home

In Ucu eJozi, Sandile Radebe reimagines the traditional ucu—a Zulu cord of spiritual and cultural significance—as a speculative sculptural form, superimposed onto the urban landscape of Gandhi Square in central Johannesburg. Using spray paint and stencil on Fabriano paper, the work becomes both image and proposal: a visual intervention that critiques and expands the aesthetics of public space. Radebe positions ucu not merely as adornment but as a powerful signifier of isintu (indigeneity) re-inscribed into the city’s built environment. By fusing indigenous symbolism with graffiti-inspired mark-making, Ucu eJozi proposes new imaginaries for Johannesburg’s public art — ones that centre African visuality, presence, and epistemology in spaces historically marked by colonial narratives.

The imagined structures evoke a Johannesburg that not only acknowledges but is shaped by isintu—centering indigeneity in the visual and spatial language of the city. These speculative insertions draw from a repertoire of isiZulu design elements, proposing an alternate cityscape where indigenous knowledge systems were never interrupted by colonial imposition.

Through this act of visual reclamation, the work explores how isiZulu material culture might have evolved in the absence of epistemicide—where its ritual significance, symbolic ornamentation, and social functions remain intact and dynamically recontextualised. Jeppe Maboneng thus becomes a cartographic and cultural intervention, offering a future-leaning vision of Johannesburg where the ancestral and the contemporary coalesce.