Receipt Poetry

Receipt Poetry (2017 – ) investigates the paper trails of everyday survival, treating transactional slips not merely as records of financial exchange, but as empirical proof of lived experience. The ongoing project brings together receipts collected from personal transactions alongside those salvaged from the streets, acting as discarded artifacts of consumption, and physical presence as a trail of discarded junk. In vernacular culture, to “have the receipts” is to possess indisputable evidence of an event; here, the literal receipt operates as a tangible ledger asserting that a body occupied a specific point in socio-economic reality.

The core archive of this project coalesces around South Africa’s “11/9”, the turbulent weekend in December 2015 marked by the abrupt appointment and four-day tenure of Des van Rooyen as Minister of Finance. As national markets contracted and political anxiety spiked, daily life continued in the micro-transactions of bread, fuel, transport, and airtime. Juxtaposing high-stakes institutional volatility with mundane domestic necessity, the receipts from this period document how macro-economic shockwaves register directly on the individual, measured in cents and survival rather than policy statements.

By collecting and recontextualizing both personal and found slips, the work interrogates what happens when proof of purchase is transferred. To hold another person’s discarded receipt is to inherit an unauthored record of their day: an involuntary autobiography written in item codes, timestamps, and VAT calculations. Stripped of their commercial utility, these thermal paper fragments fade and mutate into a form of concrete poetry: documenting the fragile, persistent weight of living through unstable history.