At Hangar in Lisbon, Johannesburg-based collaborative MADEYOULOOK traces histories of dispossession, ecological knowledge, and collective memory through sound, proposing repair as an ongoing practice of return.
3 June 2026
For interdisciplinary artist collaborative MADEYOULOOK, the creative partnership between Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho, sound is both archive and method. Their exhibition ‘Mafolofolo’ draws on oral histories, liberation songs, and long-term research into land dispossession in Southern Africa to explore how memory persists across generations. Attending to histories that continue to reverberate through the present, the exhibition approaches loss not as a concluded event but as a living condition shaped by displacement, resistance, and the ongoing work of repair.
Presented at Hangar – Artistic Research Centre in Lisbon, ‘Mafolofolo’ centres enduring relationships between people, land, and the more-than-human world. Through immersive sonic installations and collective forms of storytelling, MADEYOULOOK foregrounds knowledge carried through song, ritual, naming practices, and everyday acts of care. The exhibition reveals how these practices survive despite centuries of extraction and dispossession, offering models of belonging rooted in relation rather than ownership. In doing so, ‘Mafolofolo’ invites listeners to consider repair not as the recovery of what has been lost, but as a continual process of rebuilding connections and imagining more just futures.
Suzette Bell-Roberts: Mafolofolo uses sound to work with memory and history. How do you think about listening as part of your process?
MADEYOULOOK: Call-and-response has become an important way for us to think about both voicing and listening. It forms the basis for our work with sound formally and conceptually. Formally, there is an interplay and a back-and-forth between oral testimony and struggle/ traditional songs, the mimicry of animal calls through whistles and shouts, and the compositional structure of the work itself. Conceptually, the emphasis in our work is always on relation and shared space. The songs, for instance, are sung collectively, always in call-and-response, and are contemporary reinterpretations of songs in the popular imagination. The use of archival song and oral histories becomes the basis for a call-and-response relationship between the past and the living present. Song becomes a political inheritance open to all of us to guard against complacency and to connect us to other struggles across time.
The exhibition arises from long-term research into loss and return. How has this shaped your understanding of repair or recovery?
Through our research on the Koni and our knowledge of communities currently experiencing displacement and dispossession from mines and petrochemical and corporate interests, we’ve come to understand repair as unfinished business. It is ongoing work that is never concluded. It is also not just a reactionary operation, but is about preparedness and developing tools and models for when things inevitably break again.
Your work often focuses on overlooked Black everyday experiences. How does Mafolofolo expand this into questions of land and ecology?
We understand the subject of Black everyday experiences as being on a historical continuum – not a past long gone, but inherited. The history of land dispossession and displacement in South Africa has also been an epistemic violence that has resulted in severed relationships and knowledge of the land. This history of dispossession through legislation such as the Water Acts of 1912 and 1956, the Land Act of 1913 and the Group Areas Act, to name a few, has concealed the long-established entanglements between black South Africans and the land: evident through totems, naming practices, rituals, farming practices, the use of medicinal and spiritual plants, songs and a regard for other species, etc. Many of these practices persist; our work is to “re-look” them and unpack just how significant they are.
Sound in the exhibition draws on liberation songs and oral histories. What does sound allow you to do that other mediums cannot?
Sound has been a turn from solely visual understandings of landscape, which can often misrepresent or not fully articulate the intimate relations between people, the land and the more-than-human. Sound represents for us, through oral traditions and song, a different way of knowing and engaging based on close and entangled relations. The sonic can explore multiple interwoven experiences of the same narrative all at once and in this way makes space for complexity and layeredness. It therefore has the capacity to immerse one in myriad emotions, sensations and historical events. Our understandings of the liberation songs are as an active archive of historical land struggles directly connected to contemporary urgencies, and the land work communities continue to undertake to either maintain or repair their relationships with the land. The content of the songs speaks to the loss of land and a demand for its return, but importantly, to the psycho-spiritual and affective feelings about those experiences.
Mafolofolo feels like both a space of mourning and a place of recovery. How do you hold these two ideas together?
Black everyday life shows us we can both mourn what has been lost while doing the work of repair. In Mafolofolo, we look towards the history of the Koni people and their experiences of cycles of displacement pre-colonially, colonially and under Apartheid. With each removal, they displayed an incredible capacity to repair themselves and rebuild some of what had been lost by revitalising depleted soil and working the land (the Koni were well-known for their agricultural abilities). Throughout our research, we encounter other communities that have similarly had to live with the difficulty of loss, but have undertaken the work of repair both as a form of rebuilding and as a way of remembering lost connections. It is crucial, in our work, to expose the violence of the historical circumstances which shape our contemporary realities and the unimaginable scale of what is being mourned, but it is equally important to call attention to the agency of those most affected, either in the form of resistance, organising, preserving memory, regrowing and rebuilding, etc.
The work engages histories of extraction and dispossession while also imagining new relationships to land. What kinds of futures are you trying to suggest?
Our interest in the Koni people, and subsequently in the Bahurutse (in the sound installation ‘Dinokana’, 2024), and ordinary black life is in their longstanding, albeit often invisibilised and overlooked, relationships with the natural world. The models for reimagined relationships to land can be found in these existing practices that have an understanding of land not as property – a thing, but land as constituting being and belonging.
Your installations invite slow and open engagement. What does it mean for you to leave a work unresolved rather than fixed?
To leave a work fixed would be an assumption of resolution rather than process and practice. We are far more interested in how we can model the work of resistance and making life in the face of continuing dispossession, displacement and people’s life-worlds falling apart. The reality itself is unrelenting, and the installation is a reflection of that.
This exhibition is on view at the Hangar – Artistic Research Centre in Portugal until 5 June 2026.
