Death is Part of the Process* is an installation informed by a research project with various collections in the Mayibuye archives; a historical archive that depicts multiple facets of the resistance struggle waged against Apartheid, both within and outside the borders of South Africa.

Primarily an engagement with the audio and oral history collections, this project draws in ‘the researcher’, ‘the historian’, ‘the artist’, and mostly notably, ‘the history teacher’ to consider the various slippages and tensions in the ways (contested) histories and unfreedoms are told, remembered, packaged and narrativised by different stakeholders. A central part of the process of creating this work was the facilitation of workshops with high school history teachers and educators who themselves train teachers how to teach the past.

The project, and indeed the installation considers the chronopolitical; the politicisation and control of time — how we reckon with the past, present and future, and what is at stake in this process. The project asks what it means to reckon with the grief of working with painful histories that cannot be neatly fixed in the past, but are very much ongoing. This work explores what it means to be “in struggle”, and grapples with the disjunctures enmeshed in the archival machinery that speak to this condition of the simultaneous “fleeting freedoms” and the “not yet free” of the present.

* Death is Part of the Process takes its title from the novel of the same name written by H. Bernstein

Archival material courtesy of the UWC—Robben Island Mayibuye Archives 
Composition, research, workshop facilitation & vocals: Zara Julius
Workshop & research collaborator: Hannah Carrim
Guitar & vocals: Mpumi Mcata

Click here for the full archival reference list