POOL, Green Point Park
16.03 - 17.04.2024
In March, POOL hosted ‘The Art of Bees and Gardens’, at their temporary residence, Field Station, curated by Swiss visual artist, Dunja Herzog and Johannesburg-based beekeeper, Thembalezwe Mntambo. The Programme featured a series of talks and presentations on urban bee-keeping, educational garden projects, rogue beehive engineering practices and ‘archaeoacoustics’ – the study of deep history as told through ancestral relationships to acoustic practices in nature. I had initially proposed to write about ‘The Art of Bees and Gardens’ before I knew what the programme would entail, I assumed there would be a material exhibition component. However, as can be credited to Amy Watson, curator of POOL’s clever programming, what I received was a range of anti-capitalist methodologies for communing with bees – a species that have co-existed with humankind for thousands of years.
Herzog and Mntambo’s aim for their year-long project together – the first iteration of which was the two-day public programming for ‘The Art of Bees and Gardens’ – is to share a bee-centric counter-extractive narrative of restorative reciprocation between humans and bees. Each of the ten speakers in the programme demonstrated a tacit engagement with their practices – be it in the form of indigenous plant or sustenance gardening, urban bee-keeping or reconstructing ancient wind instruments for the relocation of bee swarms. Touch was therefore posited as the primary sense for the production of each speaker’s work, which I enjoyed as a counter-narrative to the historical Western hierarchical ordering of the senses. Taste and touch are the two least privileged of the senses, according to poet and literary critic Susan Stewart, due to their immediacy with the outside world, while vision and hearing form the apparatus of the mechanisms for reading and speech – the abstract forms of human communication which have historically allowed us to distinguish and to distance ourselves from the natural world (Stewart, S. 2005 ‘Remembering the Senses’ Empire of the Senses, ed. David Howes 59-67). Stewart references Marx’s observation on the forming of the five senses as “a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present” (2005:59). Marx’s theory of alienation therefore posits the enlistment and ordering of the five senses as apparatus for capitalist production, one may posit that the closer one is to either end of the senses spectrum in their daily work, the higher they may rank in the social world. ‘The Art of Bees and Gardens’ offers a sensory world guided by the sociality of bees and organised by the “cyclical relationships and sensing capacities that exist between bees, plants and humans” (exhibition text at POOL). The year-long project will culminate in the future exhibition, ‘Hiving and HUMing’ (TBC).
I have been following Dunja Herzog’s practice since 2022 when I came across an archive of her wonderfully intricate beeswax and driftwood sculptures, which would become the prototypes for her brass-cast works, Instruments for The One Who Dances With Jiggling Brass (2022). Herzog casts the brass sculptures in revered Nigerian bronze caster, Phil Owdodawen’s studio in Benin City. The studio casts in recycled brass salvaged from the tons of e-waste annually imported from the global north into Nigeria’s recycling sector. Herzog is interested in Switzerland’s history of mineral extraction on the African continent and she considers her practice to be a counter-gesture to her country’s colonial history of mineral extractions on the continent. Switzerland boasts 245 coal mining companies, some of which are on South African soil, while the last coal mine in Switzerland ceased operations after the Second World War1 The Swiss-owned international mining giant, Glencore is one of the world’s largest natural minerals extraction companies who currently own four coal mining operations in South Africa. .
Herzog and Mntambo met through a mutual friend while Herzog was on a Pro-Helvetia Swiss Arts Council residency at Victoria Yards, Johannesburg, in 2022. Mntambo came from a print media background but, in 2018 he departed the field to pursue his long-term interest in agriculture. A self-taught beekeeper, Mntambo moved in with his brother in Yeoville, an inner-city multi-cultural and working-class suburb, which he describes as the heart of urban chaos. Johannesburg also happens to be a massive man-made forest, with many plant species that help to yield significant seasonal honey harvests. While staying with his brother, Mntambo saw an opportunity to barter real estate for honey by keeping some of his hives in the sprawling gardens of willing Houghton residents. Houghton is an affluent neighbourhood which is bordered by Louis Botha, the main road that cuts between Yeoville and Houghton. Mntambo recalls daily walks across Louis Botha in his bee-keeping suit to tend to his hives in Houghton. This image gave the impression of a sci-fi protagonist invoking the swarm to cross the bustling threshold between the two worlds. His anecdote is also a wonderful testament to the practice of bartering in Johannesburg, Mntambo explains that one jar of honey is gifted to his beehive hosts per annual harvest and that often his hosts will purchase the whole harvest to gift their friends and family. With hives located in private and public gardens across the city, Mntambo was enabled to start his business, ‘NYOC Organics’, an independent manufacturer of widely distributed organic honey products.
