Removal to Radium - Michelle Monareng
Michelle Monareng ( South Africa )
Removal to Radium is an on going research project which considers the relationship between contemporary art and the archive particularly in relation to areas where historical traumas or ruptures have occurred in South Africa. In this project I interrogate the processes of remaking/re-creating an alternative visual archive using an archive created by my grandfather, Sonnyboy Abram Shikwane. Over a period of 20 years, he collected and recorded the history of the 1965 forced removals of residents from Rietspriut No. 417 I.R, which was a farm located in Heidelberg outside Johannesburg. The project engages with ideas of trauma, history and space and considers ways in which contemporary art practices interface with archival practices; here my intention is to foreground multiple perspectives of histories through an undoing of archival interpretations.
