Structures of the forgotten: An installation of song, soil and spirit

Mail & Guardian

2 days ago

Gebedswolke, The Prayer Clouds, by Igshaan Adams. (Photo supplied)
Installation art has always fascinated me. The idea of an artwork that you can touch, interact with, and even walk in and out of, takes the meaning of the word 'immersive' to a whole new level.
Which is why I'm excited when I hear there's a new exhibition at the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation.
Structures doesn't disappoint. This latest exhibition is an exploration of the factors — historical, cultural, racial, spatial — that inform the way people shape and create the environments they call home.
The works were created by a selection of artists and architects from Algeria to Angola, France to Iran, India to Tunisia, Switzerland to Brazil and, of course, right here in South Africa.
The variety among them is astounding, running the gamut from an ancient Algerian city recreated with 300kg of cooked couscous on a wooden table to a series of 'prayer clouds', made of beads, wire, thread, linoleum, fabric, twine and cotton, reflecting the hopes of the residents of a small Cape Town community.
But the one that most caught my attention was simply titled Dinokana — named after a village in North West, rebuilt after the Bahurutshe were dispersed during the Mfecane.
Dinokana. (Photo supplied)
The installation was produced by the Johannesburg-based interdisciplinary artist collaborative Madeyoulook, led by Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho.
They've been working together for 16 years and their practice centres around knowledge creation, particularly knowledge that emerges from the rhythms and routines of black urban life in South Africa.
As Moiloa said during the media preview I attended on the eve of the exhibition's official opening: 'We make our work from this place and for this place. So, it's really an incredible gift to be able to share it here.'
The installation was originally commissioned by the department of sport, arts and culture for last year's South African Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, titled Quiet Ground, curated by Portia Malatjie and managed by Makgati Molebatsi.
It speaks to a rich but largely forgotten history. The previous home of the Bahurutshe, Kaditshwene, was at one point in the late 1800s larger than Cape Town. This heritage is mostly hidden away on private farms or lost in archives. But through Madeyoulook's installation, it's finding a second life.
Dinokana is the second in a series of installations, building on their earlier work, Mafolofolo, first exhibited in 2022 at the 15th edition of Documenta, a contemporary art fair that takes place in Kassel, Germany every five years.
'That work was really informed by research we've been doing since 2017 in the northern part of Mpumalanga, around a historic group called Bakoni,' says Moiloa.
'And we were really interested in Bakoni because, in a way, they no longer exist, having been subsumed into other groups, particularly Bapedi, but one of the things that is left of them is the stone ruins of their villages, which cover about 100km of the Mpumalanga escarpment, but that are not very well-known to South Africans.'
'This is the kind of structure and architecture that litters the landscape but it's also a really interesting kind of memory of these people who had this really deep relationship to land.'
As Moiloa traced the history of the Bakoni — successful agriculturalists who developed technologies like terracing and who were displaced repeatedly over time — the deeper narrative began to crystallise.
South Africa is a country where, three decades after apartheid, land ownership remains grossly unequal.
Dinokana confronted me with the reality of how so many African tribes used to live in thriving, self-sustaining kingdoms but, through the cycles of dispersion and disruption caused by events such as Mfecane, colonialism, and apartheid — episodes of plunder and oppression that tore apart communities — these kingdoms were left in ruin or simply decayed until they were only a shadow of their former selves.
The installation becomes a potent meditation on both the violence of separation from the land and the ambiguity of what return means.
The question is not simply about restitution but reconstruction — how does humanity rebuild itself through, and with, nature and land?
The Dinokana installation brings these questions to life through three complementary components: the soundscape, the landscape and the rainscape.
The first is the most immersive. It's essential, I think, that anyone visiting the installation stays for the full 20-minute duration.
The soundscape is built around archival recordings of women in Dinokana from the 1950s, singing rain and harvest songs. These songs were revisited by contemporary musicians but not without difficulty.
'They struggled to reinterpret the songs in large part because the syncopation was so complex,' Moiloa explained. 'A lot of these songs would have been sung while physically working and yet they were too complex for professional musicians to find their way through.'
While I was there, I closed my eyes and let the sounds wash over me, imagining what life must have been like for the Bakoni people at the pinnacle of their time in history.
The sounds of tribal songs and chants were especially entrancing for me and made me think about how singing is such an important aspect of rural life.
'But Dinokana is also interesting because today it is sand,' says Moiloa. 'It's a really dry, dusty place, but when you go into the archives, you learn that at some point it was growing so much food that it was exporting to Kimberley, to the mines.
'And so there comes this question of, 'Hey, if this was growing so much food how is it so dry now?'' Moiloa asked. 'And the question there is around relationships to water.'
A key part of the rainscape is the resurrection plant, a stalky miracle of nature that appears dead during the dry season, only to unfurl and flourish when rain comes.
Moiloa gestures to it as a symbol: 'Even if you take a little stalk and you put it in a cup of water, then in three days it goes green, and the leaves kind of reopen. We are interested in this plant as a kind of reference to, again, this question of cycles of care and dying and regrowth.'
Then there's the storm. The entire composition of the sound installation mirrors the life of a Johannesburg thunderstorm.
'You'll notice it starts off kind of slow, grows into a bit of a crescendo, comes down and then grows up again into a crescendo,' Moiloa said, 'the way thunderstorms often do here.'
'You'll get a bit of a warning shot, a little bit of rain that tells you to go before the huge storm,' she says.
The installation's structure references the architectural ingenuity of the Bakoni and Bahurutshe, particularly their water-channelling technologies.
This indigenous infrastructure, so tied to climate, landscape and spiritual practice, is at the heart of Dinokana's quiet urgency.
Dinokana resists didacticism. Its message is carried not in slogans, but in song. It allows you to feel what was lost, to imagine what could be rebuilt. The installation quietly honours another historical episode that's not well known: Dinokana was one of the first places where pass laws were tested on women, sparking massive rural protests.
'There are images of military planes flying over groups of women who are protesting,' Moiloa noted. 'It's this sort of battle between women and a state that happens in the rural areas at this time.'
As I interacted with the space I couldn't help but think about humanity's relationship to nature, about how the Bahurutshe interacted with the land that they worked to produce food in Dinokana, the songs they would sing while working as a prayer for good harvest and also the songs they would sing to call for rain to water their crops and help them grow.
The significance of rain in societies dependent on agriculture is not foreign to me. In Setswana the word 'pula' means rain. It's also the name of the national currency in Botswana. Even as the country's economy has become less agriculturally based, rain is still regarded as a blessing — although the recent downpours that caused floods in the capital Gaborone and other towns might have been considered too much of a good thing!
A popular celebratory expression used in different contexts from school graduations and job promotions to marriages and the birth of children is to exclaim, 'Pula, Motswana! Pula!'
In Botswana, just as in Dinokana, the rain was never just rain. It was the return of life. It was the rekindling of memory. And it was a promise of the potential of tomorrow.
Marks of Home by Rebecca Potterton. (Photo supplied)
Structures runs until 15 November at the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation.