GOST Books presents Robin Bernstein’s debut photobook
MAPALAKATA, a compelling visual investigation into landscape, memory, and the layered histories of Southern Africa. The project offers a nuanced reflection on how geography is not only inhabited, but continually rewritten through movement, extraction, and shifting narratives of belonging.
At its core, MAPALAKATA engages with Mpumalanga province in South Africa, a region situated on the dramatic escarpment bordering Mozambique and Eswatini. The title, meaning “visitors,” is drawn from oral histories that once described traders from the East who travelled through Southern Africa long before European colonisation. This idea of the “visitor” becomes a central lens through which Bernstein examines how presence in a place is always temporary, contested, and in flux.
The landscape itself is striking in its contrasts. Lush cliffs rise sharply from the red earth of the lowlands, forming a natural threshold that feels both geological and symbolic. It is a frontier shaped by collision—of cultures, economies, and histories—where stories of migration and resource extraction overlap and persist. The region has long carried mythologies of gold, labor, and transformation, all of which continue to echo through its terrain.
Today, the land reveals the marks of successive interventions. Plantations of non-native trees blanket vast areas, while industrial mills process pine into paper in an endless cycle of production. Beneath this cultivated surface lies another history: gold mines that have shaped the region for over a century, their presence still audible in the ongoing rhythm of extraction. Around them, fragments of earlier eras remain scattered—ruins of pre-colonial societies, abandoned infrastructures, and the descendants of horses left behind during conflicts and failed gold rushes.
These traces form a dispersed archive embedded in the land itself. Bernstein’s work pays close attention to these remnants, treating them not as isolated relics but as active participants in an evolving narrative. In doing so, MAPALAKATA reflects on how histories are continually overwritten as successive groups occupy and reinterpret space, often in pursuit of its resources.
Rather than offering a fixed account of place, the photobook moves between observation and reflection, weaving together the present-day inhabitants of the region with the lingering presence of its past. It considers how landscapes absorb and transmit memory, and how identity is shaped through proximity to both visible and invisible histories.
Ultimately, MAPALAKATA is a meditation on transience—on the idea that place is never static, but constantly constructed through those who pass through it. Bernstein’s images invite a slower, more attentive reading of landscape, where history is not confined to the past, but continues to unfold in the present.
The book will include written contributions from South African writers Lidudumalingani
and Desmond Latham.
“The name Mapalakata once meant traders. Men who came inland with cloth and beads, their packs heavy with salt and brass. They followed the flow of rivers, trading what they could carry for gold and hides and grain. The world they moved through was a web of bargains. Even now the region works with the same logic.” Desmond Latham
Robin Bernstein
Robin Bernstein is a South African photographer whose practice examines the socio-spatial intersections of land, history, and globalisation. Working between London and Cape Town, Bernstein’s process is rooted in collaborative engagement, exploring the reciprocal relationship between individuals and their environments. After earning a bachelor’s degree in photography from the Stellenbosch Academy of Design & Photography and an honours in Art History from the University of Cape Town, Bernstein has received international recognition from the organisations such as Aperture Foundation, LensCulture, PH Museum, and the Contemporary African Photography Award.
www.robinbernsteinphoto.com
@robin.bernstein
