An international cohort of scholars recently gathered in Stellenbosch to discuss Russia and South Africa’s traumatic pasts and the way the memory of that violence has been manifested aesthetically.
This is according to Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, chair of Stellenbosch University’s (SU) Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVReQ). The centre aims to bring conceptual clarity to the concept of violence and its consequences, according to their website.
The centre hosted the Aesthetics of Memory: Soviet gulag and apartheid event from 11 to 12 August.
The Aesthetics of Memory: Soviet gulag and apartheid event was hosted by Stellenbosch University’s Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest. The event provided an opportunity for scholars from different backgrounds to see how their identities affected their understanding of memory, trauma and healing, said Andrea Gullotta, lecturer in Russian at the University of Palermo, a speaker at the event. PHOTO: William Brederode
Life imitates art
The event, which was funded by the National Research Foundation, placed “the dehumanisation and violence of the Soviet gulag in dialogue with the dehumanisation and the violence of apartheid”, according to Gobodo-Madikizela.
Aesthetic sources such as literature, art and symbols that captured the violence of the lived experience of the Soviet gulag and apartheid, were used as the medium through which to discuss the violence of the historical eras, stated Gobodo-Madikizela.
Pictured from left to right are Nashi Mushaandja, Dr Pfunzo Sidogi, Greer Valley, Stephané Conradie and Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, who all contributed to discussions at the Aesthetics of Memory: Soviet gulag and apartheid event. The ‘visual manifesto’, titled ‘After Fire: Art and the State(s) of Emergency in Namibia and South Africa’, was created at the event by layering images from different scholars’ presentations over one another to show the intersections of the projects, according to Conradie. The idea of the piece was to “go beyond just the idea of cruelty – what are some of the more generative qualities that we can bring out from states of emergency?”, said Mushaandja. PHOTO: Supplied/Westley Ceasar
The need to engage with the past
In Russia, “almost nothing has happened to reckon with the past”, according to Nanci Adler, a professor of memory, history and transitional justice at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, who was a speaker at the event.
South Africa has a much better history of engaging with the trauma of their past, according to Adler. This made juxtaposing the histories of repression and reckoning with the past in the countries an insightful exercise, she said.
Pictured above is a set of stamps that was displayed on a powerpoint presentation at the Soviet gulag and apartheid event by Tamar Garb, a professor in the history of art at University College London. She said that, for a long time, she could not identify with, and hated, the protea. She saw the protea as a symbol of white nationalism and the repressive apartheid regime, she explained. More recently, she has changed her perception of the aesthetics of the flower, as she now views proteas as something aesthetically pleasing which is a part of the South African landscape, she stated. PHOTO: Supplied/Westley Ceasar
Prof Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, chair of Stellenbosch University’s (SU) Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVReQ), said that, while growing up in Langa township, she was hardly aware of Table Mountain and it did not strike her as an object of beauty. “It belonged to a world that I was not supposed to be part of,” she said. It is important to reclaim these symbols in the post-apartheid era, as “they are nature, they are indigenous, they were never owned by the white world”, she told MatieMedia. PHOTO: William Brederode
Comparing the traumatic histories of South Africa and Russia shows that there is no monopoly on pain, according to Tamar Garb, a professor in history of art at University College London, who attended the event.
“To be with colleagues from multiple disciplines, multiple locations and multiple geographies, makes us also think about shared human experience, about a kind of planetary connectedness and about comparative experience,” said Garb.
Continuation of violence
Even though the periods of violence that were engaged with at the event were in the past, there are still incidents of violence today, said Gobodo-Madikizela.
“The Russian war against Ukraine is a violently dramatic example of what we are talking about when we talk about continuities of violence – because something was not dealt with in the past. It has not been faced. It’s coming back in this way,” she said.