When does a place become a home? When does a home become, in the words of Warsan Shire, ‘the mouth of a shark, the barrel of a gun?’ For Serraf, home began in Harare. He remembers an idyllic sense of peace in his early childhood untouched by the politics of identity. But after generations of fleeing, his family found themselves escaping home once again; this time, to South Africa.

“I was first called Black when I arrived in South Africa,” the artist recalls. He speaks of the country’s relationship to race and its complicated navigation of the so-called post-Apartheid climate, recounting his earliest exposure to xenophobia when he was only ten years old. A new student at a Jewish primary school, Serraf found himself defined not by who he was, but by who he wasn’t: not-white, not-South African, and not-Jewish.

“I left Zimbabwe when I was very young, so my perspective was limited to that of a child. But I believe that limitation ended prematurely when I came to South Africa, even though the fact that I was a child had not changed, which is strange. I had to grow up much more quickly. But my childhood in Zimbabwe was simpler. It was a fantasy. In South Africa, it was immediately made political.”

These ideas, the fantasies and the gentleness of an innocent existence, as well as the tensions of his lived experience, carry over to the work Serraf produces as an adult. His series When We Landed remembers an arrival that could have been. Capturing the experience of “a lost alien,” the images explore why, as a Zimbabwean BIPOC just a few kilometres south from home, the feeling of trespassing on African soil remains. However, at the same time, its images are light and playful, and almost childlike in their depiction. In this way, as both commemoration and celebration, When We Landed rewrites the trauma of displacement by replenishing it with the imagined memory and utopic anticipation of softness, homage and unaffected wonder. No one flees a country by way of silken parachute, but his retrospective optimism allows us to see things differently.

Returning to the words of Warsan Shire, she writes: ‘No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land’. These words resonated as inspiration for Serraf’s series Tebah: Hope is a Dry Colour. ‘Tebah’ appears in the Old Testament as a reference to both the basket in which Miriam sent Moses down the Nile, and to the Ark that Noah built. By weaving together these themes of origin, survival and sacrifice, the series does not detail how the running happened - instead, it portrays the stamina that is so intrinsic to the artist’s personal lineage and experience. “It’s not about how we arrived,” he explains, “but rather that we were able to.”