Your name
DMT
Place of birth
Pretoria, South Africa
Place where you live now
Potchefstroom, South Africa
3 words to describe you
Curious, Resilient, Experiential
Why do you take pictures?
Photography for me is the practice of a tender habit. It is the devotion I reckon with in creating community through visual narratives, and the privilege of co-creating moments with those I come across. I am very curious. I want to see how things unfold, and then I want to put them back together. There is a space in-between beauty and discomfort, and it is my favourite space to work from. I want things a little bit off. I want to say the world is so odd it can be bent at anything that links it together, and if you do it in a specific way, the way it is bent becomes something greater than reaches immediate understanding. There is a great joke in that. There is a great, fun mystery. Even if the subject is full of terror.
Where do you get your inspiration?
My autism is central to my creative practice. It is a different way of calling out to the world - a different understanding altogether. The act of making meaning, from an autistic perspective, can be as layered as it is blunt, as detailed as it is playful, as simple as it is dangerous. I also have a distinct relationship with black and white, a reverence for the quiet it produces. This understanding informs and inspires my practice.
Who are your influences?
Nan Goldin, Ren Hang, Jo Ractliffe - the photographers who inspire me to be brave.
What determines the subject matter you choose?
I grew up in turbulent circumstances and had little security throughout my life. As someone who is autistic, queer and non-binary, with a caretaker history, I am intimately aware of the challenges that face people in difficult positions, and the struggle to tell one’s story. These personal narratives are intertwined with an interest in sociology, which also informs my creative practice. Regardless of the form it takes, my work addresses these themes in a layered manner, noting that difficult/harsh experiences also have their place in art, and in beauty. This balance between what is beautiful, what is discomforting, and what is necessary for survival often plays out in my work, which addresses harsh realities with empathy and curiosity.
What impact would you like your art to have?
I would like my work to be companionable to those who need it, and an invitation to create otherwise.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
The work of Schubert and Rachmaninoff. Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Richard Billingham's Ray's a Laugh.
Is there anything you want to add?
Not particularly. Thank you for selecting me for this opportunity, I am honoured to partake.

HOLYDAY
Project statement

We lift our foot from the solid ground of all our life lived thus far, and take that perilous step out into the empty air. Not because we can claim any particular courage, but because there is no other way. ― Han Kang, 흰

HOLYDAY is a reckoning with pain. At twenty-three I felt a part of me slip away, pale and brief through the cracks of terror. As a shard, a fragment, a group of moments, I picked up my grandfather’s camera. I had arrived upon my life as a foreigner.

Photographed over nineteen months, HOLYDAY is a documentary project that narrates post-traumatic stress disorder. I spent these months following my family members, rearranging their body language to match the pictures inside my head, so often surreal and storied. If I was a butterfly, you would see me as a half-winged creature, suspended in the air. In perpetuity.

dmt
@d.m.terblanche