Social ecologies

JWTC spoke to Elsemi Olwage, social anthropology student at the University of Cape Town, about her experience of the workshop this year.

You attended your first session of the JWTC. How did you hear about the JWTC and what are the reasons that led you to apply to the 2012 Session?

I attended a panel discussion hosted by the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA) titled ‘Futures of Nature/Facts that Matter’ earlier this year in Cape Town, chaired by Sarah Nuttall. This panel was organized in collaboration with JWTC. After visiting the JWTC website and realising that this year’s programme was structured around a similar theme, I decided to apply as my own research interests’ lie very much within the debates of environmental anthropology and public culture in Africa.

The workshop was also recommended to me by another student and friend of mine working in a similar direction. The main reason that I applied for this 2012 Session was in the hope of developing a more critical and creative theoretical base to deal with questions about ‘nature’ – especially in relation to knowledge practices and politics within postcolonial settings. I was also fascinated by the ways in which the 2012 Session was planning to bring both the sciences and the arts into a space of engagement and conversation.

What are the events in this year's program that you enjoyed the most and why?

I really enjoyed the ways in which participants were enticed and encouraged to literally think through the historically layered and fragmented composition of Johannesburg in order to engage with the multiple ways in which ‘nature’ has been transformed, imagined and lived and to consider both the historicity and materiality of shifting political economies. For example the bus tour of the city on the first day consisted of going through various “invisible” spaces (such as those below the surface) and exploring those spaces at the edges and interstices of the city. Bettina Malcomess’ performative and installation piece on ‘Uitvalgrond’ or ‘surplus ground’ during this tour was one of my favourite events. It performed – in a very surreal and visceral way – the ways in which ‘natural’ spaces between the built environment are often seen as de-politicized and empty – where as in actuality, as Bettina pointed out, they can be seen to be “located at the intersection of several trajectories in the history of the city’s development”. Both the tour of the mine and Bettina’s piece really engaged with the tensions between the palimpsest nature of landscapes and modern commercial developments with their tendency towards erasure, spectacle and a kind of recycling or commoditization of temporalities.

I also appreciated and enjoyed the ways in which the workshop engaged with the arts - as a key conversant on complex issues such as climate change and the extractive and exploitative practices of the global capitalist-driven economy. The exhibition on the Niger Delta was very striking for its interesting commentary on authenticity. But it is hard to pin- point individual events – rather it was the careful crafting of putting together such a complementary and thought-provoking programme.

For my own research purposes, I enjoyed the events or talks that led to discussions on alternative epistemologies (Achille Mbembe) and what it means to ‘write from the South’ or rethinking the practice of the sciences in the so-called postcolony. I believe these kinds of arguments are crucial if we want to understand the kind of politics and knowledges needed to engage with global debates on climate change and to offer a more rooted critique of neoliberal economies as they take on different forms in different places.

Can you tell us about the interactions between South African participants and the other participants who came from abroad?

I think there is nothing better than to encounter scholars, activists, and artists from different parts of the world. It was really inspiring and productive to get to know the different projects people are involved with and in seeing the ways in which those projects resonate with your own. People were pretty open to each other and it wasn’t only theoretical arguments that animated conversations but also much joking and the sharing of stories and commentary.

The many times of eating great and varied food, going out for drinks, and dancing – I think – really encouraged a kind of atmosphere of conviviality and enabled us to really make connections in different ways. I did not really perceive much of a difference between participants from South Africa and other participants in terms of the interactions between everyone.

What, in your view, is the importance of 'theory' for young researchers?

As a student of anthropology I believe that there is much value in trying to theorize from within and through the kind of emerging socio-material and political realities in which your project of knowledge production is situated and to acknowledge the collective and political work that goes into doing that.

Theory for me is a way of imagining, of grappling and of coming to know that enables me to make connections that previously weren’t there before. It forces me to question anew those realities that I take for granted. It has implications for how I imagine the contours of difference that give form to the everyday and for the kind of political subjectivity I wish to nurture.

I think on the one hand theory for young researchers should be seen as bodies of knowledge that one needs to be in conversation with – but one should always remain reflexive and critical about the kind of epistemological traditions from which it has emerged and the kind of historical and social imaginings the theorist was working from. More importantly, I am convinced that young researchers should always work to theorize anew rather than just reworking existing ‘theory’ tirelessly or at least try to bring seemingly disparate bodies of theory into a possible and new creative tension. Unfortunately it is the case that much theory in the social sciences and the arts in southern African universities remains rooted in a Western epistemological framework and therefore I think that young researchers – everywhere - need to begin to imagine and practice different methodologies - of doing anthropology for instance. 

What are you currently working on and why?

Currently I am involved in doing research for a minor dissertation in Social Anthropology (MA) at the University of Cape Town in which I am exploring the ways in which the global discourse on ‘Biodiversity Conservation’ is being mapped onto particular places within the city of Cape Town and the kind of politics, poetics, and practices that are emerging from this. The particular place from which I am working is a small “nature reserve” that lies nestled between four different neighbourhoods in the area known as the Cape Flats. This piece of land was transformed into a conservation area during the late 1950s when a somewhat eccentric Botanist – who was often seen roaming around in the Cape Vleis, a lone white woman in gumboots and with a collection of vials around her neck, mapping ecologies – identified a small ancient fern as being completely endemic to this one particular site. She then went on to invest most of her savings and mortgage in order to buy this piece of land which she then donated to the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens.

Over the years this piece of land has been made, unmade, contested, imagined, inhabited and managed in a multitude of different ways by both human and nonhuman actors and have been incorporated in different ways into overlapping regimes of governance and care. Thus, my research is looking at some of the historical entanglements and legacies that intersect at this particular place in order to trace some of the meanings of biodiversity conservation (as a discourse of interconnectedness and rooted in ecological thinking) within an fragmented urban landscape that have been characterized by forced removals, displacements, a huge housing shortage and a development trajectory strongly shaped by segregation and racial discrimination. Despite having worked from a so-called “nature reserve” – this particular space was being used for gang peace talks; educational outings; discussions over tendering processes; for skills workshops; as a space for entrepreneurial imaginings; and for the production of scientific knowledge of ecologies; and for contestations over what constitutes the heritage of the Cape Flats.

The above mentioned practices are partly a consequence of the work done through a partnership project between the South African Biodiversity Institute, the Local Government, and the Botanical Society called Cape Flats Nature that existed for about 10 years prior to being disbanded. Its legacy remains alive amongst the managerial practices at the reserve which is very much driven by a strong orientation towards building “community partners” and relationships and is also evident in the kind of imaginaries that are driving the politics of conservation within this particular context.

These imaginaries are mostly organized around a kind of conviction of the interconnectedness between people and nature and the need to counter forms of disconnection through finding ways to make social development and conservation work together. The reason I chose to pursue this project was because I was told of some of the “community partners” that this ‘nature reserve’ had made – in particular a few individuals who were seen to be ex-gangsters and who were now avid gardeners and spiritualists - and I was eager to meet them and to hear their stories. This led me to do research both at the reserve and with some individuals in the surrounding neighbourhoods. Another reason was that this project also seemed to present in some sense a counter-narrative to the dominant narrations about conservation and environmentalism in southern Africa; whilst at the same time being very much embedded within the racial and spatial legacies of colonial and apartheid management and planning of ‘nature’ and dominant people-centred development paradigms organized around forms of participatory planning.

JWTC seen from Pakistan

This year, the JWTC July Workshop hosted its first participant from Pakistan. Zahra Hussein studied architecture at Goldsmiths College, London, with Eyal Weizman. She went back to Pakistan where she is conducting a research on drone attacks, architecture and the law. She speaks to The Blog.

You attended your first session of the JWTC. How did you hear about the JWTC and what are the reasons that led you to apply to the 2012 Session?

I met Professor Achille Mbembe last year in London where he came to deliver a lecture at Birbeck College. I introduced myself and told him about my work. I was then conducting research on the architecture of counter-insurgency in Pakistan. He showed great interest in my research and, after further intellectual exchange, I learnt about his and his colleagues work especially regarding the JWTC. Learning more about the JWTC, it immediately became clear to me which to me that this

platform presented an alternative intellectual position removed from the ordinary East-West dichotomy that is so dominant in South Asia.

What are the events in this year's program that you enjoyed the most and why?

I really liked how the art shows were made part of the intellectual rationale of the workshop and curated. They were not conceived of as an illustration of theory. They were themselves instances of theory, modes of discourse and argumentation in their own right. They also made for lively viewing and constituted a powerful counterpoint to the entire experience. The first morning, we were taken for a tour of Johannesburg. The introduction to this major Southern Hemispheric city laid out information in a particular sequence and connected the historical strands to form a complete picture for the audience.

