Tshepiso Makoni
Using t-shirts to tackle stereotypes

Tshepiso Makoni at home in Soweto, Gauteng © Thom Pierce 2023
Art changes the people who engage with it, sometimes in the most subtle ways. Artists find inspiration and meaning in different places, the motivational drive to create is fed by the feeling of making something with purpose.
Purpose, to Tshepiso, comes in starting conversations that change the way her community sees themselves, and each other.
As one half of the artistic duo Tebo X Emeka, Tshepiso creates T-shirts that fuse photography and graphic design to gently push tired old narratives in a new direction. For their first project, Taxiology, they focused on the taxi industry around Soweto. They wanted to celebrate the industry for its unique position in South African culture, accepting the perceived view of taxis as inconvenient, noisy and dangerous whilst also celebrating the positive interactions that they facilitate.
You can’t find the culture that we have here anywhere else. When you get inside a taxi you have to greet everyone, you combine your money with the other passengers and send it to the front. You tell jokes, you discuss the news.
Tebo X Emeka wants to help people see themselves for who they are and who they could be by providing representation of township culture in fashion, using the T-Shirt as an accessible, portable gallery for purpose-driven artwork.
More recently Tshepiso has designed and created the disability pride t-shirt, again looking to change the conversation around a subject that has been stigmatised and stereotyped.
T-Shirts are a way to begin a conversation, for us to be able to represent people with disabilities. It allows for their voices to be heard and for them to be seen.
Her hope is that the t-shirts will start a conversation and become a driving force for action. They want to partner with the government to use disability pride shirts as a starting point to create a new language around disability, public consciousness and acceptance.
By creating work that has meaning, and the intention to drive conversation, Tshepiso is planting the seeds of change in her community. To change the way that people view their community and therefore themselves is no small idea.
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