Sculptor remembers the Marikana Massacre

CLIFFDALE artist Robin Moodley has two exciting works included in the Romancing the Stone exhibition that is currently on display at the KZNSA Gallery, in Durban.

Romancing the Stone forms part of the South African Visual Art Historians (SAVAH) conference and the DUTDigiFest. Moodley’s first piece, called Books, Knowledge, Memories (Dispossessed), incorporates books encased in concrete slabs.

“The books are packed as one would find them on a bookshelf in a library. It deals with the concept of freezing knowledge, freezing time, and freezing education – and how it is potential deferred. After 28 years of democracy, we have no solid education system. The books reference education and knowledge trapped in time, and slicing through the concrete speaks to hope as potential is exposed.”

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Moodley’s second piece deals with the collective trauma inflicted by the Marikana mineworkers’ massacre of 2012. Moodley has created a reverent space, incorporating rusty lockers, clothing stiff with cement, a pit of sand, and water-filled basins, inviting the viewer to wash their own or their companions’ feet.

“This work acknowledges our vulnerability, and our fracture and dislocation in identity, the mistakes we made, and the trauma we carry. It gives us the ability and opportunity to reflect retrospectively and make decisions to inform a better future and consider the negative experience of the past. Here we can re-orientate and recalibrate decisions we’d make now for the future.”

Moodley maintains that Marikana was an unwelcome event in a democratic country.

“One would never have imagined it could take place, and now we expect some acknowledgement, which the nation needs to move forward. The piece is approached based on vulnerability. We all carry some sense of fracture and scars of the past.”

The sculptor pays his respects to those who lost their lives in the tragedy.

“This is not about blaming multinational companies or unions that were part of that entire unfolding but to acknowledge everyone who sacrificed a life in that event. The names of the 34 people killed in the massacre are listed. There is reverence in the space, as you walk through the sand barefoot and internalise the trauma. The images and objects placed there give a sense of the environment down in the mines – the frozen clothes, the rusty locker. On the wall are three sayings in the languages of English, isiZulu and Xhosa, which create an understanding of our interdependence and our one humanity. The viewer leaves with a sense of remorse on that incident and on how we are living our lives,” says Moodley.

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The sculptor says he has created a monument of regret, remembrance, deep reflection, or forgetting.

Moodley’s background is in interior design, where he manufactured exclusive furniture, and he has, in recent years, left the corporate world behind in favour of making impactful art full-time. The sculptor first exhibited again at the KZNSA Gallery in 2019, following a hiatus from the fine arts.

The sculptor says, “I intend to make art full-time, with no compromise, and allowing this process to unfold and take its course. I am also passionate about farming, remembering the principle of the seed, starting seed banks and permaculture farming.”

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