STATEMENT 

UNMAPPING: Contaminated Representations

 

This exhibition of work began with the process of digitally collecting images of mines across Africa as they were mapped out by UNESCO in 1963 for ‘when the rest of the world runs out of minerals – this mapping was necessary to know where to find them’. The work then sets out to explore what those spaces look like now. Each of the drawings are a collection of up to 43 mines across Southern Africa, layered on top of each other to the degree that the viewer is unable to tell where one ends, and another begins. These maps become representations of the way in which industry has reshaped the landscape.

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This story of the mine comes to be represented through the layered process that constructed its existence because landscape is transformed by people through a process of labour and categorisation. The collage and the process of making comes to represent the historical process of erasure and memory, it reaches the point where one forgets what once existed in a space and the mine becomes the place marker to indicate the ‘beginning point’. In that, the mine becomes the marker of history and erases the natural state of a place. Nature is transformed through industry and maps come to imply a particular perspective of a particular place. This perspective becomes the frame through which the world is perceived and shown cartographically. These renderings take on a level of truth because in our capacity as humans, there is a trust that we place in the representations of things that we are unable to see.

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In this, a map acts as a correspondence between the representation and the territory it represents. A convergence of time, space, and people.

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This is not a rejection of the map, but rather, a rejection of the authority claimed by maps in the objective way they are represented.  They determine fixed places that then, in that fixture come to represent the imperfection of the real place since a map is neither the real territory nor the whole representation of it. The map performs a reality, legitimates divisions, highlights contradictions, takes on positions, and then reproduces it all. In this, the road lines act as a code signifying the role of people in the exploitation and extraction of mined spaces.

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The act of something being taken out – is the precise story of the mine – the extraction of something which unintentionally leads to the emphasis of what is left behind. What is an artwork with the use of only certain tones? What does that then emphasise? What is the landscape without its minerals –  and what is brought to the surface as a result?

 

Shayna Rosendorff

2020