You were coming to Johannesburg for the first time. What are the features of the city that have been the most striking for you?

Johannesburg is, in a word, awesome. It is unlike many cities in Pakistan and yet, here and there, there are so many parallels. The fast evolution of the city and the social energy it generates - all of this is quite simply astounding. Of very particular interest is the fact that this peculiar city is very much constituted by what lies beneath its soil. The various forms of spatial segregations, whether based on class, race or otherwise, can still be mapped out easily. I was particularly interested in how segregation and security now morph into each other.

You just completed an important research on the architecture of counter-insurgency in Pakistan. What does the theme "Futures of Nature" may add to your topic?

Natural and climatic disasters present an intriguing parallel to (counter) insurgencies. They both affect and are themselves affected by space. They are both forms of agency. So while the titles of both topics might seem somewhat unrelated, there are actually many interweaving threads of inquiry linking them.

What are you currently working on and why?

I am currently involved with the Centre for Research Architecture. This is a fully-funded European Research Council project. We are doing research on the ways in which human rights are played out in the realm of architecture and the law. Alongside other things, we are currently looking at the drone attacks in Northwest Pakistan. Typically we examine situations (human rights violations) in which there is a high degree of spatial complexity due to a variety of factors (access to the space geographically, complex micro-infrastructures, diffusion of munitions used in perpetrating the violation etc.). We then map and model these situations in order to re-create a chain of events in relationship to a set of legal questions.

A Tied Tide

I want to begin this contestation in a very para-tactical way, in a delirious way, using/abusing a surrealist method of writing, I’m going to make an automatic writing list inspired by the four presentations made under the heading of Platform – Oceans | seas | islands |littorals | beaches. The following list is clearly inspired by the outstanding David Goldberg’s call to sound (out) the sea. In the same sense, with my list, I’m going to sound out the sea of one (my) brain.

The sea, at this moment, recalls an octopus, a fish, Jesus Christ walking, multiplied food, Christopher Columbus, a ship, a shellfish, a swordfish, salt, waves, fishermen, net, rich people on yachts, pirates, buccaneers, islands, capes, lighthouse, confusion, cruise, water world, bob squarepants, Alvar Nuñez cabeza de vaca, el pagamento, coral, whales, free willy, low tide, medium tide, high tide, drowned, flooded, ocean, a message in a bottle, continent, incontinent, Gulliver, sharks, coast, beach, other, cannibal, Caribbean, The Tempest, Une Tempête, slave traffic, drug traffic, submarine, marine, mar, mere, deep, depth, profound, jellyfish, Sinbad, crocodile hunter, Popeye, work trade, sea worship, ship, shipwreck, crusade, Rousseau, Crusoe.

Let’s take for instance Crusoe’s experience; the white European who become a castaway after a shipwreck. The story of Crusoe is probably one of the most well known plots, one that plays on different preoccupations and articulates notions of civilization, race, slavery, mastery, animality, cannibalism, faith, hope, ownership of the other, conquest of the other, ocean madness, individualism, etcetera.

Therefore, the particular relationships between Robinson and one of the other characters he dealt with are of some interest. Robinson, the main character, the Englishman, operates as the representative of civilization and the one in charge of sustaining certain values. As a Christian, he symptomatically names the fugitive from the native tribe, Friday, the day on which God created the animals and the beasts. Friday in Crusoe’s mind is adept to be his servant, companion or assistant, in any case, to occupy a position in which Crusoe is able to command him. It does not matter if Friday becomes educated and converts to Christianity, he still will never be able to command any future enterprise, only to clean up the mess.

Here is a fragment of a 1997 movie version of Robinson Crusoe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJw_WOvPFZ4&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL79D12E5FEA5EC369

In the conditions of the relationship between Robinson Crusoe and Friday, I see very little hope for the civilizing enterprise and a true dialogue becomes supremely difficult or impossible. It doesn’t matter if one learns the language of the other, there is absolutely no possibility that Robinson Crusoe will teach Friday how to change his role in their relationship or to invert the hierarchy.

