Protea / Extraction The Centre for Creative Arts, Cultures and Engagement (CREATURE)

Artist Mae Shummo and members of the NOW WHAT collective, Lucia Medina Uriarte and Ektoras Arkomanis, Senior Lecturer of London Met are commissioned by the Liliesleaf Trust UK to create an art installation responding to Anti Apartheid Legacy.

Protea /the adventurer, the amateur of sciences, such as botany, the collector), the penchant for classifying and exhibiting, and idyllic images of botanic gardens that conceal the labour behind their making.

In the early-twentieth century, enslaved black South African and other African workers were brought there to work in the garden. They gradually inhabited this area next to the garden, building their homes, and a community. Several decades later, in the 1950s and ‘60s, they and their descendants were expelled from the site; their homes were demolished, and Protea Village was built over. The hard materiality of the sculpture represents this concretisation of history. The streets instead of being carved, are sculpted in relief. This detail was inspired by collectors’ cases with their compartments for classifying the acquired objects (plant and insect species, fossils, cultural artefacts etc.) in colonised territories, but it also points to the irrevocability of land divisions.