During his residency (26 September – 25 October 2022), Lawrence Lemaoana developed a work titled I’m Tired of Marching (2022). The title and text germinate from a 1966 speech by a dripping-in-sweat Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., wherein the orator echoes the setting of fatigue in the fight against injustice and the threat to life suffered by him, but also black people in general. Luther King Jr. bravely indicates: “I’m tired of marching for things that should have been mine at birth.”

The work echoes through time and space to become an installation of a mass of imagined figures carrying placards, protesting, and marching. Anchored in place, the figures hold placards that, when fragmented, are illegible, thus utilising and the technique of ‘anamorphic imaging.’ The interactive work demands that the viewer gain a perspective of the work, the abstract elements pulling together to reveal the writing of the crowd.

Scaled to the average human height, the imaginary individual figures that make up the mass protestors are described as ‘automotive protest machines.’ The work is comprised of a piston-like technology to mimic the movements of an arm as it raises and lowers a banner. On one hand, the automotive function of Lemaoana’s proposed work could be read as a supplicant to the kinds of fatigue expressed by King; a way of freeing up the individual. Yet the proposal could also be read as a critique of the government’s failure to address the concerns of the working class, and the efficacy of protest within the context of a neo-liberal economy, in which the workforce is rapidly being replaced by advances in new technologies.

Lemaoana makes references to the protest action locally called toyi-toyi, a dance form that was integrated into South African protest culture following the return of uMkhonto we Sizwe exiles, who picked it up in training camps in places like Algeria and Egypt. As described by the artist, ‘It’s originally a military drill. Some Umkhonto fighters saw it as anti-intellectual, so there was a clash of ideologies when it was used. It was also physically exhausting.