Lesiba Mabitsela is a South African interdisciplinary artist, designer and Fashion Practitioner currently based between Kampala, Uganda and Johannesburg, South Africa.
Lesiba has presented work on platforms such as ARS Electronica, Tribeca Festival, Infecting the City and Live Arts Festival (Cape Town), Afrovibes Festival (Amsterdam, Den Haag, Rotterdam) and has recently exhibited his work at the Voices of Fashion exhibition hosted by Centraal Museum (Utrecht), and being named to take part in the Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear exhibition hosted by the V&A Museum (London) in 2022.
Lesiba is a former fellow of the Institute for Creative Arts, awarded in 2020 and is a former recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation scholarship, contributing to the completion of his master’s degree in theatre and performance at the University of Cape Town, which was guided by the multidisciplinary studies offered under the auspices of the Institute for Creative Arts (formerly known as GIPCA).
Aside from his artistic pursuits, Mabitsela is the founder & creative director of Lesiba Mabitsela Studio (Pty) Ltd, a made-to-order luxury clothing brand and creative studio established to produce transdisciplinary projects by exploring African fashion histories & identities through a practice that is underpinned by critical fashion & performance studies & an interest in immersive technology. Lesiba is also a founding member of the African Fashion Research Institute (AFRI), a member of the Einstein Circle on Fashioning Education & a former recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation scholarship, contributing to the completion of his studies in theatre & performance under the guidance of the Institute for Creative Arts (ICA).
Artistic Statement:
Clothing and Textile Ecologies sit at the centre of my practice. I see cloth and clothing not as finished objects, but as part of larger systems that connect people, histories, labour, institutions and the environments from which materials emerge. Migration, labour and gender are important ways through which I read these histories. Whether working with garments, archives or performance, I use clothing as a way of asking how inherited systems can be challenged and reimagined.
My practice moves between fashion design, visual art, performance and digital media. By utilising my design background, I analyse Afrocentric dress connected histories and other forms of tailoring from around the world to create artworks through speculative thinking, creating new tensions, translations and reimagined possibilities. I often begin with familiar or culturally significant garments and textiles—such as suits and blankets—and rework them to uncover the histories and meanings they carry. Through projects such as Black Tie – Missionary Possession, Reinstitute, The Cutting Room Project etc. I explore how clothing has been used to shape identity and belonging, and how it continues to carry the legacies of colonialism in Africa. Each artwork reflects a different chapter in an ongoing investigation into the relationships between dress, power and memory.
Recent research and collaborations in Kampala have expanded my understanding of these relationships. Encounters with barkcloth, banana fibre and local papermaking traditions have shifted my attention from clothing and cloth as something that is simply worn or preserved, to something that is grown, cultivated and cared for. Ideas of harvesting, regeneration and healing have become increasingly important to my work. Looking back, I realise that these ecological relationships were always present in my practice. Working more closely with living materials has simply made them visible. Through Clothing and Textile Ecologies, I continue to explore how garments and textiles connect bodies, landscapes and histories, and how they might offer ways of imagining more caring and sustainable futures.