Listen to the water and land

• Published date: 26 April 2024
• Publication title: Mail & Guardian: Web Edition Articles (Johannesburg, South Africa)

Except, it's not real life; it's the sonic installation created by South African art collective, stylised in caps as MADEYOULOOK, and curated by Portia Malatjie for the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia in Venice. It's one of the oldest art events in the world, with over 80 countries and artists represented at various individual pavilions in the famous Italian city. This is the seventh time South Africa is participating in the exhibition

The government commissioned exhibition entitled "Quiet Ground", is the culmination of seven years of research by the art collective, MADEYOULOOK. It comprises two Joburg-based artists, Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho, who centre their work on showing everyday black practices that have either been historically overlooked or deemed inconsequential. They encourage the re-observation of everyday of urban South African life – hence the name. They use different forms of art, but they tend to lean towards African oral history.

"We have been looking at the history of a people called Bakoni who were settled in that land [in Mpumalanga] in the sort of 1500s, possibly earlier, and we are looking at the cycles of displacement and dispossession that they have been subjected to for many, many years both colonial and precolonial," Mokgotho said in an interview with the Mail & Guardian.

"What we have found to be quite amazing of the Bakoni is their capacity to always find ways of repairing themselves and repairing their relationships to land through all of these cycles of displacement and dispossession, so that's kind of what it forms the work we have been doing over the past seven years."

He said they have also started looking at the Bahurutse people in the North West who have also suffered forms of displacement and dispossession over the years.

The exhibition is called "Quiet Ground" and is meant to signify the aftermath of South Africa's struggle for land and the subsequent pain the land itself had to ensure.

The curator, Portia Malatjie, said there's an understanding that the land has endured violence, as have the people of South Africa. The work is meant to speak about that very land that absorbed the trauma, but at the same time lead into the repair and rehabilitation of that land.

"It's essentially then thinking about the aftermath of struggle when, you know, in the aftermath of struggle when dust settles, when there's essentially an attainment of the things that one would have been protesting against. But...