Aftershocks: Psychotechnics in the wake of apartheid

Abstract

What we at first found intriguing about Simon Gush’s Red, what the documentary and the installation seemed to mutually conjure, was the Mandela car as a body to be mourned.2 Mourning recurred as a latent theme through the documentary in the interviews with the workers at the Mercedes Benz factory – as Phillip Groom described Mandela’s words on receiving the car, he stressed that its colour ‘represented the many people that have spilled blood in this country to liberate it, to bring it to liberation’, a notion the workers seemingly anticipated, as at the factory the Mandela car was, as Groom put it, ‘literally carried’, like a coffin, not simply a ‘labour of love’, but a work of mourning.3 Attuned to this, the shell of Gush’s reconstruction of the car body installed within the Goethe-Institut gallery in Johannesburg and then outside the Ann Bryant gallery in East London seemed to lie like a cadaver on an autopsy trolley (see image in the editor’s introduction to this issue).