Soil Conversations was conceived by Johannesburg-based, Berlin-born curator, Nisha Merit with the help of writer, curator and artist, Lindiwe Mngxitama. The first iteration of the exhibition took place at Galerie im Körnerpark (Berlin) and was co-curated by Merit and Yolanda Kaddu-Mulindwa. The second is currently hosted by Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), curated by Merit. Both iterations feature a lineup of the same nine artists and collectives, based in Germany and South Africa, with an independent performance programme for each. Works featured in both exhibitions range from sculpture, video, workshops, photography, drawing and digital works by Io Makandal, Theresa Schubert, Lungiswa Gqunta, Mia Thom and Mikhaila Alyssa Smith, Nnenna Onuoha, Silvia Noronha, Natalie Paneng, Gemma Shepard and Rochelle Nembhard and MADEYOULOOK, with performances by Helena Uambembe, Ela Spalding and Billy Langa.
I attended the performance by Langa at JAG in late October. Langa is a Johannesburg-based dancer, actor, playwright and educator who was most recently awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award 2022 in Theatre, together with long-term collaborator Mahlatsi Mokgonyana. Langa’s performance was premised as “a guide towards recalling into what the body remembers and what it stores. A glimpse at how the voice grows over time and lapses into layers of information. Sounding memory.”
JAG is housed in a monumental building, originally commissioned in 1910 by English South African art collector, Lady Phillips, who was able to fund the museum through her British mining magnate husband’s wealth accrued from the gold and diamond rush in Kimberley and the Witwatersrand. The museum was quietly opened to a public in 1915. Various extensions to the building were made over time. In recent years, however, the institution is better known for its diminishing funding, which has led to poor maintenance of the building and subsequent intermittent closing of entire wings to public view. It feels fitting to me that an exhibition about conversations with the soil in Johannesburg takes place in a building that itself is gradually deteriorating.
Billy Langa. Courtesy of Soil Conversations.
Langa leads the performance in procession; those who have come to witness are to follow him through the various exhibition rooms. The theatre practitioner speaks to the different rooms in the practice of dinaka – a traditional Pedi dance form, which he permeates with bodily vibrational frequencies. With this dance, he performs glimpses of a timeline of life on and with the soil of this place; deep history becomes further excavated with each gesture. Langa makes use of his hauntingly beautiful singing voice with reference to the a capella tradition of isicathamiya. He uses his voice further to measure space in resonance. In the smaller and more contained gallery rooms, his voice calls to the senses beyond sight, resonating with the shape of the room. In a building that is slowly closing off its rooms from view, it is quite remarkable to listen to them, instead.
Langa begins with a call and response motion in the gallery’s opening room, which is small with an oval enclave. He is accompanied by his own composed sound piece of layers of song, which he quiets as he leads us into the screening room of a cinematic excerpt from a film-in-progress by artist duo, MADEYOULOOK, titled Menagano (2023). The film excerpt is a serenely shot series of moving portraits of landscape in the misty forest region of Mpumalanga in the northwest of South Africa. This landscape was home to the agro-pastoral society of the Bokoni people who built ancient stonewalls – the circular stone enclosures featured in the film – from the early 16th to the 19th centuries. Many of the stonewalls found on kloofs and valleys of the region are believed to have been intended as sites of refuge from outside invaders during periods of unrest. Menagano features a point-of-view shot from a small clearing in a stonewall, which looks onto a field of tall grass and a forest in the distance.
The film was shot subsequent to the existing soundtrack of the work, which was composed for Mafolofolo – an installation and sound work commissioned by documenta fifteen (2022). Mafolofolo comprised groupings of smoothly sculpted and varnished plywood islands, built up in elevation contours, which formed the mountainous regions of a map that tracked the historical movements of the Bokoni. The map was drawn by the artists onto the floor of the former ballroom of the Hotel Hessenland venue. The map also served as a tracking of time, as it referenced the forced removals and regroupings of the Bokoni into the 21st century. Research on the Bokoni can be tenuous, as there are many unrecorded gaps in their history; I had understood that the ancient stonewalls are recognised as a national heritage site, however, it would appear that none of them are recognised as such, according to an e-mail correspondence with the artist duo: “Rather, a site with engravings into rock that depict the enclosures have recently become a heritage site.”
MADEYOULOOK, Menagano, 2022. Courtesy of the artists.
