Francois Knoetze, South African, born 1989
Cape Mongo, 2013
Cape Mongo is a short film set in Cape Town, South Africa that follows six different characters, represented by sculptures made of the city’s discarded waste. The word “mongo” is a slang term for “an object thrown away and recovered.” Even in a post-apartheid state, structural environmental violence is still incredibly evident in impoverished, non-white areas where the trash of wealthier metropolitan residencies ends up. Each “creature” journeys to the place of their material origin, revisiting its imagined past and examining the social weight of its conception. The selection I have chosen is a still showing a metal figure surrounded by pollution of their own making, in a slouched position facing toward the sun, perhaps contemplating the time and negligence it took to get there. Label by Kristin Rheins