A4 Store hosts the South African launch of Robin Bernstein’s debut photobook, the culmination of his durational study of historical and present social conditions and cultural cross-currents along the escarpment in Mpumalanga, which borders Mozambique and Eswatini.

“MAPALAKATA engages with landscape via a visual reassessment of a key historical, geological and geographical region in Southern Africa. The title, meaning ‘visitors’, is drawn from oral histories and was used to describe traders from the East who moved through Southern Africa before European colonisation… [The photobook] looks at the transient nature of ‘visitors’ to the landscape, drawing attention to how the history of the region is continually rewritten as different groups of people attempt to erase the narratives bound to their predecessors, each driven to occupy the space for the resources that it holds. This process leaves an archive of physical artefacts scattered across the landscape, which become ephemeral traces of the histories that have played out.
– from the publisher, GOST

Accompanying the launch, a series of object interventions carries across the ground floor, pairing spreads and images from MAPALAKATA with rock samples from the region and a cartographic view of the landscape rendered as a large-scale lightbox.