Title: Mother’s Code-Switch Formula

Artist: Kazvare Made It

Artwork Description: This work takes the form of a cocoa butter tub, reimagined with the label “Mother’s Code Switch Formula: Softens and Protects.” The familiar object draws on the language of care, pointing to how code-switching is often learned early, absorbed through watching parents shift tone, language, and behaviour in different social settings. It is both strategy and inheritance, a way of navigating perception while managing risk.

In the background, archival text from J. H. Van Evrie’s White Supremacy and Negro Subordination (1868) articulates a racialised theory of language, arguing that Black people may imitate speech but can never fully master or sustain “correct” English. The text exposes the logic of white supremacy at its most insidious: even successful performance is positioned as inherently deficient.

Code-switching appears as a form of protection, yet the archival text suggests the limits of that protection within a system that has already fixed its conclusions. The promise to “soften and protect” becomes unstable, raising questions about who is being protected, and at what cost.

Medium: Printed as giclée prints on 100% cotton rag paper.

Size: A2