The Struggle of Memory against Forgetting: Afterlife and Memorialization of Imagery Surrounding South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Madeleine Bazil

doi:10.5070/r74155759

Abstract

Given that truth commissions are heavily intertwined with the social politics of societal memory and the historical perception of events, the imagery surrounding these hearings therefore plays a role worth examining throughout this memorialization process. This essay investigates how imagery from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings has experienced an afterlife in the subsequent decades, and how this afterlife may differ from the images’ original values and purpose. This body of work examines the extended life of these images beyond that of straightforward media representation of the event—looking at how these archival elements have been reappropriated and incorporated into fine-art bodies of work by artists and documentarians working in photography, such as Sue Williamson, Jo Ratcliffe, Berni Searle, Penny Siopis, and others, in order to respond to the TRC by participating in and driving conversations surrounding the commission’s ambiguities, contradictions, and inadequacies. Through a semiotic analysis of the imagery itself, and analysis of the contextual placement and dissemination of the imagery in both its original and subsequent usages, this research therefore seeks to holistically understand the role of visual media in South Africa’s era of transitional justice and reckoning.

Highlights

Title The Struggle of Memory against Forgetting: Afterlife and Memorialization of Imagery Surrounding South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Perhaps the most significant commonality that these bodies of work by Williamson, Ractliffe, Siopis, and Searle share is their keen sense of selfreflexivity—all four engage in a self-conscious commentary on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the impacts of the apartheid regime through the lens of their own personal experiences, privileges, oppressions, and situations
Their works touch on the same central criticism of the TRC’s functionality: the idea that it revictimized or rewounded those who had already experienced significant trauma, or that the commission’s focus on amnesty was not universally sufficient or beneficial. These pieces of art speak to pertinent questions: whether and how individuals had the space to voice opinions or lived experiences surrounding the TRC without pressure or obligation to align with the dominant state-endorsed paradigm; to what extent the discourse about the TRC’s efficacy is a sign of its democratic nature or of its inadequacy; and whether truth, subjective as it is, can be composed of many layers of kaleidoscopically different and valid perspectives

Summary

Part 1: Sue Williamson

Madeleine Bazil: Even in trying to be unbiased and be a mediator or a vessel for this conversation, do you think there is a role that the artist plays in shaping it in one direction or another? Like, the choice of making that work—do you think that speaks to one particular side of the argument?. Every panel follows the same format: from left to right, an image of the victim, the “crime scene,” and the perpetrator Overlaid atop this are fragments of quotes from further news articles; as Pen describes, these excerpts “can be slid across the faces in the panel so as to foreground the shifting, uncertain nature of recollections and evidence out of which the past is constructed.”[18] The body of work is intentionally interactive; the horizontal slats can be angled, like blinds on a window, to reveal or obscure different facets of the same case. Truth Games appears to suggest that there exists no objective truth with regard to the TRC and its impact, merely a composite collection of subjective experiences

Part 2: Jo Ractliffe

Part 3: Penny Siopis

Part 4: Berni Searle

Conclusion

37 This Is a True Story