Untold Stories: Material Narratives of Fragility, Grief, and Healing

Abstract

This is the second guest-edited, themed issue emerging from papers that were presented at the 35th Annual South African Visual Arts Historians (SAVAH) Conference, hosted by the research entity Visual Narratives and Creative Outputs (ViNCO) in the Faculty of Humanities, North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, from September 29 to October 2, 2021. The first themed issue, titled Untold Stories: (Re-)narrativising the Past in the Present through Visual Artmaking ( de arte volume 57, issue 2), focused on the ways in which visual narratives bring the past into the present, to tell previously untold stories. The articles in this issue engage with local and global stories; the authors focus on human conceptions and experiences of time, space, and place as told in and through film, video, installation, photography, and found and fashioned objects. The articles in this themed issue explore visual storytelling as a method of coming to terms with grief, loss, and bereavement, with contemporary mourners adapting new technologies and merging these with older rituals and traditions. Among the narrative themes shared by the articles are methods of storytelling; notions of narrativity, historicity, and temporalities; and the blurring of past and present, fact and fiction. Concepts of time and narrative time are central to visual accounts of grief, collective memory, and memorialisation, although the trauma of losing a loved one or experiencing violence throws sequential time out of joint. Themes of absence and presence—the present