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Brocken Telephone
by Luca Evans and thato makatu
Long Gallery: 30.04.26 - 11.06.26
L: “We’re doing this thing where we make works in response to each other, back and forth, following a train of thought. Like a game of broken telephone, or ping pong.”
T: “Or like a game of chess, except less strategy and more scraps of paper. If anything it felt more like scrabble. Making can be a very precious thing, and we’ve tried not to be but old habits die hard.”
L: “Yeah I liked it most when we were messing around in studio together. We worked in loose prototypes so we could bounce ideas faster. It helped with artist block, taking someone else’s thoughts, reshaping them, passing them back. Everything you gave me was a surprise.”
T: “It was interesting to see what could come out of throwing, stitching, taping, stapling, gluing things together in response to each other.”
L: “Sometimes we worked so fast the prototypes fell apart. To keep the game bouncing I’d hold two pieces together and say “just imagine it looked like xyz.”
T: “Sometimes the response is an idea that you’ve had in your head for at least a week, and it takes seeing the response to your idea to actually get you to make the work.”
L: “I think that’s probably enough? Maybe one last line.”
T: “I can’t believe you gave me the last line. All of this to say… sometimes the work, the object, the thing you have at the end, is only a glimpse into the conversations we have with ourselves, our practices and/or each other.”
thato makatu is currently preoccupied by zine-making, world-building in video games, and burglar bars in QwaQwa. Their work thinks through how the domestic space interacts with our memories, how objects in the home are activated in our memories through time and the many interactions we have with these objects and with other people.
Luca Evans is a Cape Town-based artist working primarily with wood and text. Their work plays with ideas around language, failure, mishap, technology, violence, nostalgia and humour. Text and object are assembled interchangeably with cut-and-paste strategies. They work with marquetry, an archaic woodworking method in which thin pieces of wood are assembled like jigsaw puzzles. While working predominantly in wood, they also experiment with print, publication, video and found objects. They have a background in Linguistics, graduating from the University of Cape Town in 2018, and their interdisciplinary practice spans artmaking, education, writing and curation.
