'deixem passar (it favors the house) is a video essay exploring diasporic masculinity, grief, and cultural identity under neoliberal capitalism. Through a personal family history of the Madeiran diaspora in South Africa, it situates intimate memory within broader systems of economic and gendered expectation. Tracing a path from Madeira’s sugar plantations to Madeiran-owned corner and liquor stores in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, the film examines structures of extraction and assimilation.

The casino becomes a central metaphor: a system that “favors the house,” mirroring community experiences of gambling, intergenerational obligation, and the pressure on men to achieve financial success. The Bailinho da Madeira emerges as a final site of embodied tradition — seemingly innocent, yet embedded with the same underlying forces of performance and systemic pressure.

‘tar’ (2024) is a 26-minute film that, by utilizing the archive and recently taken footage, reads into potholed roads as a reflection of a political past crossroading a precarious present within South Africa; memory becomes a site of nostalgic contention and re-construction. These asphalt veins that connect cities are generally regarded as a benchmark standard of judging efficient governance. This is viewed within the now and disregards past urban planning structures that were rooted within exclusionary Apartheid systems.

This enquiry into the past is an attempt to understand how the future could pan out. In order to recognize our responsibility, our standing within tomorrows and the future to come, an in-depth, unfiltered look into the past needs to be confronted. How can we take this unearthing of trauma and reconciliation into a future that too often appears anxiety ridden and polarized?

This film does not offer suggestions of sugar-coated Utopias; instead it points to one singular country's grapplings with a history untreated and turns the microcosmic into the macrocosmic by joining our collective need to pay attention to our Earth and the impending consequences of climate change, analyzing themes of past colonial infrastructures, nostalgia, personal memory and the Anthropocene.

Edited Jungle (2025), Fruta (2022) and Petala (2021) as part of studio saudari.
Written interviews with Video Club (Jungle, 2025), Yung Nollywood (Fruta, 2022) and Jazmin Garcia (Pétala, 2021).

I feel like I know you 🏹
Another little zine experiment (digital to print).

I recently rabbitholed into a comment section where users were arguing about AI. This led me to the profile of Gina. Pinterest is probably one of the few ‘social’ platforms that’s not as intentionally curated & reflects so many facets and aspirations of a user: the dream wedding references, ideas for quick meals, religious or spiritual motivations, etc.

You seem to really grasp who the person is.
I don’t know Gina. We’ve never met. But based on her pins I can deduce quite a bit about her.

Thanks to Gina, I’ve discovered religious meme culture and cleaning tips. We’re markedly different in so many ways & don’t hold similar fundamental beliefs at all but it’s a trip to feel the humanness - the dreams, the fears, the hope - and she also loves Rae Klein! - and a sense of relation to someone unknown.

Vrystaat Kitsch 🏹 A lil love letter, fan zine to a very kitsch, very beloved interior decor style of the Free State, Mangaung, South Africa (Vrystaat).

I grew up visiting friends whose grandmothers, aunts, mothers all made their own decorations. You could immediately sense who the inhabitants were. The house became them. As opposed to the interior styles of the now where it’s very much dictated by trends - beige, minimalistic, generic. This is a shout to these homes and the people who made them. (Also a nod to the South Africanisms: barbed wire, top-to-bottom fencing).