M A N Z I L

South African, Indian and raised by Aotearoa, I hold many cultures, people and lands with honor. Growing up in the complexity of diaspora, I haven’t always felt secure in my identity. I carried questions that I didn't know how to ask, and encounters with stereotyping and discrimination that didn’t make it easy to embrace my cultures, especially through clothing. But I’ve learnt that these experiences aren't mine alone, they speak to wider audiences who face colonial legacy, cultural inferiority, displacement and marginalisation.

Informed by lived experience, postcolonial/decolonial theory and regenerative design thinking, my design practice has given me the the resources, platform and space where I am pushed to unlearn, reflect and create new understandings of self, value and belonging. This process has brought me closer my culture, traditional dressing systems and indigenous knowledge in a way that is so special to me.

I do not claim to have solved the tensions between tradition and modernity, belonging and diaspora or identity and expression, but I choose to hold them, to wear them and to keep working through them. With this, my practice has gifted me the opportunity to find joy and healing in wearing culture once again and I wish for that joy to be shared with the wearers and participators of MANZIL.