FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg
31.07 - 06.09.2025

“There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” —Octavia E. Butler

Standing in the FADA Gallery watching Oupa Sibeko and Lerato Matolodi pour honey over their bodies while calling “Hey honey!” and “Oh honey!” to each other and the audience, I found myself thinking about what it means to transform pain into something nourishing. The performance, and those keen shafts of memory that stung felt like fire, reaches its crescendo as they rip open duck-feather pillows, throwing feathers into the air in gestures that blur ecstasy with destruction. When Matolodi suddenly stops mid-performance to ask audience members, “Where’s your salt?” —noticing that some of us had dropped the salt given to us earlier —the ritual instruction becomes an institutional accusation. We are complicit. We cannot hold what we’ve been given.

The moment crystalizes something essential about Re:Fuse-Ability, curated by Brenton Maart and Leora Farber. The exhibition brings together artists from Africa and the Global South who work with discarded materials, living systems and technological waste, but it’s not interested in the simple transformation narratives. Instead, those works function more like digestive systems —processing the detritus of empire while asking uncomfortable questions about our capacity to metabolise what empire has left us with.

In the corner of the gallery, earthworms are slowly eating Frantz Fanon. Nolan Oswald Dennis’s garden for fanon (2021) transforms visitors into caretakers who must feed the worms whilst they digest copies of The Wretched of the Earth into fertilizer. Dennis describes this as a “game of meaning” where “ the worms are making soil as they’re eating books”.

There’s something profoundly unsettling about watching revolutionary theory become compost. The work makes visible what usually remains invisible — the material labour required to transform ideas into something that might actually nourish future growth. The worms don’t care about Fanon’s arguments; they are interested in cellulose, the binding glue, the paper’s particular texture. Yet through their indifference, they perform exactly what Fanon advocated: the complete metabolization of colonial structures into something entirely new.

Standing there, feeding the worms while other gallery visitors hurried past, I was struck by the work’s stubborn temporality. Revolutionary transformation, Dennis suggests, operates on a geological rather than historical time. The worms will continue the patient work long after the exhibition closes, long after we’ve forgotten the theoretical frameworks we brought to bear on their labour.

Core Dump by Francois Knoetze. A core dump consists of the recorded state of the working memory of a computer program at a specific time.

Francois Knoetze’s four-channel video installation Core Dump traces different temporalities entirely—the accelerated time of digital waste flowing from Kinshasa to Dakar to Shenzhen to New York. The projections flicker with images of electronic graveyards, workers dismantling devices with their bare hands, and toxic landscapes that support our supposedly immaterial digital lives. 

What strikes me most about Core Dump is how it makes visible the colonial geographies embedded in every smartphone, every laptop, every digital artwork we encounter. The Global South acts as both extraction site and dumping ground for the digital economy, yet these processes remain largely invisible to those who benefit from them. Knoetze’s installation doesn’t offer solutions; instead, it sits with the uncomfortable reality that our technological liberation depends on others’ technological entrapment.

In the gallery basement, moss is slowly consuming remnants of empire. Leora Farber’s Leftovers at the table (or what we’re left with) stages a scene of gradual decomposition where moss gradually overtakes remnants of a colonial dinner service. The moss exercises what I began to think of as “vegetal jurisprudence”—a form of non-human legal practice that slowly decomposes the material artefacts of colonial power. It doesn’t argue with empire; it simply digests it. 

The work suggests possibilities for what Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen calls “negative entropy” practices, cyclical processes that transform waste back into life-supporting systems rather than the linear transformation of resources into refuse that characterises industrial production. But Farber’s moss also raises uncomfortable questions about the pace of such transformation. Can vegetal time address the urgency of our current ecological crisis? Or does it offer a different understanding of urgency entirely?

The most haunting work in the exhibition might be Masimba Hwati and Michael Gould’s sound installation Nyami Nyami, which resurrects the river deity displaced by the Kariba Dam construction in 1955. I had seen the live performance two weeks before. Working as The Zebra Collective, the artists use sound composition to conjure what colonial violence attempted to destroy, invoking the spirit of the Zambezi through frequencies that seem to emerge from the gallery walls themselves. 

Nyami-Nyami demonstrates how technological tools—the same as digital systems that Knoetze exposes as sites of extraction—might be turned toward collaboration with indigenous cosmologies rather than their domination. The sound piece doesn’t represent the river deity so much as invoke its presence, creating spaces for forms of knowledge that exceed colonial epistemological frameworks. 

Listening to Nyami-Nyami, Ramon Amaro’s concept of “decolonial AI” comes to mind. Technological processes that emerge through indigenous knowledge systems rather than despite them. The work suggests that the digital technologies currently accelerating ecological destruction might also offer tools for reconnection with more-than-human intelligence, if we can learn to use them differently. 

Of course, the exhibition’s location within the University of Johannesburg creates a profound contradiction. When Dennis’s earthworms digest Fanon within this institutional context, they perform what might be understood as “institutional autophagy”—the university literally consuming the revolutionary texts designed to challenge its epistememic foundations.

But perhaps this is exactly where such a work needs to happen. The artists in Re:Fuse-Ability understand that genuinely decolonial aesthetic practices must grapple with the institutions that constrain them, working within and against the structures that make cultural production possible while limiting its transformational potential. 

The exhibition succeeds not by resolving these contradictions but by making them productive. It demonstrates what it means to work with damaged materials—whether earthworms, electronic waste, colonial dinner services, or university galleries—and transform them through sustained engagement with non-human processes of intelligence. 

As I left the gallery, I carried with me the image of Sibeko and Matolodi covered in honey and feathers, the sound of Nyami-Nyami still resonating in my ears, the patient work of Dennis’s earthworms continuing in darkness. These artists understand that the age of planetary crisis demands more than representation; it requires forms of cultural production capable of surviving ecological collapse through partnerships extending across species boundaries.

Their practices suggest ways of metabolising empire that move beyond simple resistance towards what Octavia Butler anticipated: learning to recognise that while there may be nothing new under the sun, there are always new suns waiting to be born from the composted remains of dying worlds. The exhibition proposes that such births require not just aesthetic intervention but sustained material engagement with the waste empire that has left us, transforming refuse into the foundation for genuinely decolonial futures.