By Mamelodi Marakalala
Two words will echo throughout the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia which takes place from the 20th of April to the 24th of November 2024: Stranieri Ovunque (translating to Foreigners Everywhere). It is the title chosen by Brazilian curator and Museu de Arte de São Paulo artistic director Adriano Pedrosa – the curatorial lead of this 2024 Biennale. It is set to reflect the idea that “Wherever you go and wherever you are, you will always encounter foreigners – they are everywhere. No matter where you find yourself, you are always truly and deep down inside, a foreigner – we are everywhere.”
Dr Portia Malatjie, who is a long-standing curator and senior lecturer in Visual Cultures at the University of Cape Town, has responded to the La Biennale theme through Quiet Ground, which is the 2024 South African Pavilion’s submission with conversations around land in South Africa’s political, cultural and natural landscape as well as notions of natal foreignness and practices of establishing historically severed connections to land.
South Africa has a long history of segregation that has been detrimental to its original inhabitants. People and their children were violently forced to migrate to other regions. People had their land stolen from under their feet. The very resources that indigenous communities depended on for life and sustenance were pillaged and, in time, destroyed. This long history has seeped through the generations. There is an ongoing rebuild that Quiet Ground aims to unravel and bring to the fore. Quiet Ground looks into the chasms of this subject matter and invites communities everywhere to tune into their subjective and multiplexed connections and histories with land.
“I hope what people take away from the conversation is a deeper understanding of discussions around land. On the other hand, in as much as ideas of land repossession or land restitution are permanent and important, there are other mechanisms and strategies being implemented daily – where people are trying to reconnect with the land in various ways; whether it be spiritual, whether it be ontological, and so on. I want people to also focus on the land and its materiality, to focus on the land as something that we commune and communicate with because it has its own agency as well,” says Malatjie.
Malatjie continues, “What starts to happen when you pay attention to the agency and subjectivity of land is also this idea of rest, if you will. Hence ‘quiet ground’. It is what happens in the aftermath of a revolution or struggle when the dust has settled, when the land listens to itself, and when people are trying to reconnect with the land outside the purview of violence. Seeing that this is happening in the context of the Venice Biennale, it is also then about having people understand what land politics potentially mean in the context of South Africa, but also understanding that some of those conversations translate and travel to other parts of the world. There are shared stories everywhere.” Indeed, the story of stolen land resonates with many indigenous people across the continents; becoming a loss of ancestry and loss of cultural identity, stripping communities and individuals of their sense of belonging, and creating foreigners everywhere.
To reflect these deep meanings in Malatjie’s Quiet Ground is a newly commissioned sound installation by MADEYOULOOK – an artist collaboration between Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho. Describing their ethos and artistic inclinations, Nare Mokgotho says, “What really drew MADEYOULOOK together was this fascination with the every day as a site or locus of knowledge production, and that’s always been our focus. Initially, starting from the urban and going off into peri-urban and also rural places. That shift happened in the last seven years or so, with the work that we’ve been doing on land and has carried on since.”
The sound installation is titled Dinokana (2024). It is an accumulation of research spanning their artistic practice and an extension of the Mafolofolo: place of recovery (2022) floor installation they created for Documenta 15 at Hotel Hessenland in Kassel, Germany, which reflects Moiloa and Mokgotho’s dedication to the subject of land. While Mafolofolo focused on the Bokoni region in Mpumalanga province (interestingly featured as part of the South African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale for Architecture in 2023), Dinokana is a broadening of the scope referencing three sites; with Bokoni still being one of the sites, Dinokana Village (previously known as the Moiloa Reserve) as the second, and the urban environment as the third. Even further, it is a perfect reflection of the exhibition’s focus on the stillness and quietness that follows a revolution. Dinokana has that element of “rest” in people’s reconnections with land which has followed Mafolofolo’s infusion of the phase of demand and insurgence in reclamations of land.
MADEYOULOOK explores both the material and immaterial depths of land’s history by extending the focus to the most important resource to be found in one’s land – water. Moiloa and Mokgotho refer to the Bahorotsi people of the North-West province’s Dinokana Village, to Bahorotsi’s relationships with land and their loss of its endowments. MADEYOULOOK describes Dinokana Village as once a water-rich and prolific farmland in South Africa that is now barren and dusty and could not be recognised by its former inhabitants from the 1800s. It is also the home village of Molemo Moiloa’s father, which makes this endeavour personal and more profound.
