An art writer and art history educator’s unique clothing library, the After Library, is a way to access histories and narratives – even the difficult ones – and understand why the wearer is part of the story too.

Could your clothes become a catalogue of your life? A library of sort as it faces outwards to the many worlds you engage with on the one hand, and on the other, takes on an imprint of you, as it lies close to your skin.

These were the kinds of questions art writer and sessional art history educator Thulile Gamedze mused over as she took to making her own clothes during the long lockdown hours of Covid-19 in 2020.

“What was interesting for me is that clothes as objects are worn on your body and follow you around everywhere; it makes them a good mediator between the wearer and things like the text someone reads, or the art they see, or something else they experience,” says Thuli.

Thulile Gamedze has co-designed clothes that reflect selected texts about the 30-year journey of democracy. Photo: Ufrieda Ho

And with this, the idea for what she calls the After Library project was seeded. A library of clothes with a matching library of texts or art. She started working with select collaborators, asking them to share a book or text that was personally resonant to them. The piece, though, had to reflect on the moment of the 30-year journey of democracy, which was a stipulation from the National Arts Council that gave funding for the project. The text also had to engage with the dynamic of space and place, as a library existing in a southern African context.

Thuli would, through exploring the chosen texts through the eyes of her collaborators, create an item of clothing to reflect each piece of text. Her intention being that each garment would explore the story and offer meanings and different access points through the tactile and the embodied.

“I am passionate about teaching and pedagogy. I really like to make the learning process about dialogue and exchange and mediating between what might be read in the classroom and how people are experiencing the text they’re reading,” she says.

The pilot edition of the After Library was launched at a Human Rights Day exhibition in March at Ellis House, New Doornfontein, in Johannesburg. Her collaborators are Tlotliso Skefu, Kamva Matuis, Max Thesen Law, Abri de Swardt, Thandi Gamedze, Abigail Dawson, and Nombuso Mathibela.

AL006_MANGANYI.BEINGBLACK, created with Nombuso Mathibela, in response to Chabani Manganyi’s Being Black in the World, 1973. Photo: Gillian Fleischmann

They chose varied text but with overlapping themes. There’s the exploration of sub-culture of competitive bodybuilding open to all races, but also filled with manipulated narratives, omissions and erasures in a racially segregated South Africa. There’s the exploration of the firm imprint of the church in the lives of the faithful but the glaring limits and hypocrisies of religious faith when it looks away from challenging political power.

It makes the After Library a unique presentation to reflect on the troubled and still burdened socio-cultural, political and economic life in post-apartheid South Africa at the 30-year mark.

The texts in the first edition of the library are A moment of truth: A word of faith, hope and love from the heart of Palestinian suffering 2009; Hugo ka Canham’s Riotous Deathscapes, 2023; K Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams, 2001; Ellen Kuzwayo’s Sit Down and Listen, 1990; GALA’s Pride, Protest and Celebration, 2006, Peter Clarke’s Fanfare catalogue documenting his 2004 collage exhibition at Stevenson Gallery; Chabani Manganyi’s Being Black in the World, 1973; and Max Thesen Law’s newly commissioned essay, constituting a partial history of the 1975 Mr Olympia bodybuilding competition, held in Pretoria, at a time when international sanctions against the apartheid state were the norm across the board, entitled Oranje, Blanje, Blou & Liggaamsbou: a partial history of the 1975 Mr Olympia bodybuilding competition, 2025.

The texts can be demanding, Thuli admits, but she insists there must be more way to engage, rather than for people to be so overwhelmed and disheartened they recoil or check out completely.

For her, the garments in the After Library offer this. As each piece and it’s matching text is borrowed, a softening happens, she says. The fabric becomes more worn, the pages smoothed by being thumbed through. And this softness becomes a symbolic access point, personal power even to stay engaged in a world full of hardness and heaviness.

On the left is AL005_LAW.MROLYMPIA a garment created in collaboration with Max T Law, in response to Max T Law’s Oranje, Blanje, Blou & Liggaamsbou: a partial history of the 1975 Mr Olympia bodybuilding competition, 2025; and on the right a is AL003_CANHAM.DEATHSCAPES a garment created in collaboration with Kamva Matuis, in response to Hugo ka Canham’s Riotous Deathscapes, 2023. Photo: Ashay Parbhoo

Thuli’s library of clothes have been crafted to be worn in a number of ways and by any kind of body. It’s part of the inclusivity and play she wanted to incorporate into her pieces so that they take on the wearer’s own interpretations. It’s a deliberate feminist approach – making the personal political.

The garments hold meaning though through her choice of fabrics, their patterns and textures also come to hold a collective memory with each borrower leaving a little of themselves.

“I’m not against ownership of garments, especially when you cherish clothes, and build a relationship with clothes. But I’m also totally interested in an idea of kind of collectively owning of something.

“Maybe when someone takes out one of the garments, beforehand they might browse through its file and read entries by people who have borrowed it before them and instead of it be about one person’s personal history, it becomes about a collective history.

“Of course there may be someone who is just seduced by a jacket in the library and wants to take it out – that’s also absolutely cool too,” she adds, saying there are no prescriptions on how people should engage with the library.

Gallery visitors view AL005_LAW.MROLYMPIA. Photo: Ashay Parbhoo

Thuli tells of her love for libraries and even the exchange involved in borrowing. Being a child – one of five – her family “filled up the combi and headed to the Randburg library every Saturday”.

She quickly fell in love with the repository of shared resources, of knowledge and wonder held in books on shelves. There was ritual and responsibility, trust and contract in looking after something and being trusted to return it, intact.

There was family ritual too. She says, with a laugh: “I think I get some of this record keeping impulse from my dad. I remember that every time we got back from the library, before we could run off and start reading, our dad would make us sit at the table and he’d take a record of each of our books. Then the next week, he’d sit us down again, going through the list and making notes about return dates, renewal dates and such things.”

In the After Library, it’s the note taking, reviews and cataloguing from each wearer that gives The After Library a kind of sustained life – perhaps the same way a book becomes alive again every time it’s discovered afresh by a new reader.

Thuli will extend the life of the library through an online platform and garments will continue to be available to borrow. There will be pop-up events at her studio at Transwerke at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg and she hopes to apply for more funding to grow the library.

“There’s a necessity in my mind to be able to connect in a real and embodied way with histories that are important for us now, but also not to be locked down by these histories to the point where we feel it’s impossible to move. So, in a sense these garments I’ve made are a way to carry you through the process of reading.

“They hold you, like they’ve held other people before you. It’s a way to intimately deal with heavy and difficult texts, to you can take these things as part of our history but still go on living with joyousness,” she says.

 

• You can follow Thulile’s work on Instagram here and here, and her personal musings are here 
• Feature image: Installation view by Gillian Fleischmann