For ’The Art of Bees and Gardens’, Herzog and Mntambo brought together a group of speakers from different walks of life to reflect on the vibrating threads that interweave their practices. The first group of guest speakers included poet, social engineer and urban gardener Xolisa Bangani of IKhaya Garden, a Non-Profit community sustenance gardening project in Khayelitsha, where Bangani grew up; Vuyo Myoli, internationally recognised musician and urban beekeeper in Gugulethu, who offers free pollination services for community gardens in exchange for keeping his hives safely in their vicinities (Myoli’s hives had fallen victim to pyromaniac vandalism in the past) and, marathon runner, gardener, indigenous and medicinal plants expert and civil engineering student, Simangaliso Ngalwana. Ngalwana is also responsible for the indigenous garden alongside the Field Station building. Amongst other topics, the speakers reflected on their spatial and economic qualms with gardening and beekeeping in the city of Cape Town. There was a discussion on the arid soil conditions in Khayelitsha. for which Bangani offered composting solutions which have enabled his gardens to bloom. Ngalwana considered the contradiction of a lack of gardening space in Cape Town compared to the expansive and fertile farmlands of the Eastern Cape, where he grew up. However, the Eastern Cape does not have the same market demand for his medicinal plant products as the over-populated and bustling tourist haven of Cape Town. While each speaker makes a living off of their craft, they have all relied to varying degrees on bartering, community collaboration and alternative resource problem-solving to sustain their work.
The talk was followed by a presentation on rogue beehive engineering by self-taught alternative beehive-maker Klaas van der Waal. Van der Waal opened the programme the day before the seminar, with a free public workshop on alternative beehive-making in Bangani’s IKhaya Garden. A final highlight for me was an interactive presentation by archaeo-acoustics academic researcher and bee-keeper, Neil Rusch, who shed light on the fascinating connections between San rock art, bees and vibro-acoustics.
Rusch opened with an image of a San rock art painting in the Cederberg, dated about 2000 years ago, previously believed to depict San healers holding fly whisks in a trance dance. Rush and his cohort of archeo-acoustics specialists at The School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at WITS University, were able to discern that the figures were more likely spinning aerophones – instruments that make use of the wind to produce sound. The particular instruments featured in the painting are speculated to be ‘bullroarers’, known to /Xam-speaking San as !goin !goin – an arrow-shaped blade attached by a chord to a stick, which the player spins on its axis to create a vibrating sound akin to the multitudinous buzzing of a beehive. Rusch pointed out that the San hunter-gatherers affiliated the sound of the !goin !goin with honeybees, swarms of which they allegedly moved using the ancient aerophone. He explained that the San had an inherent understanding of how to communicate with bees through vibration, which they appear to have channelled by collectively swinging the !goin !goin. Rusch brought about eight !goin !goin replicas with, which we were asked to play all together in turns. To hear the !goin !goin played by eight different bodies is quite an incredible experience, which I related to a personal memory of feeling a porcupine vibrate its quilled body in defence. I remember sensing the vibrating quills of the porcupine in my own skin as my hairs pricked to attention, almost as though my body was reciprocating the porcupine’s vibrational threats. In this same way, albeit with a different bodily reception, the San are believed to have moved swarms of bees with the vibrational soundwaves of the !goin !goin.
As the talks came to a close, I considered the ways in which I may have been alienated from my own tactile senses, when thinking about the potential touch points of my body as portals to other species’ worlds. I liked that a prerequisite for communing with the bees is a de-hierarchising of the human senses; one must surrender the body to vibrational touch in order to taste the honey; the sweet, hypnotic scent of which has drawn humans after beehives for thousands of years. Ironically, I also had to consider that Swiss institutional and state funding grants had primarily made possible this series of events. On the scale of a western hierarchy of the senses, Switzerland’s extractive mining processes in South Africa can best be described as abstract to its residents, who may read and hear about it, only but, who nonetheless benefit from the tax proceeds of Swiss mining companies. In contrast, the bee-keeping, bee-hive-making, local honey-producing, pollinating and gardening practices engaged by the speakers, whose stories I have told, demonstrate a transparent production line, archived in each of the bodies that have laboured together in the process. Stewart elaborates on Marx’s poignant observation on the forming of the senses as a “history of the economy that ranks the senses and regulates the body in relation to the social world” (62). I wonder whether the concept of bee-centricity as commune with another species does not provide a methodological break with Marx’s ranking of the human senses, redirecting them instead towards the social world of bees, a requirement of which is the primacy of vibrational touch.
