by Made You Look
For their work at Documenta 15 in 2022, I constructed the sound component of the immersive installation Mafolofolo by MADEYOULOOK, a Johannesburg based interdisciplinary artist collaborative between Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho.
Mafolofolo: a place of recovery, emerges from five years of our research in the northern part of South Africa. Our research has sought to understand the multiple cycles of loss and subsequent cycles of return related to the land. We are concerned with the deep and enduring relationships with the land that remain, despite the long durée of South Africa’s turbulent and destabilizing existence. What we take from the particular history of this place is the potential to seek intimacy, spiritual security, and interdependence with the land and more-than-human life. Through it, we encounter how we might repair ourselves and the lands from which we find sustenance.
Mafolofolo is a site of grieving and a place of contemplation, but also an offering of strategies for recovery. The cycle of displacement and return is present in the historical tracking in the floor installation and in the sound that references popular African resistance songs for liberation, particularly of the land, against the oppression. Mafolofolo is a narrative that traces a history of violence, racism, extraction, and ongoing dispossession with very real contemporary urgencies. Still, it is also an opportunity for different imaginaries of relation with the land.
- flat pink roses
- dinokana – venice biennale
- i seek you in my dreams
- where the wind calls my name
- under the hanging tree
- mafolofolo – documenta 15
- one take grace
- film festival film
- i want to see for myself
- stillborn
- desert
- the man jesus
- imbizo ka mafavuke
- inxeba (the wound)
- urban mermaid
- black president
- the silent form
- creation – moyo – iyeza
- uncles & angels
- security
- television
