A festival that turns up the Heat on the arts scene, not the planet

Safeguarding our planet is one of the focuses of the upcoming Heat Winter Arts Festival, an event in Cape Town’s city centre from 11-21 July that encompasses exhibitions in 15 galleries, as well as theatre works, opera, jazz and dance classes. 

All the exhibitions address the theme of “common ground”, encouraging a reflection on conditions that bring communities together. Many of the works address environmental preservation or the role nature plays in uniting people. 

From painting and creating sculptures with brightly dyed beeswax, to embracing the textures of natural surfaces, to focusing on our impact on micro-environments or the importance of protecting community green spaces, artists Nina Kruger, Elize Vossgätter, Rentia Retief and Kylie Wentzel offer varying approaches in the drive to safeguard our planet.

The key to environmental conservation is finding kinship with the natural environment and its inhabitants, posits Kruger, a textile artist. 

“If we can acknowledge [the] differences [and] similarities [between us and] non-human organisms … we will be more empathetic and recognise ourselves … in the plant and animal materials that surround us,” she says.

Kruger, whose exhibition Infinite Threads is showing at AVA, weaves installation works using collected natural materials, illustrating our connection to the environment and highlighting micro-environments. 

One of her works, Down the Rabbit Hole, knits together masses of bunny tail grass — which is often removed as a weed — to form a fluffy, natural tapestry. 

When moving the bunny tail grass to her studio, Kruger had to fog the plants to kill the mites living in them after she suffered an allergic reaction. This piqued a rumination on the ethics of exterminating the mites.

“You think it’s trivial, but just collecting a few plants has a big impact on the small micro-communities that surround and interact with [them],” she says.

Despite their diverse practices and approaches, Kruger and her contemporaries are thematically united in their commitment to elevating our environmental consciousness — a commitment that can be viewed through a post-humanist lens.

Post-humanism is a perspective that decentres the human, suggesting that we are part of a much larger picture (one which focuses on the interactions of nature, technology and society.)

Vossgätter, who is showing works at Homecoming at Union House, is a painter and sculptor who now employs natural beeswax as her primary medium, addressing the destruction and reconfiguration of our natural environment by examining waste and overconsumption. 

Vossgätter dyes beeswax bright colours and applies it to large canvases. She then uses heat to carve into the surface of the top layer of wax, revealing the complex multicoloured layers below.

Vossgätter used to work with oil paint, an archival material, meant to last for generations. She says: “We’re not going to live that long and our paintings aren’t going to live that long.

“I started working with wax because it was something that could melt as our Earth heats up, so it was something that was in harmony with the climate and our lack of harmony with it.”

Retief’s work forms part of the exhibition …as we see it at Ebony/Curated. She draws and paints natural landscapes in the Western Cape, often en plein air (embedded in nature), aiming to evoke her reverence for and emotional connection with nature, prompting viewers to treat their natural environments with care. The delicate, softly blended brush strokes and careful interpretation of texture in her work at the show Nog Onlangs (Just Recently, 2023) reflect this reverence.

Calling her role as an artist a “middleman for empathy” between her subject matter and viewer, she says: “My job would be to bring connection. Someone will look at [my work] and then hopefully feel [a] reciprocal connection to the work with their own story as a background”. 

A collaborative relationship with nature

Kruger, Vossgätter and Retief all evince a post-humanist perspective in viewing nature and natural materials as part of a collaborative relationship, as opposed to a medium or subject matter.  

“I listen to what the plants want to do… It’s always a conversation and back and forth with all the materials I work with,” says Kruger. 

“This whole [recent] body of work I created with thousands of bees flying around me,” says Vossgätter. “They would start to pick off bits of the paintings … the work was changing due to their interaction.”

Retief’s en plein air process goes beyond this painting tradition.

“Once, I took out a piece of big paper and I worked with charcoal dust, and there was a wind that came up, and it completely made its own little drawing in the process,” says Retief.

In addition to interconnectedness and collaboration, a post-humanist worldview draws attention to the permanent impact human development has had on the environment.

Vossgätter’s bright, acid-coloured beeswax speaks to this intersection of development and environmental adaptation, creating a luminescent, synthetically dyed new nature. 

She examines natural adaptations to the presence of plastics, such as plastiglomerates, which are landmasses created when “the currents [bring] all the plastics together, knitting together to make new landmasses… There’s a whole lot of species of animals that have adapted to feed on this trash, and that’s now the ecosystem.”

Vossgätter’s unnatural colouring of the natural material beeswax is a reflection of these ecological changes and adaptations to accommodate them.

“We are all adapting to this new synthetic nature … there is a new harmony that is slowly … recreating a new nature.”

A preserved colonial garden could be seen as an unnatural relationship with the environment, but Wentzel views the Durban Botanic Gardens as an important multicultural community hub, a space where humanity and natural environments coexist.

Wentzel is a trained printmaker who transitioned to painting. Her exhibition The Botanic Gardens at Kalashnikovv features large-scale, bold, print-like paintings expressing her love for the Durban Botanic Gardens and its communities. 

She says, “The peripheral elements of the space that gently elbow [the viewer] to take another look — birthday balloons stuck in a screw pine tree, the iridescent satin suits of groomsmen having their pictures taken, alien birds in indigenous trees…

“I love to see the ways in which people and animals show up together or in solitude in what is considered Durban’s oldest public institution.”

She says the botanical garden is a prime example of environmental stewardship.

“I think environmental caretakers are very necessary. We live in a world where big corporations are unethical … [and] capitalism has pushed us so far away from our connection to the Earth and the wellbeing of its people. 

“We need environmental guardians to help us keep those connections. We need to protect our land while simultaneously protecting our people.”  

Wentzel describes a visit to the Durban Botanic Gardens as a balm.

“Even if you have little to no interaction in a space like this, it often leaves you feeling more connected — to your surroundings, to a cause, to people, to life, to energy, which are important connections to have in a modern world that tries to isolate us from them.”

Retief finds solace in the quiet of nature, likening it to a spiritual experience.

“I find that it’s almost like returning to … a [simpler] human element of just going back to nature… When I’m in nature, it kind of takes you back to the id, that ancient self. That’s the spiritual connection that I find. 

“I really, really wish that we can somehow return [to a life] where nature and a slower life [are] prioritised,” says Retief. 

“The priorities within our communities are often [material goods] whereas it’ll be great if it [was a] slower living mindset — mindfulness, that’s the priority.” DM

This text was sponsored by the Spier Arts Trust for the African Art Content programme taking place through the Heat Festival. For more information about the festival, click here.