Helena Uambembe

“The more creative with your trauma, the better,” artist Helena Uambembe deadpans in her video How to Make a Mud Cake. Her words are sardonic, a jibe at the expectation that one should treat their pain as a commodity, packaging and peddling their wounds for an external market eager to pantomime empathy.

A playful but biting commentary on loss and reckoning, How to Make a Mud Cake suggests that trauma is more than one person’s burden, that it can seep into the soil and permeate a culture. Uambembe’s work is rooted in this experience of inherited trauma. The artist grew up as the child of displaced Angolans in Pomfret, South Africa, where her father fought as a soldier in the 32 Battalion, an elite South African military unit whose conscripts were largely of Angolan heritage. Much of her work grapples with these various levels of estrangement.

The video conflates a children’s game with an online cooking tutorial, as the artist assumes the persona of a social media chef to tackle the lingering trauma of colonialism. Laying out her ingredients, she works clumps of soil between her palms to “remove any land grabs.” At one point, she urges her viewers to “make sure not to cut yourself,” before adding “but if you do it adds to your life story.”

The video is rounded out with a series of ink prints on kitchen rags, listing out package warnings: “May contain traces of nationalism” or “May contain traces of fascism.” The prints operate in the same imposter mode as the video, by deliberately emulating cheap, mass-produced goods. Their humor is immediate, but their truth registers more deeply. After all, how can one remove blood once it has soaked into the soil?

Text: Kate Sutton