Friday is domesticated and educated by the European Castaway, which means that someone who is absolutely lost educates him. Who he becomes is someone who shares the general fate of the native who also becomes the immigrant, the servant, the object of domination, the freed one, the alien, the outer space inhabitant, the other culture, and the multicultural one. Nothing new, nothing outstanding but only a perpetual position in a never changing structure of power. Perhaps it would have been preferable for Friday to have been eaten by the Cannibals.

Crusoe’s logic of confusion, his will of the lost, is perpetrated by the supremacy of the hierarchical systems used to construct knowledge, history and images. The confusion of Christopher Columbus, his inability to recognize where he was, drove him to name the inhabitants of the islands Indians, and in that act, one can identify a similitude to the way Crusoe named the savage. We can view both Crusoe and Columbus’s voyages as delirious overlapping journeys in the case of Columbus, through an imagined Indian Ocean that wasn’t there.

The confusion caused by the oceanic drift is the aspect of both Crusoe and Columbus’s stories that I wish to point out here. It is this confusion, provoked by feelings of disorientation, of a lack of moorings that recalls the image of a continental shipwreck. This land is the land where we have been shipwrecked and the sea that surrounds us is only drift and confusion.

We learned how to survive the wreck of the Conquest, that big bang that overlapped theories and histories, but we are still being educated by the necessities of a few people. We are frightened, surrounded by the sea, by the ocean, by the land where we have been shipwrecked. Only those who master the ocean are able to manage it, to be in charge of the resources it gives us.

We are still being trapped by the ocean, not only by the oceaness of the ocean, but also by the Civilized European epistemology that can only understand it as the opposite of the land, a narrow perspective in which everything is seen as the opposite of something. In a very appropriate image of the apocalypse, we are acquiring old perspectives at the end of time. We are afraid of something; we need something to be afraid of. We create opposites in order to justify our fear and our will and means of domination of nature.

Addressing the image of the surfer showed by Goldberg, surfing can be seen as one of the ways to feel that humans domesticated the ocean, civilized it, but only in a superficial way, that means, only on its surface. We can proudly use a surf board as if it were a piece of land surfacing above the water, in order to re-enact the scene of Christ not walking but surfing the waves. Beneath the surface of the images of Christ walking on water or the surfer, lays a deeper meaning.

Ever since the shipwreck initiated by the conquest, we feel that every colonial episode has transformed our whole understanding of the relationship between the sea and the land, between the ocean and the earth, but on the other hand, we feel that nothing has changed. If we take for instance the fuller isoedric dyxomap projection, and we attempt to use it to replace the actual coordinates we use to understand the earth, we may drift into other allegorical problems, one can imagine the continent as the site of a shipwreck and our lives as those of castaways or marooned sailors.  We are faced then with the impossibility of accurately representing or charting our course into the depths of nowhere.

But the point I wish to make is that the type of subject derived from that enlightening narrative of Crusoe’s experience; the radical individualistic subject depicted by Crusoe’s character, is the perpetual lonely soldier in a frantic ride against nature. He represents the crusading human’s desire to travel far away, into the ocean of planets, asteroids and universes, not caring that the human is going to feel alone, in a world that doesn’t give him any stability or security.

This is a fragment of Luis Buñuel’s Robinson Crusoe (1954)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7BuN8eEYM0

Robinson is with his dog, but he’s alone, he’s with the cat or the parrot but he feels alone eternally lonely, he searches tirelessly in order to in the hope of not feeling abandoned or marooned in the universe. The Apocalypse seems to complete the image, and at least make the human feel that he’s not that lonely. Sometimes one can sense that the Apocalypse is the step humanity has to take to evolve, to transform nature and to become something other, at the same time, the apocalypse differentiates between the living dead and the spirits, the good and the bad, those admitted into the glorious kingdom of heaven and those that are to be excluded.

http://www.benitomovieposter.com/catalog/images/movieposter/robinson-crusoe-en-marte-img-5345.jpg

Maybe we should plan to face the apocalypse with a surfboard.

