expectations.” It means certain colors, certain themes, certain traumas, certain aesthetics. It means a story that confirms what the audience already believes they know about Africa.
But I am not here to perform Africa for anyone.
Africa is not a costume I put on to be legible. Africa is a living, complicated reality that I carry. And sometimes the most honest way to carry it is not by displaying it loudly, but by protecting it from being consumed.
So anti-belonging becomes a boundary: you can’t take my origin and turn it into your entertainment.
And there is also pressure the other way: to prove loyalty. To remain “African enough.” To speak with the right language. To keep the right politics. To not become “too European.” To not become softened or changed.
But change is part of life. Migration changes you. Love changes you. Language changes you. Time changes you. And refusing change doesn’t make you loyal; it can make you trapped.
So anti-belonging is also freedom: I refuse to freeze myself in the version of me that makes others comfortable.
Sometimes I think belonging is a story people tell to feel safe. A tidy narrative: you come from here, therefore you are this; you live here, therefore you should behave like that.
But my life doesn’t follow a tidy narrative. My life is a braid. It’s two waters mixing. It’s a passport with invisible pages. It’s nostalgia and ambition, grief and excitement, pride and doubt, all in the same body.
So where do I belong?
I belong in the contradictions.
I belong in the in-between.
I belong in the fact that I can love South Africa deeply and still choose to build a life in Italy.
I belong in the fact that my “home” is not one location but a set of sensations: a kind of light, a kind of food, a kind of music, a kind of silence, a kind of memory, a kind of pain.
Sometimes home is a smell. Sometimes home is a voice note. Sometimes home is waking up and realizing you dreamed in a language you didn’t grow up speaking.
I belong where my body can breathe. I belong where my work can exist without being used as proof of someone else’s idea. I belong where I can be seen without being pinned down.
And sometimes, honestly, I don’t belong anywhere, and that is also a kind of truth. There is a loneliness inside migration that doesn’t go away. It becomes part of you. You learn to carry it. You learn to make something from it.
I don’t say that with despair. I say it with clarity.
Because anti-belonging is not the absence of roots. It is the refusal to let roots become chains.
I can be African and European without needing to be half of each. I can be fully African in my origin and fully present in Europe in my daily life. I can hold both without collapsing them.
And my art becomes the place where that holding is visible.
The artwork becomes a border that I control, not a border that controls me.
Sometimes the work is quiet because I am tired of being asked to explain.
Sometimes the work obstructs because I have been obstructed.
Sometimes the work disappears because I have felt erased.
Sometimes the work refuses to communicate clearly because I am tired of being translated.
Anti-belonging is my way of saying: I am not a simple story. I am not a cultural product. I am not an easy answer.
I am South African.
I live in Italy.
I am shaped by Africa, and I am shaped by Europe.
I have a clear belonging, and I have a complicated reality.
And instead of choosing one and killing the other, I choose to live inside the tension. I choose to let my art carry that tension honestly, emotionally, without apology.
If you ask me where I belong, I might not give you the word you want.
But I can tell you what I know is true:
I belong wherever I can remain whole, even if “whole” includes contradiction.
I belong in movement, in translation, in the unstable space where identity is not a fixed label but a living process.
I belong in the space I create when I refuse to be owned by a single place.
That is how I (anti)belong.