An Arresting PortrayalMarco Cianfanelli's Release at the Nelson Mandela Capture Site

On August 4, 2012, an extraordinary monument was unveiled on the rural outskirts of the small town of Howick in the Midlands of the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa (Fig. 1). Comprising fifty discrete black steel components, each between 6.5 and 9.5 meters tall, Marco Cianfanelli's Release is approached via a paved pathway set between two embankments. While it is initially unclear what the sculpture may represent, this changes as one proceeds down the pathway. When the viewer arrives at a spot some 35 meters in front of the sculpture, the work reveals clearly an image of Nelson Mandela's face in profile, looking towards the west, the side where the sun sets (Fig. 2, Cover). Then, as the viewer moves closer to the structure, the illusion disappears, and it becomes evident that the sculpture is in fact made up of a series of wholly abstract steel plinths (Figs. 3–4).

The location of Release is important. A few meters behind the work, just across the R103 motorway, a plaque is set into an unprepossessing brick structure that was erected in 1996 to mark the place where Nelson Mandela was arrested on August 5, 1962 (Fig. 5). Shortly after his acquittal at the Treason Trial on March 29, 1961, a warrant for his arrest had been issued. Mandela had consequently gone underground. Making various trips to Africa and the United Kingdom to solicit support for the African National Congress (ANC), he also undertook military training to equip himself for the sabotage campaigns that Umkhonto we Sizwe, its recently constituted military wing, had begun to plan. Returning to South Africa, he spent much of his time from October 1961 hiding out at Liliesleaf farm, north of Johannesburg. His arrest occurred after he had attended a Congress Alliance party in his honor at the home of a photojournalist in Durban and was likely the result of a tipoff to the security police by somebody there.² Mandela was posing as a chauffeur for a comrade, Cecil Williams, as the pair headed back to Johannesburg, when they were pulled over by security police.¹ Although Mandela was initially sentenced to five years imprisonment on charges of incitement and illegally leaving South Africa, he would in fact remain in prison considerably longer. While he was in prison, security police raided Liliesleaf farm and discovered material that led to his being charged with sabotage, and he received a life sentence on June 12, 1964. The so-called capture site is thus the location that marked the end of the era in which Mandela enjoyed any immediate freedom of movement and would see him instead subjected to twenty-seven years, six months, and five days of incarceration, mostly on Robben Island.

The portrait in Cianfanelli's sculpture was based on several photographs of Mandela that the artist found on the Internet, as well as a film still.³ Noting that it "reads as a familiar photographic image, structurally suggestive of his incarceration"⁴ when seen from the front, when viewed from the side, the artist observes, "the design and arrangement of the columns create a sense or moment of fracture and release."⁵ The idea of "release"—the title of the sculpture—which refers to both the liberation of Mandela from prison twenty-seven years after his arrest and the emancipation of South Africans from apartheid rule, is thus invoked formally through the illusion of Mandela being discharged or dissolved.

Erected to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Mandela's capture, Cianfanelli's sculpture has in the space of just half a decade become a landmark monument in South Africa. Despite its remote location, it attracts busloads of visitors daily. As Christopher Till, director of the Apartheid Museum and a former director of culture for the City of Johannesburg, has observed, the sculpture "captures people's imagination" and has in fact become "a place of pilgrimage."⁶ It is notable that hundreds of people came to the monument to pay respects immediately after Mandela's death on December 5, 2013...