Giya Makondo-Wills is a British-South African documentary photographer based in Utrecht whose work explores race, colonialism and systems of power. In one of her recent projects Boarderliners (2020), commissioned by the Royal Literary Fund, the artist looks at what it means to be mixed race in the U.K today. Intimate portraits are accompanied by the stories of people she photographs. One of the character shares: “My mother was Irish and my father was from Barbados, I was an illegitimate child and as much as she would have liked to have kept me she couldn’t. I was adopted by a white family, an Iris mother and an English father. In the adoption correspondence letters it is mentioned the difficulty placing me due to my ‘colonial blood’.
