“When I engage spontaneously with my materials, I am not translating a dream into a conscious statement. I am responding to it, allowing its presence to shape my gestures, forms, and textures without forcing it into clarity or logic.”
Leonardo Sitoe (b. 2000) is a multidisciplinary visual artist born in South Africa and based in Johannesburg, with familial roots in Maputo, Mozambique. His practice operates at the intersection of Afro-Surrealism, African dream narratives, and diasporic memory, using material as both medium and witness. Working primarily with wood and found organic matter, Sitoe gathers materials already marked by time, weather, and decay – wood planks, bark, soil, leaves, and MDF shavings – each bearing traces of other lives and environments. These accumulated histories form the foundation of his work, allowing material memory to surface alongside myth and imagination.
Sitoe’s sculptures and assemblages give rise to ambiguous, anthropomorphic forms that exist between human and nonhuman, creature and habitat, object and presence. These hybrid figures speak to fractured histories shaped by slavery, colonial displacement, and rupture, while also asserting resistance through their very construction. Rejecting polish or easy legibility, the works insist on endurance, transformation, and quiet defiance. Afro-Surrealism, for Sitoe, is not a stylistic gesture but a method, one that allows dreaming to function as reclamation, unsettling dominant ways of seeing and knowing while rooting the dreamworld firmly within an African context.
“To attempt to assign meaning or explain a dream risks stripping it of its essence, imposing a framework that it inherently refuses. There are moments when this vagueness feels frustrating, even unsettling. I am trained to make decisions, to structure, to clarify. Yet here, in the studio with my materials and the echoes of dreams, clarity can be the enemy. The work exists in tension, suspended between recognition and elusiveness, inviting the viewer into that same frustration I experience.”
Sitoe’s sculptures and assemblages give rise to ambiguous, anthropomorphic forms that exist between human and nonhuman, creature and habitat, object and presence. These hybrid figures speak to fractured histories shaped by slavery, colonial displacement, and rupture, while also asserting resistance through their very construction. Rejecting polish or easy legibility, the works insist on endurance, transformation, and quiet defiance. Afro-Surrealism, for Sitoe, is not a stylistic gesture but a method, one that allows dreaming to function as reclamation, unsettling dominant ways of seeing and knowing while rooting the dreamworld firmly within an African context.
“To attempt to assign meaning or explain a dream risks stripping it of its essence, imposing a framework that it inherently refuses. There are moments when this vagueness feels frustrating, even unsettling. I am trained to make decisions, to structure, to clarify. Yet here, in the studio with my materials and the echoes of dreams, clarity can be the enemy. The work exists in tension, suspended between recognition and elusiveness, inviting the viewer into that same frustration I experience.”