Despite the numerous interpretations of the Robinson Crusoe story, we still face the ghosts that inhabit the story as if they were brand new. The narratives of Nature found in Crusoe, which tend to come back again and again: the survivor, he who is skilled enough to confront inhospitable nature, has already been transformed. Our quest for survival has become a different narrative about the earth and its wealth; Happy Water, Green politics, natural reservations, conservationism, sustainability, everything is in our hands. Don’t use too much water, be natural, be wild, love the animals, and don’t eat meat. We survive as consumers and we have created a new subject of opposition, a new emerging class of green people, green politics who are at the front of the green apocalypse.

http://www2.swaylocks.com/files/jesus%20logo2.jpg

We see that there has been a transformation; now the consumer is compelled to clean up the mess, while the managers of the world keep on exploiting and educating in a very humanistic approach to preserve not only the world, but the actual relations of the world. Who is deciding how to master and mange the climate change policies?

Art also has to deal with those inner contradictions, with the representation of the human and the non-human as we saw in the exhibitions during the JWTC. It seems that one of the responsibilities of art is to construct different images and critique existing images of the possible. To be transgressive. We repeatedly have had to struggle with powerful narratives of corporative land owners, of religions, and with remixes of those same narratives, and we are still cleaning up the mess of the residual processes of history in whose construction we had no part.

Southern epistemologies appear to be a way of encouraging other dialogical forms. As Achille Mbembe pointed out about the singularity of human kind, human beings are part of the unique but they are not the unique. Instead, human life can be seen as an impure form of water. (Impure Ocean).

Southern epistemologies can be seen as epistemologies of the impure or composite epistemologies. We can decide not to be blinded by the promises of green consumerism, which mask the same old narratives of exploitation and occlusion, the same ideologies masked by the promise of the apocalypse and of redemption. We can prefer not to take our places in the glorious green heaven of the believers and instead stand with our feet firmly on the ground. From that perspective maybe we can sound (out) the polluted sea that we are.

Andrés Jurado

Meeting the Next Generation of Scholars

The 2012 JWTC session witnessed the participation of many young South African and international scholars. The Blog has spoken to some of these. We will run their profiles in the next few weeks. Today, we speak to Janie Swanepoel from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Stellenbosch.

 

You attended your first session of the JWTC. How did you hear about the JWTC and what are the reasons that led you to apply to the 2012 Session?

My supervisor Professor Steven Robins advised me to apply for the Workshop. Since my research concerns “nature”, the theme also made the Workshop more attractive.

What are the events in this year's program that you enjoyed the most and why?

The theme “Futures of Nature” led us to consider the agency of non-humans. We occupied our minds with trees, the tsetse fly, oceans, and the gun to consider other ways of thinking about the (apocalyptic?) world we live in. In this spirit of taking seriously the material, the organisers exposed us to the place-ness of Johannesburg: we visited the mines from which the city was built, discarded urban places (uitvalgrond) and the remaking of spaces in the inner city through art. I really appreciated the way in which this workshop not only presented an excellent collection of lectures, but also gave us a visceral, material and cultural introduction to the place Johannesburg. I also wondered on the influence of this material experience of the city on our conversations and debates around epistemologies of the south – or thinking from the south. 

Can you tell us about the interactions between South African participants and the other participants who came from abroad?

Discussing my locally based project with international participants gave me the opportunity to refresh my perspective. I also learned a lot from the late night debates that took place on 7th Street Melville where conversations continued in a lively fashion from the day’s art exhibitions and lectures. The workshop provided a platform from which I could position my own thinking on an international level.

What, in your view, is the importance of 'theory' for young researchers?

As a young social scientist, it is a daunting task to make sense of the messiness that emerges from research, and theory helps with this task. But the JWTC is about rethinking theory and its place in the South. The relationship between methodology and theory was a recurrent theme in the discussions of the workshop. In the “Anthropocene” (Chakrabarty) the “project of critique as based on the premise of human exceptionalism” (Achille Mbembe) demands us to consider alternative agencies and ways of knowing and writing in the making of theory. Critiques of the apocalyptic alerted us to its ability to obscure the now and the lectures on transnational geopolitics illustrated the political nature of natures. These discussions seem to suggest that the future of critique lies in finding methodologies that challenge the current theoretical capital (mostly produced in the North). The culture of theory is as part of human-natural history, as it is part of its future(s), and the task of the next generation of scholars lies in engaging  with this practice while concentrating on those places, spaces, thinkers and philosophies and life systems that are often overlooked by theories built on Western understandings. The latter task should not be considered without criticism (it has it own set of problems brought to our attention by Annie Leatt) or without recognition to what has already been theorised.

What are you currently working on and why?

