Mapalakata

Robin Bernstein’s debut photo book, Mapalakata engages with landscape via a visual reassessment of a key historical, geological and geographical region in Southern Africa. The title, meaning ‘visitors’, is drawn from oral histories and was used to describe traders from the East who moved through Southern Africa before European colonisation.

The work is situated in Mpumalanga province, South Africa, on the escarpment bordering Mozambique and Eswatini. A place where lush cliffs abruptly pierce the hot, red earth of the lowlands. It serves as a geo-physical symbol for the edge of the South African frontier. A collision point that has inspired countless folk tales and the beginnings of the modern-day story of gold in South Africa. Today, plantations of foreign trees blanket the landscape while mills churn steam as they pulp pine into paper. In the valleys below, gold mines that have been chiming steel against rock for the past one hundred years ring their ceaseless chorus. The surrounding terrain is littered with relics of another time — the remnants of a forgotten pre-colonial society and wild descendants of horses abandoned during wars and a failed gold rush.

Mapalakata looks at the transient nature of ‘visitors’ to the landscape, drawing attention to how the history of the region is continually rewritten as different groups of people attempt to erase the narratives bound to their predecessors, each driven to occupy the space for the resources that it holds. This process leaves an archive of physical artefacts scattered across the landscape, which become ephemeral traces of the histories that have played out.

Through a photographic investigation of these remnants of the past and the people who presently inhabit these spaces, this work aims to engage with the nuances of present social conditions in South Africa and consider how place roots itself in the consciousness of those who inhabit it.

“The name Mapalakata once meant traders. Men who came inland with cloth and beads, their packs heavy with salt and brass. They followed the flow of rivers, trading what they could carry for gold and hides and grain. The world they moved through was a web of bargains. Even now the region works with the same logic.” —Desmond Latham