We are an artist duo, ivukuvuku and Philiswa Lila, living and working in South Africa. Our collaborative practice grows from a shared space of memory, healing, and transformation. We see art as a gesture of pouring healing – a release and a reception. It’s about letting go of inherited pain while making room for the healing that comes from nature, community, and ancestral presence.

​

Our work moves between performance, installation, painting, writing, photography, and film. It’s research-based, but also deeply personally grounded in our everyday encounters and the energies that flow through us. Materiality plays a big role. For us, it’s not just about physical matter; it’s about what the body remembers through touch, smell, sound, emotion, and movement. All these things become part of the artwork, shaping how it lives and breathes.

​

We often return to water, fire, sun, and wind as natural forces that carry both destruction and renewal. They remind us that healing is not a single event but a cycle, one that keeps moving through us. Our creative process feels like an offering: an outpouring of mind, body, and spirit that reaches toward something larger than ourselves.

​

Memory sits at the center of what we do. We draw from our own stories and from the collective memory of communities who’ve carried pain, loss, and love across generations. Sometimes this memory surfaces as grief or anger, and other times as tenderness and quiet reflection. We treat both past and present as living realities that shape how we remember and how we re-member — how we piece ourselves and our histories back together.

In our practice, pouring healing takes two forms. It’s the act of pouring out violence, suffering, and buried memories – giving them space to breathe. And it’s also the openness to receive healing – to let in the restorative energies of land, spirit, and human connection. Both gestures are part of the same movement, a rhythm of release and renewal.

​

We believe that personal and communal healing are intertwined with environmental and social justice. The wounds we carry mirror the wounds of the earth. The land holds memory too: it listens, absorbs, and speaks back. Through our work, we try to honour that exchange, creating spaces where people can grieve together, remember together, and begin again.

​

Read more about VukuvukuPhila! our collaboration story here