Listen to the water and land
Two South African artists have created a sonic piece for the annual international cultural exhibition, the Venice Biennale
Imagine yourself in a room halflit with natural golden light. The brick walls have the colour of reddish-brown sand just after rain. The room has gently curved wooden planks that resemble terraced land. As you turn your gaze to the centre, hundreds of strings intertwined with the resurrection bush hang from the ceiling. The sound of raindrops echo in the background while an African woman narrates a story about rain. If rain drops touch the twigs, they come to life
Except, it’s not real life; it’s the sonic installation created by South African art collective, MADEYOULOOK, and curated by Portia Malatjie for the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia.
The biennale is one of the oldest art events in the world, with more than 80 countries represented at individual pavilions in the Italian city. This is the seventh time South Africa is participating in the exhibition.
The government commissioned exhibition entitled Quiet Ground is the culmination of seven years of research by the art collective, which comprises two Joburg-based artists, Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho.
They centre their work on showing black people’s everyday practices that have been overlooked or deemed inconsequential. They encourage the re-observation of the every day of urban South African life — hence the collective’s name. Moiloa and Mokgotho use different forms of art, but they tend to lean towards African oral history.
“We have been looking at the history of Bakoni who were settled in that land [present-day Mpumalanga] in about the 1500s, possibly earlier, and we are looking at the cycles of displacement and dispossession that they have been subjected to for many, many years both colonial and precolonial,” Mokgotho said.
“What we have found to be quite amazing is their capacity to always find ways of repairing themselves and repairing their relationships to land through all of these cycles of displacement and dispossession. So that’s kind of what forms the work we have been doing over the past seven years.”
He said they have also started looking at Bahurutse in North West who also suffered forms of displacement and dispossession.
The title Quiet Ground is meant to signify the aftermath of South Africa’s struggle for land and the subsequent pain the land itself had to endure.
Malatjie said there is an understanding that the land has endured violence, as have the people of South Africa. The work is meant to speak about the land that absorbed the trauma, but also the repair and rehabilitation of that land.
“It’s essentially then thinking about the aftermath of struggle when dust settles, when there’s an attainment of the things that one would have been protesting against. But there will be a moment of quiet when the land is unable to listen to itself, when land is unable to contemplate the trauma that it has gone through by absorbing people’s trauma.”
Malatjie said her vision for the exhibition was to explore the nuances of land and politics.
South Africa’s politics can never be divorced from its past, she said, and this artwork is no different. Although it alludes to South Africa’s history, it is set in the politics of today, Malatjie added.
“Land politics is not something of yesteryear. It’s something that people are experiencing on a daily basis. And that’s not just in South Africa. It’s actually a conversation that’s happening internationally, it’s something that’s current, that’s urgent,” she said.
The overall theme of the biennale is “Foreigners Everywhere”, which gives everyone everywhere the opportunity to think about what “home” means to them.
Moiloa and Mokgotho’s artwork is titled Dinokana, which means small rivers or streams, because the other key story that the piece seeks to tell is that of water and rain.
Malatjie said land cannot be separated from water.
“When we talk about forced migration or displacement in the context of South Africa, we often talk about how people have been removed from particular land and it’s usually land of their ancestors. Maybe [they were] moved from fertile land to barren or arid land that we seldom consider. There’s also been forms of water displacement.”
The issue of water displacement and living in arid regions in South Africa leads into the discussions about the need for rain.
Malatjie said the collective explores the currency of rain, the scarcity of rain and how singing for rain to fall is embedded in orature and African traditions.
Mokgotho added: “Part of the idea of the water is trying to think of water as a kind of infrastructure of repair. We cannot speak about land without speaking about the role that water plays, but also in many African contexts, especially in the semi-arid contexts of Africa, water is a very sacred and rare resource.”
He said that when Bahurutse sing rain songs, they are asking the heavens for rain, adding that it is only cultures that live in very arid areas in the world that have rain songs.
The concept and development of the piece and the exhibition was a collective effort managed by the Institute for Creative Repair and included architects, who developed the landscape, and vocalists, who worked on the sound pieces for the work.
But it also included the people who work the land, whose voices and knowledge are embedded in the waves of the sound reverberating from the exhibition.
Moiloa said the sound in the exhibition that makes it what it is is that of rain during a thunderous Johannesburg storm.
“One of the interesting things about rain is that it does bring repair. It’s part of who we are as human beings and part of our spiritual connection with the skies,” said Moiloa.
“We use rain in this work very much as a kind of metaphor to think about how we nourish the land and how do we nourish South Africa after such a challenging history and how do we use these technologies of working with water to repair ourselves in this very complex place of South Africa.”
La Biennale di Venezia is running until 24 November. The South African Pavilion will let the rain fall from 19 April for its opening.