South African frontier tales and UK climate preparedness: culture’s role in resilience

A photographic frontier: South Africa’s past as cultural warning

Robin Bernstein’s Mapalakata is not just a debut—it is a deliberate act of reclamation. The book, unveiled this week, stitches together South Africa’s pre-gold rush era through a patchwork of folk tales, oral histories, and archival artefacts, all rendered in stark, unflinching photographs. The images do not romanticise the frontier; they document its fractures—land disputes, forced migrations, the quiet violence of colonial expansion. Bernstein, a Johannesburg-based artist, has described the project as an attempt to “reconstruct what was deliberately erased,” a phrase that resonates far beyond South Africa’s borders.

What makes Mapalakata urgent is its timing. As the UK grapples with its own historical reckonings—from the legacy of empire to the contested narratives of Brexit—the book serves as a reminder: cultural memory is not passive. It is a tool, wielded to either obscure or illuminate. Bernstein’s work arrives as the British Museum faces renewed pressure to repatriate artefacts, and as the Bayeux Tapestry’s proposed UK loan reignites debates over who owns history. The difference here is agency. Mapalakata was not commissioned by an institution; it was built from the ground up, with community elders and local historians as collaborators. In an era where museums and governments still dictate the terms of cultural restitution, this is a quiet revolution.

UK climate prep: small steps or systemic failure?

Downing Street’s new campaign urging Britons to prepare for national crises—power outages, cyber-attacks, extreme weather—lands with a thud this week. The advice is pragmatic: stockpile water, keep a battery-powered radio, learn how to turn off your gas supply. But the timing is telling. This is not a proactive measure; it is damage control. The UK has just endured its deadliest heatwave in a decade, with provisional data from the Office for National Statistics suggesting thousands of excess deaths. Hospitals have cancelled surgeries due to overheating wards. Schools have sent children home because classrooms are unsafe.

Darren Jones, the chief secretary to the prime minister, framed the campaign as a response to “the risks we face from climate change.” Yet the language is revealingly passive. There is no mention of retrofitting homes, accelerating renewable energy projects, or reforming planning laws to mandate heat-resistant infrastructure. Instead, the burden falls on individuals to “secure and protect” basic services—a framing that echoes the government’s broader retreat from systemic solutions. As Laurie Laybourn, executive director of the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, wrote in The Guardian this week, this approach risks a “derailment doom loop”: climate disasters erode trust in institutions, which then fail to act decisively, fuelling further crises.

The campaign’s launch coincides with a new CSIRO report that dismantles the Coalition and One Nation’s claims that abandoning net zero would lower energy prices. The report finds that generation costs will likely rise after 2030 regardless of policy, but that nuclear power—their preferred alternative—would be the most expensive option. The disconnect is stark: while Downing Street urges citizens to prepare for the worst, the political debate remains mired in short-termism.

Hong Sang-soo’s cinema: the art of doing nothing (well)

Hong Sang-soo’s The Day She Returns is the latest in a filmography that has made a virtue of inertia. The Korean director’s work is often described as “slow,” but that label misses the point. His films are not about the absence of action; they are about the action of absence—the way people fill silence with alcohol, half-truths, and the quiet unravelling of their own lives.

The Day She Returns follows an ageing actress who returns to Seoul after a career hiatus, only to find herself trapped in a cycle of day-drinking and existential musing. The plot, such as it is, could be summarised in a sentence: a woman sits in a restaurant, drinks soju, and talks about her regrets. Yet Hong’s genius lies in his ability to make this feel revelatory. His static camera frames the mundane with the precision of a still life, while his unobtrusive zooms—sudden, unexplained—hint at the instability beneath the surface.

This is not just a Korean phenomenon. As British cinema grapples with its own identity crisis—caught between the heritage films of Merchant Ivory and the commercial demands of streaming—Hong’s work offers a counterpoint. His films are unapologetically local, yet their themes are universal: the weight of expectation, the fear of irrelevance, the way time erodes both ambition and memory. In an era where cinema is increasingly dominated by spectacle, The Day She Returns is a radical act of restraint.

What to watch: the stories shaping culture’s role in crisis

1. Katie Price’s The Price of Fame: The second instalment of Sky’s documentary on the former tabloid star airs this week, offering a rare glimpse into the mechanics of celebrity culture. Price’s story—from Playboy mansion to single motherhood, from I’m a Celebrity to financial ruin—is less a personal tragedy than a systemic one. The series raises uncomfortable questions about who profits from fame, and at what cost.
2. California’s shark summer: Scientists at the CSULB Shark Lab report that juvenile great whites are migrating north in record numbers, drawn by warming waters. While shark attacks remain rare, the phenomenon underscores the broader disruptions caused by climate change—disruptions that are no longer confined to the Global South.
3. The hallucinogenic mushroom: Lanmaoa asiatica, a prized delicacy in China’s Yunnan province, has been found to induce vivid hallucinations of tiny, brightly dressed people. The discovery, reported in Plantwatch, highlights the blurred line between culinary tradition and psychotropic experimentation—a tension that is likely to grow as climate change alters ecosystems.

The takeaway: culture as a rehearsal for resilience

The common thread this week is preparation—not in the sense of drills or stockpiles, but as a cultural practice. Bernstein’s photographs, Hong’s films, even the UK government’s crisis campaign, all ask the same question: how do we ready ourselves for what comes next?

The answer, it seems, lies in storytelling. Culture is not just a reflection of society; it is a rehearsal for its future. Whether through the reclaimed histories of Mapalakata, the existential drift of The Day She Returns, or the stark warnings of climate scientists, the stories we tell now will shape how we respond when the next crisis hits. The challenge for institutions—and for audiences—is to listen before it’s too late.