Mapalakata captures South Africa's shifting industrial frontiers

South African photographer Robin Bernstein has released her debut book, Mapalakata, a photographic investigation into the Mpumalanga province that borders Mozambique and Eswatini. Published by Gost, the work focuses on a geophysical frontier where lush cliffs meet the hot red earth of the lowlands. Rather than a traditional art project, the book functions as an archaeological survey of an economy built on successive waves of resource extraction.

The title, meaning visitors in Bapedi, is drawn from oral histories describing traders from the east who moved through southern Africa before European colonisation. Writer Desmond Latham notes that these men carried cloth, beads, salt and brass, trading them for gold, hides and grain. "The world they moved through was a web of bargains. Even now the region works with the same logic"

Bernstein documents the physical remnants of this enduring economic drive. In the valleys below, gold mines have been chiming steel against rock for a century, shaping the modern history of the country. Above them, the South African Forestry Company’s Berlin plantation sprawls between Mbombela and Kaapsehoop, where non-native pine trees are pulped into paper. The book also captures the abrupt end of another extractive era; asbestos samples sit in the quiet Bulembu Museum, a town once served by the second longest cableway in the world before the global ban on asbestos terminated the industry in the early 2000s.

The landscape is also littered with relics of a forgotten precolonial society, alongside traces of more recent public policy. One photograph features Marycate and her daughter Sibahle in a home built during the Group Areas Act of 1950, which enforced racially segregated neighbourhoods and structured the labour force surrounding Barberton's mining sector. Even the region's wild horses are tied to economic failure, speculated to be descendants of animals abandoned after a failed gold rush two decades prior to the discovery of gold in Johannesburg.

Working between London and Cape Town, Bernstein frames these scattered artefacts as ephemeral traces of histories playing out. For European investors and policymakers, Mapalakata provides a visual ledger of how the relentless pursuit of commodities rewrites a region's social conditions, leaving physical archives of both boom and bust scattered across the terrain.