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An Obstinate Course of Memory, 2025

installation
glass mosaics on plywood, two-channel video, sound, resin cast sculpture, Namib desert Sand, 200 Akz coin, steel

soundscape composed and recorded by Vuyo Tshwele





installation images above: courtesy of Brook-lynn Norkie

An Obstinate Course of Memory explores how remembrance endures and sustains itself beyond authoritarian streams of memory. it traces the informal memorialization of the 5th of January 1993 massacre in Namibe, Angola – a moment, like many others in the 27-year conflict between the ruling MPLA and UNITA, relegated to the margins of public memory. the 2002 ceasefire brought no transitional justice or public reckoning with the human cost of the war. instead, a mutual amnesty was declared, effectively silencing inquiry. in the years since, collective memory has been abstracted, reconfigured into iconography managed by the ruling elite. while CIVICOP – National Commission of Reconciliation in Memory of the Victims of the Political Conflicts – was established after a 17-year delay, its propagandist aims and embodied continuation of the State’s choreography of control soon became apparent.

drawing from Edouard Glissant’s concept of the Nonhistory (Glissant, 1989), An Obstinate Course of Memory embodies a counter-memorial practice, positioning itself against the totalizing frameworks of History (capital H) inherited from colonial epistemologies and weaponized by the postcolonial state. materializing through an installation composing glass mosaics, Namib desert sand, sculpture, a 2022 commemorative-edition 200 Kwanza coin and moving image, the work functions as an anti-monument honoring the 5th of January and its remembrance. it investigates the verbal, meta and material languages of memory in Angola. Mosaics in Socialist Realist style, for instance, have served as a medium for depicting quasi-mythical scenes of history – as seen on the plinth of Independence Plaza or the archway to the Military History Museum. by appropriating this lexicon, the project seeks to map remembrance of the event, materially and relationally subverting the media used to control History. it transforms relevant localities into spaces of contemplation, using cartographic and symbolic pairings to trace memory's persistence.

the desert biome becomes an instrumental space of investigation in An Obstinate Course of Memory, forming an allegory, through its aridity, of the condition to which Nonhistories in contemporary Angola are subjected. the moving image component, while investigating social media’s role in counter-remembrance, opens a visual corridor into the desertic landscape of Tombwa. furthermore, special attention is paid to the Onymacris Bicolor beetle, native to the Namib Desert, whose survival strategy – fog basking – serves as a biomimetic metaphor for memory’s ingenuity under arid conditions. this tactic mirrors how memory adapts and endures even in inhospitable environments. the project illuminates channels such as procession, repetition, and social media as alternative yet vital forms of memorialization – persisting where historiography refuses to recollect.