Seminar JBSC: Moving Materials, Territorial Transformations

This afternoon, we will discuss how infrastructure projects and resource extraction transform landscapes in the colonial context. How should we view such activities when they are based on perspectives that reduce land to inert geology and bodies to units of labour?

We will explore how resource extraction and infrastructure projects can lead to profound changes in the landscape. From a colonial perspective, infrastructural projects such as railways and mining tend to present land as empty and open to manipulation. This idea often erases or ignores existing communities, customs and relationships with the land in order to legitimise extraction or appropriation.

We will also consider what happens to objects when they are removed from their original context. In a new environment, they acquire different meanings, and the place of origin suffers a loss. We often work with archives that were formed within colonial power structures, that produce gaps, absences and silences in histories. We explore ways to listen to the quieter frequencies of the land, its people and the environment.

This event is part of the project Moving Materials: Architecture, Extraction, and Colonial Railway Infrastructures in South Africa, which is supported by an NWO grant from the Research into Collections with a Colonial Contextprogramme. Meghan Ho-Tong is leading this project as a visiting scholar at the Jaap Bakema Study Centre, in collaboration with Alejandro Campos and Dirk van den Heuvel.

Photo: Collage with drawings of Park Station, Johannesburg, by JF Klinkhamer (Collection Nieuwe Instituut) and Geological Survey Map South-East Africa, 1884 (Collection Nationaal Archief)