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Mnemonic Devices: Exposing the Margin within Institutional Spaces of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Part 2 Project 2021
Nothando Lunga
University of Johannesburg | South Africa
In the essay Choosing the Margin As A Radical Space of Openness bell hooks asserts that “there’s a need to create spaces where one can redeem and reclaim the past, legacies of pain, suffering and triumph in ways that transform present reality”. The premise of this project is an archive, which may be understood as an event space memorializing protests in post- apartheid South Africa. In pursuit of politically motivated speculations of contemporary and future definitions of equality. Informed by South Africa’s political climate where ghosts of past repressive systems continue to fracture the present. I argue that lines of temporality have been blurred through these hauntings, made manifest in the fight for acknowledgment, equality, and compensation for disadvantages still evident in contemporary South Africa. Both violence and liberatory potentials of past hauntings are evident within our contemporary legal framework set in place to ensure equality, making it important for resistance to effect change.

Sited at Constitution Hill, Johannesburg, the archive becomes a tool for speculating new and uncharted territories of revolutions yet to come by providing means that enable interaction, collision and, immersion through the prototype meanwhile propelling the need for memory as an essential weapon of resistance.


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2021
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