The dust rises before you

The ongoing body of work brings a story of entangled relations between people and land, through the depiction of small, vulnerable places located within the Karoo desert in South Africa.

The Karoo, derived from the Afrikaans language borrowing of the indigenous Khoemana word ǃ’Aukarob, meaning hard and dry, is a semi-arid desert area, covering close to 40% of South Africa’s land.

For millennia stories roamed in this ancient, vast layered landscape. The pristine, untouched wide open landscapes are deeply embedded in the South African imaginary. The scattering of small, dispersed villages and vast fenced sheep farms across the untamed lands, reinforce this idyllic association.

However, the Karoo landscape also represents the brutality of colonial frontiers and the fate of those they dispossessed. The landscape with a complex history continues to have unavoidable political connotations, due to nationalist past agendas driven by ownership and access to the resource of land. The latent tensions linked to racial discord and land seizure are reinforced by ongoing contentious land reclamation court cases and most recently, by the building of the Square Kilometre Array telescope raising concerns about land expropriation and lack of socio-economic return to the local population.

In the images, the notion of vulnerability is profoundly present and slow regeneration emerges after long periods of devastating drought. Signs of declining local government service delivery have become profoundly tangible in South Africa’s rural landscape. The fabric signals the lack of water provision, sanitation, environmental health and waste management. The photographs of make-shift structures tentatively seek how to anchor in the earth; revealing a deep sense of precariousness and uncertainty.

The photographic intent is not to take a moral position nor make an emotionally charged documentary. The work focuses on different types of images, landscapes, human figures and more abstract images, to bring together multiple views of looking at a changing world, to speak to the complexities and nuances of the dynamics informing this world.

A sense of disquiet is the undertone, as images of sites, objects and people in the landscape explore themes of displacement and migration, untold histories and disenchantment with the dream of a ‘Rainbow Nation’. On the other hand, the images render a sense of powerful human resilience and timeless connection to earth, to its soil, its fruit, its breath.

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The title ‘The dust rises before you’ relates to an indigenous type of dance ‘Nama Riel’ going back to the days of the first people of the Karoo, the Khoisan. The community has incredible pride in the dance, which is in recent years enjoying a massive revival. Because dances are traditionally held on deep sand and involve swift kicking motions, the locals say it’s a good Nama Riel if “the dust rises before you”.