Menagano and Mofolofolo are both outputs of a six-year, ongoing research project on the Bokoni by the duo, which draws out the contours of whole groupings of people erased by “a history of violence, racism, extraction, and ongoing dispossession.” In the context of Soil Conversations, I believe that the duo are actually producing a temporal archeological excavation of place in conversation not only with minerals, but with time. In their humble words, “Still, it is also an opportunity for different imaginaries of relation with the land.” The film was produced on residency at the DAAD Artists-Berlin programme and is excellently curated into the exhibition programme as a poignant intersection of the history of land dispossession and subsequent conduits for healing offered.
Langa’s voice permeates mournfully into the high caverns of the screening room. His choreography is at times slow and deliberate, in harmony with the pace and solemnity of the film. He then leads us into the massive exhibition hall, which houses most of the work in Soil Conversations, primarily sculpture, photography, sound and installation pieces. Langa later relays to me that he preferred the intimacy of the smaller gallery rooms. However, in this big, echoing hall, he uses his audience’s bodies to enclose himself in sound. He gestures for us to gather in a circle and to clap, rub our hands together, shwoossssh, whistle and hum at varying turns; in response, he isolates parts of his body in a choreography of vibrational frequency. A practice in becoming molecular, Langa relates to the soil in terms of “erosion and erasure.” He expresses the want to be grounded by it, and yet it floats around him, as residual mining dust permeates the air of the City of Gold.
I consider the contradictions of yearning for a grounded-ness in the earth, which one might more easily associate with the wet valleys of Menagano, while breathing in the Johannesburg air – a material archive of a history of mineral extraction into material wealth, in artist duo Nina Barnett and Jeremy Bolen’s words, “This dust, even when invisible, gives form to a history of colonialism and its destructive local cost.” Merit’s choice of museum was not without awareness of the irony of the fact that JAG was built on the proceeds of this dust – the resident molecule on Johannesburg lungs since the city’s inception as a hole for digging out gold in 1886.
Installation view: Natalie Paneng, Venus Finds Balance and Venus Alchemises Below, 2023. Courtesy of Soil Conversations.
We follow Langa to the final exhibition room, in which benches are laid out to witness the pixelating-into-form renderings of Natalie Paneng in the digital textile piece, Venus Finds Balance (2023), and video work, Venus Alchemises Below (2023). The digital textile piece depicts Paneng’s avatar standing in a shallow river dressed in a self-made outfit that the artist refers to as an amalgamation of South African indigenous regalia. The stance of the avatar is reminiscent of the figure in the Temperance card of the Rider-Waite tarot deck: an angel, with one foot in a flowing river, pouring water between two cups held in both hands. Paneng’s open palms face upwards in surrender; two orbs float above each hand with the words ‘above’ and ‘below’ hovering in a bubble-like text, while the word SO frames the artist’s head. Arrows between each word show a directional current to form the cyclical sentence, ’above so below/ below so above.’ Venus Alchemises Below is played on two flat screens that are placed on the floor, facing up to Venus Finds Balance. In the two-channel video piece, Paneng’s avatars perform a choreography of gestures, glowing in differing vibrant colours against the backdrop of the dusty, red site of a hollowed-out mine. Each of the four avatars glows in yellow, orange, blue and black, signifying some of the primary minerals mined from South Africa historically: gold, copper, diamonds and coal. While the mineral avatars present as funny, obscure little characters, their role is quite serious in this narrative, as Paneng embodies each mineral, perhaps lamenting the cost of human lives in the on-going colonial endeavour of resource extraction. However, Paneng’s avatars in both works offer a glimpse into another world in which each avatar remains underground, becoming mineral by the alchemy of the Venus above, resolutely holding the weight of time in her palms, as we watch a re-rendering of time, promised by the refrain: As above, so below.
Langa leads us into this last room, takes a seat and invites us to do the same. He begins to tell a story in Sepedi, which not all of us understand but which is received as a solemn reading of Paneng’s Venuses and perhaps a moment to sediment all to which we have been witness in Soil Conversations.
When asked if my translation of Menagano was correct, MADEYOULOOK asserted that they prefer not to translate the word into English. Langa, likewise, refuses a translation of his story. I think about the dust as a transparent film lightly coating all that it settles on, and I reflect on the dense opacity of the earth from which this dust was roused. It becomes clear to me that a conversation with the soil in a country with such a history of land dispossession, which we have all inherited to varying degrees of responsibility, could not possibly be equally translated for us all. Perhaps the only common state with which to relate to the soil is a spluttering cough of fine, red dust.
Installation view: Natalie Paneng, Venus Alchemises Below, 2023. Courtesy of Soil Conversations.
