Quiet Ground – Quiet Ground

The 2024 South African Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia titled Quiet Ground is curated by Portia Malatjie and features a newly commissioned sound installation, Dinokana (2024) by the collective, MADEYOULOOK (Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho).

Installation view of Dinokana (2024) at ‘Quiet Ground’, the South African Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia. Courtesy and ©️ MADEYOULOOK, photograph by Bubblegum Club.

Installation view of Dinokana (2024) at ‘Quiet Ground’, the South African Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia. Courtesy and ©MADEYOULOOK, photograph by Bubblegum Club.

Quiet Ground is a meditation on the political, social, ontological and spiritual histories of land and water. It explores the secret life of land and water and examines the many ways that the environment is shaped by our socio-political climate. Rooted in the ongoing legacies of forced migration in South Africa, the exhibition focuses on how the dispossessed reconnect with the land and investigates cycles of loss and repair during multiple iterations of displacement. In charting processes of rehoming and rehabilitation, the exhibition understands the relationship with the earth as a way of being. It advocates the subjectivity and agency of land, and explores land as method, epistemology, educator, repository of memory, archive and as a portal through which ancestral knowledge is communicated and transferred. Quiet Ground celebrates how the land quietly grounds us and eagerly proclaims gratitude for its generous capacity to absorb our trauma that is entrenched in centuries of violation.

Colonialism, slavery, the 1913 Land Act, Irrigation and Conservation of Waters Act 8 of 1912, and later the Water Act 54 of 1956 during the reign of the apartheid regime dictated where, how, and when Black and indigenous people were allowed to engage with their environments, including the rivers and streams that ran through their neighbourhoods. These histories and their legacy of ongoing displacement continue to decimate Black and indigenous people’s relationship to the environment. The exhibition emphasises the many forms of reparative practices employed to reignite healthy, multisensorial, and mutually beneficial relationships to land and to water. These strategies take an intergenerational and interdependent approach, paying attention to rituals of yesteryear alongside contemporary reparative modes of engagement. By considering the imperceptible frequencies of everyday life, Quiet Ground amplifies a more subdued, meditative process of re-rooting in the face of continued dispossession. It focuses on the tranquil individual and communal spiritual practices that do not over pronounce themselves and listens to the ways in which the dust settles on the earth in the aftermath of a revolution through politics of landcare.

The exhibition is a solo presentation of MADEYOULOOK’s newly commissioned sound installation, Dinokana, that explores themes of land reconstitution and meditative strategies of processing history. The artists consider the materiality and metaphor of the resurrection plant – a plant that, in apparent death, reanimates with a few drops of water – to draw attention to how Black communities have approached land rehabilitation. The installation focuses on the resilience of a people that has been forcibly removed multiple times and, at each location, has employed fresh, mastered, and innovative agricultural methods to re-energise the land. MADEYOULOOK draws attention to the various legislations that have controlled how Black and indigenous peoples have been able to access their environments. They examine water sovereignty and the instrumentalisation of water as a form of capture and alienation. They contemplate the political and social capacity of water and propose tapping into water as an infrastructure of repair. Dinokana’s sonic component is constructed around the timeline of the ebbs and flows of the thunderstorm, allowing the energies of expectant rainclouds to direct the work’s auditory mood. The immersive installation brings together sound, cartographies, plants, and rainwater to consider the cyclical and insistent cross-generational relationship between water and Black life. The multichannel sound piece weaves in songs about the rain, harvest, and water divination with snippets of interviews from growers and land workers from different generations and communities across the country who are finding new vocabularies for resurrecting their relationship to land. The immersive sanctuary invites visitors to sit on and in the work, making it a space of refuge and of rest. Quiet Ground compels us to ask: what can the land teach us about repair and restoration? What strategies can we employ to reconnect materially, ontologically, and spiritually to the environment? What future possibilities emerge from learning the practices of our ancestors? And, what happens when we listen to the whimsical whispers and trickling vibrations of everyday gatherings with land and with water?

PARTNERS, SPONSORS AND PROJECT TEAM

Commissioner
Ambassador Nosipho Nausca-Jean Jezile

Curator
Portia Malatjie

Artists
MADEYOULOOK: Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho

Associate Curator
Siwa Mgoboza

Artistic Collaborators
Nozuko Mapoma (Arranger and Vocalist); Modise Sekgothe (Vocalist); Lerato Moloto-Moraka (Vocalist); Kamogelo Gwangwa (Vocalist); João Orecchia (Composer and Sound Designer)

Sound Recording and Engineering
Flame Studios; Nkanyiso Martin Ngwenya

Exhibition Design
Office 24-7 Architecture: Nabeel Essa and Samkelisiwe Kunene

Exhibition Production
PLNTH: Liesl Potgieter

Exhibition Installation
eiletz ortigas | architects: Claudia Ortigas and Mateo Eiletz; Digital Fabric: Gavin Olivier, (Audio Visual Consultant; TNCE: Tinus Nel (Structural Engineer); Linspace: Ivan Lin (Acoustic Engineer)

Project Management
Makgati Molebatsi (Project Leader); Veronica King (Project Leader); Dawn Robertson (Travel, Event Management and Schools’ Competition); Saul Molobi (Stakeholder Relations)

Performers
Msaki; SunEl Musician

Visual Identity, Catalogue and Website Design
softwork studio: Naadira Patel, Kirsty de Kock, Fred Swart and Skye Quadling

Communication and PR
Percy Mabandu

Content Creation
Bubblegum Club: Jamal Nxedlana

Photography
Tommaso Gesuato

Copy Editing and Proofreading
Tracy Murinik

Catalogue Authors and Contributors
George Mahashe; uMbuso Nkosi; Tizintizwa (Soumeya Ait Ahmed and Nadir Bouhmouch); Siwa Mgoboza and Portia Malatjie; MADEYOULOOK

Catalogue Image Credits
Masimba Sasa; Ricardo Marcus K; Frac des Pays de la Loire; documenta fifteen

Printing
Sponsored by Sappi, printed by Raff & Cantz Druck GmbH, Riederich, Germany

Principal Sponsor
Department of Sports, Arts and Culture, Republic of South Africa

Additional Support for the South African Pavilion

Sappi

African Infusions

Constitution Hill

In Residence by Pieter Brundyn

Hazendal Wines

STILL ART Residency Program

Threadcraft Sisters2

Research Unit