Abri de Swardt (b. 1988, Johannesburg) is an artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. De Swardt holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a graduate of the Institute for Postnatural Studies, Market Photo Workshop and Stellenbosch University. De Swardt’s work connects interrelated concerns between queerness, decoloniality and the more-than-human, to imagine forms of affiliation that are critical, fluid and reparative. He positions his work as an expanded form of collage which moves across photography, video, sound, sculpture, costume and performance in a convergence of the elemental and theatrical. Situated in Southern Africa, De Swardt’s work challenges the ongoing effects of settler-colonial whiteness and masculinity, and perceptions of queerness as ‘unnatural’ and ‘unAfrican’, through joining historiography with fiction, auto-ethnography, ecology, desire, and the fantastical. Collage is realised in his work directly upon the body as a frenzied surface occupied and inhabited, as seeped and adrift in bodies of water, and as saturating narrative voice. For over a decade his work has been preoccupied with attending to waters, fluvial and oceanic, as political microcosms and wild archives, in a hauntology resurfacing submerged stories.