Tracing Flows: The Fluvial Landscape in Abri de Swardt’s ‘Kammakamma’

A feature by Madeleine Bazil on the 28th of February 2024. This should take you 5 minutes to read.

POOL, Green Point Park
01.02 - 03.03.2024

‘If the river’s mouth could speak, what would it say?’ This is the question that Abri de Swardt poses in ‘Kammakamma’, his exhibition at POOL at Field Station in Green Point Park.

‘Jump in the drainage ditch around your culture,’ mutters actor Ben Albertyn’s damp, porous Hendrik Biebouw, writhing onscreen in drunken anguish around a muddy riverbank, tearing sandbags open, loosing a blockage situated at the confluence of the Eerste and Plankenbrug rivers. ‘Become fluent in floods. Pinch your language open.’ I wonder: who is Biebouw instructing with his abstracted directives, and to what ends? Ghostly and unsteady – encased in a membrane of waders and gloves, a jester-like ruff around his neck, his hair matted from river water and perhaps from sweat – he cuts a tragicomic figure. Repeatedly, we see Biebouw refracted through a lens: his reflection in the water, his face through the mesh of a sifting pan. His ramblings trail through Afrikaans; bursts of German, Dutch, and Malagasy; made-up compound words and nonsensically convoluted idioms. It’s a sonic landscape as evidence of language as something slippery, mutable – fluvial. What does language carry along its current, and what gets left behind?

Stills from Abri de Swardt, Kammakamma (2022-2024), Synchronised two-channel projection, configurable screens, sand from Macassar Dunes, and costumes, 16’54 min. Courtesy of POOL and the artist. Photography by Mia Thom.

‘Kammakamma’ centres around a two-channel video projection, shot over 10 days along the Eerste River and featuring Albertyn as a reimagined Hendrik Biebouw. Biebouw – a teenage idler who, after a fit of drunken disorderliness in March 1707, was ordered to leave the premises of a VOC mill in Stellenbosch- is known for subsequently being the first recorded instance of a European self-identifying with the term ‘Afrikaner,’ previously a nomenclature only associated with enslaved, free Black, and Khoekhoe populations, not with burghers¹. And so to hone in on Biebouw, re-enacting this moment, is to tune the lens to the river mouth of Afrikaans cultural identity – and the ways that language both informs and manifests such shifting mythologies and our understandings of them.

I’ve been consistently interested in the artists that POOL incubates and exhibits for their rigorous integration of research and practice-based work. The project’s residency at the resolutely public-facing Field Station – is, to me, one of the more compelling recent developments in the Cape Town art ecosystem. Less a white cube than an approachable way station, its location and atmosphere feel particularly resonant as a site for De Swardt’s investigations into the psychogeographic matrix of identity and cultural memory.

This is not De Swardt’s first encounter with these waters: what they reveal and what they submerge. Ridder Thirst, his 2018 solo exhibition, contained a moving-image work interrogating how white supremacy is both communicated and complicated by the Eerste River’s passage through Stellenbosch: looking through the lenses of Fallism and a youthful, queer body politic to dismantle and re-organise notions of the river as vessel and witness of multivalent narratives. ‘Kammakamma’ is the opening episode of what will grow into an iterative feature-length body of film work which will be the second instalment in a trilogy exploring the Eerste River, beginning with Ridder Thirst. Here, the artist travels back in time to an inflection point in the founding mythology of Afrikanerdom. And as before, he considers the river as border, as contact zone, as contested terrain in the project of colonial expansion.

The effect of the synchronised screens is disorienting: they move in tandem so elegantly, offering complementary angles, until they don’t. It’s jarring whenever the two narratives diverge. The contemporary built environment’s periodic encroachments on the scene – one camera panning to a construction vehicle – are discomfiting, particularly when juxtaposed with uninterrupted nature on the other screen. Also startling is footage of the river in the aftermath of flooding; suddenly, these waters are wildly entropic and reliant on human intervention.

Installation view: Abri de Swardt, Kammakamma (2022-2024), Synchronised two-channel projection, configurable screens, sand from Macassar Dunes, and costumes, 16’54 min II. Courtesy of POOL and the artist. Photography by Mia Thom.

In the gallery space, alongside the two synchronised screens and an arrangement of piled sandbags for seating, is a QR code mounted on one wall. Scanning it, I find a PDF document containing the arteries of thought that undergird ‘Kammakamma’, including commissioned texts by historian Dr. Saarah Jappie, poet Ronelda S. Kamfer (writing in Kaaps), and another by De Swardt for future choral composition – each of their responses offering more valences to the variegated notion of the river.

A further cast fills out the film: actors René Cloete, Ibtisaam Florence, and Cole Wessels portray silent, stoic witnesses to Biebouw. Their characters will be protagonists of future episodes of ‘Kammakamma’, but in this one, they are, hauntingly, no more than set pieces against the abrasive foreground of Biebouw’s monologue. Posed in uncanny physical formations that feel uncomfortably subservient and even at times sexualised, these characters – all people of colour – are manifestations of a white supremacy culture rooted in language that stratifies race and space.

At the walkabout, De Swardt asks us: what does drunkenness do to language, to identity, to self? It disrupts, I think, and often in ways that contain violence – much like language itself. Indeed, the name Kammakamma is a living entity, a document of sustained cultural and colonial entanglements: an amalgamation of the Khoekhoe words for water (//amma) and similitude (khama), with kamma absorbed into Afrikaans, where it translates to ‘make believe’. Like the origin of the name of the Eerste River (so named by Simon van der Stel because it was the first river he met after leaving Cape Town), language so often proves a staging ground for the papering over of Indigenous histories.

Sitting atop sandbags watching the video, I think of the poem ‘riviermond’ by Pieter Odendaal. Later, at home, I dig out his collection ‘Ontaard’ (Tafelberg, 2023). My Afrikaans comprehension leaves much to be desired and so as I jot down my halting attempts at a translation, I’m aware that even now, received understandings of language are mutating and evolving, erasing and rewriting before my eyes and by my hand. ’N ontmoeting van waters is ek / ’n samevloei van sout en vars,’ the poem begins, before Odendaal’s self-same speaker traces his lineage back through the roads and waterways of the Cape over centuries of colonial violence and expansion, all the way back to the arrival in South Africa of the poet’s ancestor, a VOC soldier, whose legacy ‘in my sell muteer’. The poem ends how it began, the opening stanza repeating itself: language as re-wounding, as ouroboros.

And a river doesn’t really end, does it? Its mouth is less a hard stop than a troubled confluence, a threshold of transfiguration toward and into other channels. As historical memory is meandering, fractured, fluid; so too must we consider De Swardt’s notion of the river as variously a storyteller, historiographer, and witness to the historical narratives over and around which it washes.

Kammakamma is exhibited at POOL until 3 March 2024