My ethnographic work explored some of the borders that positions Table Mountain National Park (TMNP) within the city of Cape Town. This has opened a network of people and spaces that brought together an interdisciplinary (but largely historical and anthropological) reading of the contemporary conflicts that emerge from the urban/nature interface. My interest in this study began with a simple question: how can it be that this large national park can exist (largely uncontested) within a city challenged with vast inequalities and housing shortages? Reading into the historical fabric of this metropolitan nature park, my curiosity has led me to another question: what nature, and for whom? This research forms part of my MA in Social Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch.

Liquid Modernities: On Kim Anno Water City, Durban 2012, Goethe Institute

Photograph #1: A suit-clad young man stares at the camera, his back turned on the ocean, the water, timeless, boundless, unidentifiable. The viewer knows that the invisible city behind the beach is Durban, but she can’t see it. “Watching,” 2012.

Photograph #2: The frame captures the profiles of two suit-clad young men staring towards the ocean, facing the water, timeless, boundless, unidentifiable. This time, the city has entered the frame, the backs of the two men turned against the urban landscape of Durban. “Two Men Facing East,” 2012.

Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity alerts us to the frantic rhythms of the present, the modern solids that have now turned into liquids, moving freely and formlessly from one vessel to another (Polity, 2000). What happens, however, when liquidity stops being a metaphor and becomes a natural threat? What happens when an exhausted, abused and overstretched modernity melts nature’s solids into water? Water Cities happen. Liquid modernity is the projected, almost apocalyptic future of a failed modernity.

 When Bauman described deterritorialization and the dissolution of boundaries brought forth by modernity in its late, liquid form, the borders he had in mind were not coastal ones. However, the young “actors” –as the artist calls them– in Kim Anno’s work are faced with the very real watershed of Bauman’s liquid modernity: a menacing, mobile, watery border, anticipated in the form of a natural disaster –discursive, and at the same time, potentially factual.

Similarly, the young actors in the two photographs described above gaze either towards, or against the liquid future ahead of them and, respectively, the present and past of their lives in the cities they live in. But Kim Anno’s work challenges precisely this other invisible border marked by the opposite directions of the two men’s gaze: the border between future and past, between the event and the mundane, between disaster and the everyday, between, even, the liquid and the urban, water and earth.   

So how do we imagine Water Cities? What will, if, everyday life be like? Together with the young actors she captured with her camera, Kim Anno devised a new beach game, a water sport: one ball, a few bodies and water. Water, the quintessence of the everyday in the port cities faced with the threat of sea level rise, acquires a peculiar quality: it embodies the looming anticipation of disaster, the potentiality of another everyday, dystopic, bleak and excessively liquid. Yet the photographs and videos maintain an uncannily peaceful and mundane leisurely quality. To paraphrase the artist herself: “Even in the eve of disaster we remain humans, we need to play, to move on.” In “Donna,” 2012, a young actress, is flipping through the magazine “artsouthafrica” while floating on water; in “Bed,” 2012, we see a liquid still life, once again blurring the boundaries between the future and the past, the everyday and the eventful. A floating mattress, a dress on top, a cushion, a necklace.

The actors wear suits, ambiguously corporate and businesslike as if to mirror the failed modernity that induced the natural disaster of sea level rise. Yet, the suits are further evidence of the quality of the everyday that Kim Anno tries to capture with her art: life goes on, the young actors in Water Cities still have to go to work after the event, while engaging in some play in between. “Who is it that will be affected” (by the disaster?), asks Kim Anno.

“Hidden” somewhere in the photographs and installation, lies a commentary on the role of the nation state in handling natural disaster. Or, rather, the failure, as the artist believes, of the nation state in preventing climate change or managing a disaster partly caused by its politics. “Raising no man’s flag,” 2012, in the water, the newly acquired (or lost, depending on one’s respective) territory of the Water City. No man’s flags, artificial ironic symbols of non-nations that point to a fellow viewer’s observation, the fact that is, “… that it is because of the environment, rather than human matters that we need to think beyond the nation state.”  

Installation #1: A projection of young actors, suit clad, playing the new water sport of the Water City. The value of leisure. At the front, a floating paper city, alluding to the moment of its transformation into a Water City. As if the wave washed away the artifacts of the everyday: buildings, a car, a chair, a lighthouse, a ball. Is it the same ball they used for their game? “Water City, Durban,” 2012.

Alexios Tsigkas