Sumayya Vally
‘When we breathe in [...] we literally swallow contaminated sites, history and the environment. We breathe in the remnants of the exploitation of our earth and our ancestors,’ says Sumayya Vally. Her video collage reveals the omnipresent yet invisible violence: as we breathe, our lungs fill with dust particles that bear traces of colonial and ecological crimes. Lung-damaging mining work or living spaces assigned by racist urban planning have brought death to marginalised people in Johannesburg – X-rays and contaminated spoil heaps bear witness to this to this day.