Abstract

KIRSTEN, Marnell. The march continues: A critique of The Long March to Freedom statue collection exhibited in Century City. IT [online]. 2020, n.34, pp.1-16. ISSN 2617-3255.  http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2617-3255/2020/n34a8.

At a moment in South African history that calls for decolonial perspectives on ideological and material remnants of the country's colonial and apartheid pasts, the exhibition of The Long March to Freedom life-size statue collection at Century City, Cape Town, constitutes a seemingly contestable juxtaposition. This exhibition, that opened at Century City on 15 November 2019, is seemingly intended as a commemoration of South Africa's struggle for freedom and a re-evaluation of former state-sanctioned versions of the country's history. The visuality of the space that this collection currently occupies can however be described as one with a contestable relationship with the past, in which spatiality itself signifies a call to forget the past, or rather to construct a mythological version thereof. While The Long March to Freedom exhibition seemingly encompasses calls to inclusion in the South African public sphere, Century City, as a space saturated with simulated signs, functions as a site of exclusion and privilege. This article aims to highlight tensions between "subjective" memory and "objective History" in post-apartheid South Africa, negotiating tensions of a historicality-sociality-spatiality trialectic within a site of socio-political and economic exclusion.

Keywords : Memory and history; decolonising memorials; politics of space; signs and sites of simulation; Century City; The Long March to Freedom.

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