The approach of MADEYOULOOK can be described as partly a process of working as artists-as-researchers within a sort of para-archiving practice (in the way that they work with archives to produce other archives) and partly a practice of temporal artistic disruptions / interventions / installations / happenings in the public space. Concerned with the project of historical revisions and memorialization of South African history, this collective is interested in bringing out undocumented histories of the “everyday.”

They are focused on the experiences of ordinary people of color in South Africa, which in turn tend to foreground tensions between the popularized or aggrandized mainstream public histories (of published material and monuments) and the everyday stories that tell us about the daily struggles people face in South Africa (both historical and contemporary). This is intended to subvert what has increasingly become a selective history (commemorations and monuments) of political moments that are used to propagate political power. As such, their projects become an attempt to heroize the ordinary—what is often overlooked—in terms of public memorialization.

The power of the work of MADEYOULOOK is in the possibility of acknowledging what writer and academic Njabulo Ndebele calls “intimate moments,” when looked through what Molemo Moiloa (one of the collective’s members) describes as a “practioning,” meaning “thinking through and making in context.” Such work is political because it speaks to the desire to elevate the value of storytelling at the same time evoking what could be considered the politics of the everyday. Their practice starts to question what counts as grand, spectacular or important history. It starts to write a history of the everyday as a telling of another story not only about the atrocities of apartheid or its sustained effect in the present, but rather how ordinary people deal with this history daily.

This interest in the everyday therefore offers a different way to memorialize history. MADEYOULOOK asks us to consider what those daily stories are and mean. What do they tell us about different people’s experiences, cultures, and aspirations? What does this everyday history tell us about how people live and exist throughout history? It is a practice of observation and participation—where the researchers are both implicated in the story at the same time as they document it.