As Mokgotho notes, we cannot simply look at and speak about land without excavating into the subject of water and all that the land has carried. Through the Quiet Ground exhibition and the physical space and sonic sequence of Dinokana, the viewer is also confronted with how far these losses have gone, with listening to the land. The land does speak for itself: if the land is angered, there will be barrenness; if the land is at peace, there is water in abundance.
What MADEYOULOOK has created for this exhibition is a large room that serves the landscape of two sections referred to as islands, to encapsulate the dynamic of the land itself as well as the skies and heavens. There is terracing that allows viewers to sit down and contemplate the space while they listen to traditional songs calling for rain along with natural sounds of water, to demonstrate the present scarcity of water for rural South Africans to establish the custom of creating songs of divination that call upon the rain. Another element is that the installation’s enclosure was created from the tiny branches of the resurrection plant and connected to form a large curtain that Mokgoto said resembles a thunderstorm in Johannesburg. Each element of the installation represents the three sites in question and, thus, reflects the intricacies of the water cycle in the different regions of the country.
Dinokana’s structures and sounds are meant to immerse the audience into these histories, current states, and ongoing engagements or reclamations surrounding land; rather than simply tell a story of it. Moiloa and Mokgotho also achieve this immersive aspect by naming the installation after Dinokana Village. Dinokana, by the way, is Sesotho for “small rivers”. There is might and poetry in the naming of this artwork, in the context of rehoming and rebuilding connections to one’s land. One of the most treasured things of every indigenous person is their home language, and it can be the one straw they hold onto in alleviating their natal foreignness.
“Names carry a history. They also carry this insistence to repair and to find one’s place of belonging once again. Dinokana speaks to sociality and relationality, not just with land but also with water. To add to the point of naming the works: because both Mafolofolo and Dinokana are actual places, I think it is very important that we don’t speak about them in the abstract, that we don’t speak about land in very distant terms. These are contemporary urgencies in South Africa. These are not some fanciful ideas. Our practice has always been about going after actual places and historical sites where knowledge was produced, which is very important to us. Those are places that we can look back on to try to find strategies for how we can begin to reconnect and begin to repair our relationships with the natural world,” says Mokgotho.
Considering MADEYOULOOK’s artistic journey since the very beginning of their careers in 2009 and Portia Malatjie’s curatorial framework, the stars are very much aligned for this response to the 60th Biennale’s theme. Malatjie says, “What was interesting for me, with MADEYOULOOK, was arguably the disruptive nature of their practice. It very much occupies the field of the artistic but they also go beyond the artistic. They engage with the community, hosting workshops and finding solutions that have a real impact in people’s everyday lives.”
Mokgotho adds, “When Portia approached us to work with her for the pavilion, it was very much based on the seven or eight years of research and work we’ve done on themes of land. She wanted to tread lightly. She wanted to show care for our practice. So the natural thing she felt to do was to continue the inquiry that we’ve been doing and further our exploration into some of the themes that we were exploring in Mafolofolo. Her curatorial framework focused on the idea of foreignness, on the natal alienation that many Black South Africans feel, and to show the severing from one’s land and feeling like a foreigner in one’s own home.”
In closing, Malatjie leaves a cardinal consideration for viewers and IQOQO readers alike as they contemplate this year’s South African Pavilion. She says, “There is certainly a celebratory aspect to the work and the exhibition that is often clogged under the context of violence. Our conversations around land are not static. They’re very, very fluid; and different people have different engagements at different points in their lives. So to think of land and land politics as this constantly violent thing is itself a violent infliction. Molemo, Nare, and I are also very interested in the subject of growing practices [the agricultural aspect] and how that can be a joyous experience for many people. Let’s make sure that we are not constantly falling into the idea of land, therefore misery.” People have also been married on land, birthed children on land, performed dances or rituals, eaten fruits from the land, and had all sorts of precious moments in life. The subject of land is varied and one to be respected and appreciated across all voices.
Find out more about the exhibition: https://iqoqo.org/the-2024-south-african-pavilion-at-the-60th-international-art-exhibition-la-biennale-di-venezia/
