Browsing by Author "Smith, Michelle"

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    Aftershocks: Psychotechnics in the wake of apartheid
    (Taylor & Francis, 2016) Truscott, Ross; Smith, Michelle
    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).