By Avuyile Conjwa
Where do lost memories go? At Hazendal Wine Estate, the What the Body Keeps art exhibition suggests that memories do not disappear. They propose that memories are displaced, and in turn transform the body into a living archive of what the mind cannot hold.
Sculptural forms by Katja Marsiglia, a Stellenbosch University graduate, explores the body as a site of memory, where what cannot be held begins to shift and take shape. Photo by Avuyile Conjwa
Visitors gathered at the What the Body Keeps art exhibition at the Hazendal Wine Estate in Stellenbosch. The exhibition, which runs until the end of June, features recent graduates Olorato Makgale, Katja Marsiglia, Robyn Norval, Lisakhanya Ngqoba and Jesse Martin-Davis.
The exhibition offers a different perspective: that memory is not solely confined to the mind, but instead is stored within the body itself, suggesting a causal offloading and relocation that resists being fully captured into words.
We do not often ask ourselves this question: where do lost memories go? We simply surrender the answer to the void – the space where experiences and traumas are dispersed into temporary disappearance.
The mind is a vast and complex network. It is working at rapid speeds to control most, if not all, human functions. But as with any system, it is faulty. It lags.
So what happens in that moment – in those gaps of time where memories are displaced?
Left to right: curator Jana Nefdt, artist Robyn Norval, artist Olorato Makgale, artist Katja Marsiglia, artist Lisakhanya Ngqoba, artist Jesse Martin-Davis and curator Zetta Welgemoed. Photo: Supplied by Hazendal Wine Estate
Walking through the exhibition space, the idea of memory as something external to the mind begins to take shape, not as a theory, but as atmosphere. Light is limited to the pieces, and the spaces between are dim. Surfaces catch fragments of coloured resin and shattered moulds of glass.
We are transported to the void, where memories continue to exist as ligaments of a fractured form. In a way, the exhibition mirrors the condition it proposes: that the body is a site of memory. Memory is not a continuous whole, but exists in moments of visibility, between stretches of absence.
This fragmentation carries throughout the exhibition, positioning the body as a living archive of experience and trauma. These bodies are never complete; they are assembled, not given.
This assembly is embedded in the material itself – worn metal purses, marbled clay, layers of glue and glass outlining the shape of a woman. Memory here is not abstract; it is the visible and the unseen. They are suspended in a space where time holds no measure.
Alongside these forms are objects that seem to have once held something. A punctured heart formed from cotton and clay resists any sense of containment. Ityali (blanket), threaded with elements of textile maps, honours the journey of what is fragile and unspoken. These objects gesture towards a different kind of failure, not just that of memory, but of holding.
What emerges is not loss, but a condition in which memory can never be kept in one place. It remains in motion, shifting and leaking, pooling elsewhere, beyond the structures meant to contain it.
Where do lost memories go? If they cannot be contained within the mind, nor fully held within the body, then perhaps they do not go anywhere at all. The exhibition suggests that lost memories do not disappear, but remain displaced.
Memories are alive – they linger and shift, settling into the parts of ourselves we do not always recognise. What we call forgetting may not be an absence, but a failure to locate what has moved.
And so the question remains, not where the memories go, but whether they ever leave us at all.
