Het versamel

On Un-remembering

Installation and Photographic Research, Cane , 2010

PROJECT

The installation examines the post-apartheid practices of institutional memorialising and active, public un-remembering.

The impetus for this project was my discovery that the busts of Verwoerd, having been loaded onto flatbed trucks in 1994 were now stored in Pretoria and Orania archives, consigned to unrepresentability. It seemed to me that it was the very impossibility of making or seeing his portrait that gestured towards making portraits from sites of absence; places previously named after him: hospitals, office blocks, dams, airports, primary schools, suburbs.

He cannot be remembered, except underground, in fluorescent-lit storerooms, watched over by diligent white-coated ladies.