Sons and Daughters of the Soil: Pan-African Politics in the installations of Dineo Seshee Bopape

Enveloped by the sound of waters from the North, South, East and West of the African continent, a viewer of South African artist Dineo Seshee Bopape’s Lerole:footnotes (The struggle of memory against forgetting), 2018 is immersed into a history of African resistance to European incursion that stretches from 1415 to 1935 and from Morocco to South Africa, including the 1920 formation of the West African National Congress. This look to Pan-Africanism is echoed in her works using soil such as The name of which escapes me now (in numerous specific places..), 2016, and “+/-1791 (monument to the haitian revolution 1791), 2017 which bring soil from across the continent together in expansive installations dedicated to healing. Bopape is one of several contemporary artists directly referencing and engaging Pan-Africanism in her work. The approaches and perspectives vary, with some artists looking back to the struggles of the movements of the early twentieth century and others imagining the future political and technological power of the African Union. Within this context, Bopape’s work articulates a Pan-Africanism which enfolds past, present, and future. Focusing on Bopape's use of soil and clay as a way to connect the geopolitical and the metaphysical, I argue that Bopape’s approach ties erased histories of Black Liberation to suppressed spiritual traditions and in doing so presents the land as a living archive which connects the past traumas of human and non-human life. The works point to the importance of listening to this archive in building a future Pan-African collectivity.