Senzeni Marasela grew up near an abandoned gold mine in the Witwatersrand, the ridges where mineral extraction gave rise to the Johannesburg metropolis. Marasela engages with the emotional and political impact of mining on African women’s lives and the irreparable damage that apartheid’s forced migration and labour systems caused to Black families. She explores this intimate archive through textile-based installations and performance works in which she embodies an alter ego, Theodorah, whose husband was swallowed by the mines.
In the Biennale Arte 2026, Marasela presents an installation of seven large-scale suspended textile works that incorporate cascading lengths of red wool hand-stitched onto tjali, mixed-fabric cerimonial blankets. The stitch patterns trace maps of mine slopes that have collapsed, and the titles refer to notorious mining disasters in South Africa, with their location, date and human toll.
These works are cosmographs that elicit the line between the womb, the mineshaft, the underground, the city and the lives lost. Underground are claustrophobic conditions, rife with the risk of disaster and death from gas, water, heat or structural failure. Life above is characterised by waiting – a state of “not yet” that materialises in tactile, entangled cartographies, each seam and stitch encoded with longing and subtle differentiations of lives and time.
—Mpho Matsipa
