In the series Motherland Balema applies cast latex breasts and paint to the surface of schoolroom maps in order to question the ideological notions inherent to the realm of cartography. For centuries maps have been employed as a tool to define not only geological phenomena, but also political circumstances and affinities from the subjective perspective of the producer in a practice usually driven by colonial desire. Maps thus occupy a position between the factual and the representational, serving as an objective means of surveying land and demarcating territories, but also as an ideological tool for the visualisation of power and possession. Balema’s maps are bereft of their authority: they appear blackened and charred, soiled and sodden, as if under attack from the corrosive, noxious-colored swathes of paint. They have been reduced not just to objects, but to remains which are now themselves colonised by disembodied breasts which cling parasitically to their host. These sculptural and painterly interventions deconstruct the regimes of knowledge embodied by the pedagogical devices in a gesture which underscores the irrelevance of static diagrammatic structures in today’s constantly changing world. The shifting, iconoclastic swathes of paint allude to the turmoil wreaked by global issues documented in the maps such as climate change, overpopulation and forced migration, with the drooping and lumpy prostheses suggesting a tired and exhausted Mother Earth, overwhelmed by the challenges of human intervention.