"Remember Marikana": Violence and Visual Activism in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

To produce creative works that translate rage into critique and that open spaces for mourning and solidarity with the dead is an essentially hopeful gesture that reaches out and toward others. It is the making of political community (or at least an expression of the desire for it) and an injunction not to give up, but to resist. Such is the case of the interventions made by visual activists in the afermath of the Marikana massacre of 2012 that refuse to allow the continuities between the violence of apartheid and the violence of the present to go unmarked. The works I focus on here draw attention to how remembering Marikana entails not only commemoration, but a summons for justice and social change.