GOST Books is delighted to launch Robin Bernstein’s debut photobook MAPALAKATA, a nuanced exploration of landscape, memory, and the layered histories embedded within Southern Africa’s terrain.
MAPALAKATA engages with the landscape through a visual reassessment of Mpumalanga province, South Africa, a region positioned on the escarpment bordering Mozambique and Eswatini. The title, meaning “visitors,” is drawn from oral histories and was historically used to describe traders from the East who moved through Southern Africa prior to European colonisation.
The work unfolds across a dramatic geography where lush cliffs rise abruptly from the hot, red earth of the lowlands. This natural threshold becomes a symbolic frontier—both geological and historical—where narratives of migration, extraction, and transformation converge. The region has long been shaped by movement and encounter, serving as a point of collision that continues to inform South Africa’s complex historical imagination.
Today, the landscape bears the imprint of successive waves of occupation and industry. Vast plantations of non-native trees stretch across the terrain, while industrial mills convert pine into paper through continuous streams of steam and machinery. Beneath and beyond this cultivated surface lie gold mines that have echoed with the sound of extraction for over a century, their rhythms marking an ongoing cycle of resource pursuit and economic ambition.
Scattered throughout the valleys and hillsides are remnants of earlier histories—fragments of pre-colonial societies, abandoned structures, and the wild descendants of horses left behind during conflicts and a failed gold rush. These traces form a dispersed archive, quietly embedded within the land itself.
MAPALAKATA reflects on the transient condition of “visitors” to place, examining how histories are continuously rewritten as successive groups attempt to overwrite or replace those who came before them. In doing so, it reveals how the pursuit of resources shapes both physical environments and collective memory.
Through a photographic investigation of these remnants and the people who currently inhabit the region, Bernstein’s work considers how place is experienced, contested, and internalised. MAPALAKATA ultimately reflects on the fragile relationship between land, history, and consciousness in contemporary South Africa.
Robin Bernstein: Mapalakata
Category: Photographer Monographs & Art Books
Author: Robin Bernstein
Publisher: Gost Books
Publication Date:
July 2026
Print Length: 120 pages
Language: English
Price: paid
paid
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