The Partial and South Africa
In South Africa, the partial carries particular urgency. Cultural memory has been fractured by colonialism, apartheid, and ongoing structural inequities. Official archives privilege institutional voices, legal documents, and sanctioned aesthetics, marginalizing everyday experiences, subcultures, and informal knowledge. To insist on totality in this context risks reproducing the very erasures that produced these silences.
Partial Objects offers an ethical alternative. By preserving fragments, we allow contradictions to coexist: suffering does not need redemption; resistance does not require mythologization; silence may retain its force.
Each object becomes a testimony to the intensity of human striving, in line with Schopenhauer’s observation that the Will expresses itself across diverse forms, never reducible to a single narrative (Schopenhauer, 1969).