Tag: works

Archives of the botanical

This set of foraging walks, food, herb and seed shares and curated film screenings was put together by collaborating artists Nicole Sarmiento, Ismail Farouk and Yasmin Meyer.

In ‘Archives of the Botanical’ you were invited to a day of film screenings, walks and seed/herb shares for Palestine. Alongside the work of visual artist and filmmaker Jumana Manna, and the film of scholar, author, filmmaker collaborators Heidi Grunebaum and Mark Kaplan, we invite a multisensorial engagement with land, seeds, herbs, botanical archives and food, channeling solidarity with the ongoing struggle of Palestinians and marking the historic case of South Africa v. Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

This set of screenings and embodied interventions approaches questions of land, memory, ruins and fugitivity alongside botanical archives. Exploring plant/human intimacy, legal/scientific regimes of occupation in Palestine/Israel and the stories that plants tell, these works offer memory, knowledge, caretaking and refusal in the context of ongoing occupation and capitalist relations of extraction.

Foragers (2022) by Jumana Manna

Foragers depicts the dramas around the practice of foraging for wild edible plants in Palestine/Israel with wry humor and a meditative pace. Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Jerusalem, it employs fiction, documentary and archival footage to portray the impact of Israeli nature protection laws on these customs. The restrictions prohibit the collection of the artichoke-like ’akkoub and za’atar (thyme), and have resulted in fines and trials for hundreds caught collecting these native plants. For Palestinians, these laws constitute an ecological veil for legislation that further alienates them from their land while Israeli state representatives insist on their scientific expertise and duty to protect. Following the plants from the wild to the kitchen, from the chases between the foragers and the nature patrol, to courtroom defenses, Foragers captures the joy and knowledge embodied in these traditions alongside their resilience to the prohibitive law. By reframing the terms and constraints of preservation, the film raises questions around the politics of extinction, namely who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on.

The Village Under the Forest (2013) by Mark J. Kaplan and Heidi Grunebaum 

The Village Under The Forest explores the hidden remains of the destroyed Palestinian village of Lubya, which lies under a purposefully cultivated forest plantation called South Africa Forest. The Village Under The Forest unfolds as a personal meditation from the Jewish Diaspora.

Using the forest and the village ruins as metaphors, the documentary explores themes related to the erasure and persistence of memory and dares to imagine a future in which dignity, acknowledgement and co-habitation become shared possibilities in Israel/Palestine. The Village Under The Forest won the Audience Award at Encounters South African International Documentary Festival in 2013

 

 

Land and Erasure I and II

This collaborative walk and spatial intervention through performance, sound, poetry and alternative forms of collective mapping took place under the rubric of a public art festival put together to commemorate the centenary of the 1913 Land Act. The LAND festival, put together by the Gordon Institute of Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA), now known as the Institute of Creative Arts, in collaboration with the African Center for Cities at the University of Cape Town and the District Six Museum.

This work was a collaborative effort put together by the following artists: Nicole Sarmiento, Ismail Farouk, Nadine Cloete, Lucy Campbell, Toni Stuart, Shelley Barry, Ferdinand Van Tura, Sabelo Mcinziba, Kim Munsamy, Sebástian Porras and Colin Meyer.

To think about land in the present moment is necessarily to think beyond fixed categories, binaries and notions of private property, land tenure or sedimented mappings. Questions of land are imbricated in bodies, movement, memory, migration, forced displacement and removals, and therefore deeply historical. At the same time, commemorating the 1913 Land Act calls for taking on the legacies and logics that continue in the present, and manifest in forms of social injustice, institutionalized violence and historical effacement.

In this walk, more ceremonial than focused on the gaze, we take the liminal and itinerant, memory and displacement, the silenced and buried, the living and the dead, as starting points for opening the spatial literacies of the cities we inhabit.

Land and Erasure I Bonteheuwel

Bonteheuwel, as part of the Cape Flats, was conceived as a township for the relocation of people who were forcibly removed from places such as Sea Point, District Six and Diep Rivier. Today, Bonteheuwel, like most of the Cape Flats, continues to exhibit the spatial and social legacies of the Group Areas Act, as disinvestment and municipal neglect fail to address the basic needs of residents. It is also an important site of resistance. We visit this space considering the layering of time, the idea of landscape as archive, and dialogue with silenced histories in the making of the present.

Land and Erasure II Central City

In the central city land comes at a premium. It is a scarce resource and foundational to questions such as who can live in the city, whose desires are accommodated in the city, and the city for whom. These elements manifest in the built environment, in modes of visibility and invisibility, as well as in the quiet dynamics of movement, networks, connections, formality and informality. In this walk we visit ongoing processes of “regeneration” in the name of culture and design that is taking place, in the context of the deep inscriptions of time that often are effaced.

Collaborating artists: Nadine Cloete, Colin ‘Boesman’ Meyer, Lucy Campbell, Toni Stuart, Ferdinand Van Tura, Nicole Sarmiento, Ismail Farouk and Sabelo Mcinziba