Social Impact Arts Prize
01.12 - 28.02.2023
Eleven embroidered panels made by forty-one women artists from Mapula Embroideries of the Winterveld are currently on display at the Rupert Museum in Stellenbosch. The body of work – titled Hands Become Voices for Our Planet – features alongside eight other awarded projects by different artists in the Social Impact Arts Prize 2022 competition, selected from a total of four hundred and sixty entries. The exhibition runs until 28 February. For the initiative, all the artists responded to the theme of the environment in interesting ways. Nature and water are points of convergence for most of the projects.
Brenda Schmahmann, a scholar who has devoted some of her work in the past to particular Mapula Embroideries’ projects, highlights that collective’s “longstanding current” to producing work in which “problems are remedied.” Their socially engaging work showing at the Rupert Museum does not depart from that fashion. It is a form of storytelling which has always been the hallmark of the collective’s practice, imparting important lessons in the process. Centring the health state of a tree as a ‘thermometer’ for gauging the mood of the earth, the work follows a linear narrative, starting from a position of precarity when the life of a tree is threatened by reckless human behaviour, to a stable or healthy state when people care to take care of their surroundings.
The brightly coloured illustrations in the work are embroidered against a black backdrop. They are all done by hand in a slow, labour-intensive, collaborative process. Depicted on the panels are scenes of human interaction with the environment. They capture the mood of the earth under the pressures of overpopulation and overgrazing as well as the consequences of veld fires. They show the negative impact of industrialisation on the ecosystems and the result of the overexploitation of natural resources, especially non-renewables like coal and oil. The work also addresses the effect of the excessive cutting down of trees for firewood, a common phenomenon in most rural communities on our continent who cannot afford to substitute the vital resources for alternative sources of power.
Scenes of flooding, rises in sea level, desert encroachment and the loss of biodiversity due to droughts are some of the results of the above-highlighted activities clearly illustrated in the work. These are everyday stories, advisories, vital teachings and lessons – which we encounter in magazines, newspapers, on the news in television broadcasts, as well as on the internet – that we usually take for granted. The collective also complements the visuals with embroidered text.
Mapula Embroideries, Hands Become Voices for Our Planet, 2022. Photo by Roelof Petrus van Wyk. Courtesy of Social Impact Arts Prize.
Idolising Greta and David, drowning black and brown voices
The fight for climate justice is a global phenomenon, hence the inclusion of the portraits of Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough, two of the most vocal Western figures on the matter. They have greater global recognition and appeal and have won global awards for their sterling campaigns. However, I would have wanted their faces to either disappear completely or be relegated to the bottom of the panels where the eco-warriors from the Global South are placed. In their place I would have liked to see South Africa’s young Pan-Africanist eco-warriors Yola Mgogwana and Ayakha Melithafa, or Zimbabwe’s Nkosilathi Nyathi and Kenya’s Elizabeth Wathuti. While the artists try to include the above individuals and many other activists from marginalised parts of the world at the bottom of the panels, these are the faces they ought to have centred. In that way, Mapula Embroideries would have avoided perpetuating the drowning of black and brown voices on the subject.
Doing so would have ensured that their work resonates with a young black child visiting the Rupert Museum from the nearby Kayamandi township, or an African child viewing it on our continent. Seeing ourselves in the work is important. Who has forgotten the outrage that ensued recently when The Associated Press, a US news agency cropped Venessa Nakate – a young Ugandan eco-warrior – out of an image that had Greta and other young white activists? If owning our narrative did not matter at all, there would be no need for Licypriya Kangujam, a young environmentalist from the subcontinent, to tell the Western world to stop calling her ‘Greta of India’. The artists would have done a great job to foreground subaltern voices of young eco-warriors from the Global South, for representation matters. The work would also have spoken differently to a deeply conservative white elitist Stellenbosch community.
Mapula Embroideries, Hands Become Voices for Our Planet, 2022. Photo by Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti.
The message is not lost though
With their entry into the Social Impact Arts Prize 2022 competition, Mapula Embroideries have done well to respond to a key issue of our time, one that politicians and captains of the industry deliberately choose to ignore and deny in pursuit of popularity and profits. Their work, which I consider a form of activism, reinforces what we encounter in the popular media and on the internet. Sometimes, all it takes is a different medium of expression for society to pay attention. Through this body of work, the Women of the Winterveld have once again exhibited their ability to respond to contemporary topical matters through storytelling based on their experiences and observations, offering possible solutions as usual.
