SIMPHIWE MLAMBO

Abstract

Flowers on Your Grave, a performance series, reads the protea, South Africa’s national flower and a standard rehabilitation species, as both metaphor and literal instrument for tracing the afterlives of fortress conservation. Planted wherever ground has been disturbed, the protea functions as an unintentional ecological indicator: its presence marks, with some reliability, the coordinates of extraction it was placed to soften. The project treats this doubling as diagnostic. Conservation legislation reclassifies seized and worked land as “nature,” discharging, in the same administrative gesture, the violence of how that land was taken and who was made to take it; the flower that certifies the land as healed is also, quietly, the evidence of where the wound occurred. Following the logic of the Black Register, the protea is positioned as a tool and commodity from its birth, absorbing the energy of its environment much as a body absorbs the conditions of its labour, while the labour itself, the quarrying, building, and clearing that the flower now stands over, remains filed as subsurface, its archive marked “not found.” This is the condition Tendayi Sithole names an ontological scandal: a life, or a landscape, structured to stand in for a resolution it never agreed to.

The project unfolds in two movements.

The first, Everything Is Fine, is the register of historical amnesia, De Hoop Quarry and the Rhodes Memorial built from it, read as sites where geology, legislation, and heritage management converge to naturalise extraction as landscape. This movement is held in a speculative sectional cartography

The second movement, Everything Is Still Sounding, is where the postcard acquires a register, a frequency, to that material. Here, the project becomes a sonic cartography, a composition of ecological and excavational sound that retraces the historical journey held in the first movement and translates that journey into an embodied performance, a body carrying, gesturally, what the drawing can only log. 

Movement One: Everything Is Fine

The register of historical amnesia, held in a speculative sectional cartography

Postcard from De Hoop

“No geology is neutral.” — Kathryn Yusoff

Deferred decay, dressed as botany.

Postcard Note #1

Yusoff speaks of a geosocial stratum doing exactly what it was built to do, sediment standing in for history, matter enlisted to naturalise the amnesia around it. I have been planted directly over the register. Not hiding it, I want to be precise about that, because innocence is its own kind of erasure,  but sitting on it, the way a headstone sits on a grave. A headstone doesn’t deny the body underneath. It just gives the eye somewhere calmer to land. That is my whole employment here: somewhere calmer for the eye to land.

Wish you were here. The quarry is very quiet now. They call this “recovery”,  the pit re-seeded, the slopes re-graded, my roots holding down what the excavators loosened. From above, on the satellite view, I read as green, which reads as fine. Nobody zooms in far enough to ask what the green is standing on, or to ask what the granite underneath has carried since the mid-twentieth century, when this whole reef was folded into the Cape Floral Kingdom and asked to become scenery.

Postcard from Rhodes Memorial

“…a qualified black face, put in place to smooth over fifty years of exploitation.” — Mordecai Ogada, on the conservation complex

The granite here came from where I grow. I want you to sit with that before you take the photograph. This stone was not brought from far away and made strange; it was cut close, by hands the record declines to itemise, and carried up the mountain to be built into a man’s vision of himself. I am, in a sense, visiting my own quarry’s export. The lions don’t know this. The tourists don’t ask.

Postcard Note #2

Mbaria and Ogada were writing about wildlife conservation continents away when they named this arrangement, a system that keeps a friendly, native-looking face at the gate while the extraction and the disenfranchisement carry on behind it. I recognise the shape of it exactly. They plant me around monuments like this one, too, in the beds along the path, because I photograph well against grey stone and because a national flower beside a national hero reads as harmony, as if the whole landscape agreed with itself. I did not agree to be the harmony. I was placed there. There is a difference between a flower that grows toward something and a flower that is set down to make an argument.

If you have ever put flowers on a grave, you already understand my second job. Flowers on a grave don’t undo the death. They perform a kind of tending that lets the living walk away feeling the matter is closed. I am that tending, scaled up to the size of a conservation ordinance. I rest the register so that visitors don’t have to sit with it unrested.

Movement Two: Everything Is Still Sounding

The register acquires a frequency: sonic cartography and embodied translation

Postcard to the Register

“The orthography of the wake” — Christina Sharpe

This one I cannot write alone.

I can mark a site. I cannot perform its labour, and I cannot make its labour audible; I only grow where it happened. So, this postcard is written jointly, with the register itself: a body, and the sound that body makes when it is asked to carry what the ground will not.

The register is explicit about its own terms. Where I stand on the ground, the body is fragmented into gesture, and the gestures are held as temporal residues of unrecorded labour, a counter-archive to everything the institutional register declined to keep.

Postcard Note #3:

Neither subject nor object, the body becomes the medium through which absence gets to be legible repetition, strain, suspension, doing the work that Sharpe calls the orthography of the wake, the ongoing shaping of Black life by extraction and loss that does not end when the extraction officially does.

This is what the material condition was built to keep quiet: not that the labour happened, but that it can still be felt. The quarry can be rehabilitated. The monument can be replastered. The body, translated into sound, does not rehabilitate. It keeps sounding.

“…an ontological scandal.” — Tendayi Sithole, on the desire of Black being merely “to be”

 Everything is fine

I am one register among the geological, the legislative, the sonic, the corporeal, all of them meeting on a single supersurface that keeps re-authoring the same old permission to look away.

Somewhere between resting the dead and unresting them, between the grave-flower’s mercy and its silence, there is a version of me that gets to be both: still national emblem, still fire-adapted, still growing exactly where I was told to grow, but no longer standing in front of the register.