Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF)
31.05 - 07.12.2024
‘Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink’. These words from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1843) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, refer to the fact that the ocean that girds us is undrinkable, and now polluted. It further implies that we live in an accelerated state of dread. Some believe that the earth is better served by our extinction. Others maintain that we can and must endure, despite our folly, vanity, cruelty. Is the death instinct our default mode? Is catastrophe inevitable? Or is there some way that we can survive fatality? These questions are at the core of a lean yet monumental exhibition at JCAF, the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation. Titled ‘Ecospheres’, its remit is none other than the fundamental question – ‘What is humankind, what am I’?
Installation view showing Mater Iniciativa, Ecosistemas Mater (2024). Photo Graham De Lacy.
This question is not concerned with the abiding and distracting fetish of identity, but with ‘locality’ – the fact that where we are located informs who and what we are, because as we inhabit the world, it in turn, inhabits us. What then is this Anthropos? What is our relationship with the world? How must it change? All importantly, ‘How do we imagine the kind of world we want to inhabit with reference to the natural world, the built environment and the techno-future?’ These vitally interlinked facets are the foundation of a focus, spanning three years, under the moniker – ‘Worldmaking’ – a project concerned with the ‘environment, sustainability, architecture, habitat and biotechnology’.
‘Ecospheres’ is the first iteration. Through art – wall-works, installation, sound and video – the exhibition centres on pollution and waste – more specifically, the catastrophic impact of plastics, overfishing, air pollution, water scarcity. The disturbing fact that water was listed in the futures market as a ‘commodity derivative’ in 2020, thereby forging the financialization of a human right, reveals the root cynicism that underwrites the new conditions for survival in which inequality is a given, that there is in fact no such thing as a universal humankind.
Installation view showing Wolff Architects, Reading Room (2024). Photo Graham De Lacy.
It is against this dispassionate elitism and self-interest that Glenn Albrecht postulates a ‘Symbiocene’ – ‘living together for mutual benefit’. Donna Haraway, more proactively, reminds us that ‘nothing makes itself’, that what matters is a ‘symbiotic worlding’, for ‘when we make-with, we are inextricably bound to the earth’. This is the premise that grounds the JCAF show, ‘Ecospheres’. Its goal, experientially, is ‘to integrate visitors into the co-creation of knowledge’. As such, the show is interactive, ambient, and immersive in the best sense, given that immersive art these days is also dangerously conscriptive, a means whereby pacification – the root of indenture and servility to technology in particular – has become the new normal. This, however, is not JCAF’s aim. The show is not perversely seductive. Rather, it is an inspirational reckoning.
Two components are critical – ‘the natural and the imaginary’, the fact of life and our ability to dream inside of it. The elemental world – water, air and earth – is this shape-shifting fact, one that in this post-industrial techno-futuristic moment is shaped not only by the fatality that is the Anthropocene, but also by the ‘Capitalocene’ – the ‘capitalist modes of production that lie at the root of environmental and related social degradation’. Extinction is not inevitable, it is systemic. How we change the system defines our fate.
Installation view showing Ernesto Neto, Um dia todos fomos peixes (One day we were all fish) (2017). © Ernesto Neto. Photo Graham De Lacy.
Against a punitive and cynical rationalization of the world – akin to its monetization – JCAF returns to the importance of primal mythmaking – namely, the Aboriginal ‘songlines’ through which human existence is sung into being through the traversal of the earth, in how we ‘navigate the landscape during the Dreamtime’. In other words, we live in parallel times and existences. The bitter rationalization that founds an extractive economy has woefully ignored this soulful coexistence with the earth. In his haunting and hallucinatory installation, Um dia todos fomos peixes / One day we were all fish, Ernesto Neto returns us to a subaquatic balm, and reminds us that we remain amphibian, made of earth and water – mud. Zizipho Poswa’s monumental vessels continue this mythic narrative in which clay is the primal and enduring creative matter. Bronwyn Katz, however, directs us to copper, an electrical conductor, which through her wall-sculpture Kai tus tu / Great rain rain, reminds us of both the balm and the toxicity of a deluge. The current floods in Kerala, India, in which entire villages have been destroyed, the death toll mounting, is but one of many global catastrophes. For if water – via the sea or river delta, whether contained or let loose – is an ‘expression of a community’s identity’, life’s greatest source, it is not only generative but also murderous.
As for air, it too is fast becoming toxic. As David Boswell Reid reminded us in the mid-1800s, in the throes of industrialization – evident in the polluted heavens in paintings by JMW Turner, James McNeill Whistler, and Claude Monet – ‘no agent exerts a more continuous power upon men than the atmosphere by which he is surrounded’. The combination of light and filth is the root of changes in art in the 19th century. As the world changes, so does our relationship to it – what and how we see the world. As JCAF blisteringly asks – ‘Do we think about the air around us, in spaces that are common to all, regardless of borders and boundaries? … do we grasp the colonization of the air we breathe by corporations and governments through warfare, tear gas, weapons testing and chemicals that move via air currents across borders?’
Installation view of ATMOSPHERE 1. Water: Narrative and Myth-Making, from left: Rithika Merchant, Transtidal (2022); Zizipho Poswa, uNa’kaMzingisi (Mzingisi’s Mother) (2024); Bronwyn Katz, Kai tus tu (Great rain rain) (2023). Photo Graham De Lacy.
Given the enormity of the scale of the problems confronting us, Rob Nixon is just in reminding us that while these problems ‘feel unmanageably abstract … it’s the role of artists and gifted climate communicators to help bring home the perturbing changes, to make them visceral, textured, intimate’. To achieve this goal we must, as Rainer Maria Rilke implores – change our lives. What is urgently required is ‘a politics of care’, a radically new – or renewed – symbiosis of nature and culture. In this regard, the most compelling installation, for me at least, was Ximena Garrido-Lecca’s Insurgencias botanicas: Phaseolus lunatus / Botanical insurgencies: Phaseolus lunatus, the re-envisioning of an ancient clay-based irrigation system centred on the enduring lima bean. A hydroponic marvel, a spiritual solace, the installation was immersive in the most nurturing sense. One learnt – not knowing one needed to be taught – how to breathe.
As the agronomist and freedom fighter, Amilcar Cabral, reminds us, geology is never separate from human history, ‘the soil is not an inert and static “ground” subjected to human agency, but rather has a dynamic relation to human social structures, evident in its different responses to forms of colonial extractivism’. The same applies to air and water which are no longer a universal right for the living. If as Cabral justly notes, that ‘we must affirm, without fear of contradiction … that, to defend the Earth is the most efficient process to defend Humankind’, then, for JCAF, the question is how, through art and education, this becomes possible.
Founded on a South-South axis, ‘Ecospheres’ is an exhibition that seeks a different hemispheric alignment, one that focuses on regions excised and exploited, which, together, can produce a counter-intuitive myth and map for the earth’s survival, and our continued place therein. For this to be possible, we must reinvent what it means to be human, challenge centuries of misinformation, rethink power, question the capitalistic fetish of futurity, and, simply, recover the enduring lore that we are not humans on a spiritual path, but spirits on a human path.
Installation view showing Ximena Garrido-Lecca, Insurgencias botánicas: Phaseolus lunatus (Botanical insurgencies: Phaseolus lunatus) (2017). © Ximena Garrido-Lecca. Photo Graham De Lacy.
